I started writing the year-in-review (recap) posts from 2019, so this will be the sixth consecutive year I will write a yearly recap. Taking some time to reflect on things accomplished this year from a professional point of view, I think it will be a good rear mirror view to look back at 2024; let’s dive in! A motorcycle rear view mirror background image generated using Image FX (Imagen 3) Table of contents # Highlights Public speaking in 2024 Blog posts of 2024 Most viewed blog posts of 2024 Podcasts/Interviews this year Community activities Became a Docker Captain Developer ambassador programs repo Listening to Podcasts Misc Conclusion Highlights # Below are the major highlights of 2024 from a professional (and tech) lens: I did seven public talks/workshops this year, all in person and one technical talk at work. In addition to Sydney, I gave talks in Adelaide, Hobart, and Auckland, New Zealand too. Similar to the past couple of years, I have written 25+1 (this recap) blog posts this year. In this blog, the number of users has decreased by 45% compared to 2023, thanks to us technologists using (or dare I say overusing) LLMs. I have also written one blog post about Feature flags for the Simply Wall St. tech blog. I was a guest in two podcasts this year, one for the StackOverflow Podcast released in August and another one for The Doers Nepal (in Nepali language) which released in September. Helped re-establish GDG Perth and contributed to organizing 11 meetups for GDG Cloud Sydney and two conferences: Google I/O Extended Sydney and DevFest Sydney this year. I also moderated two AI-related panel discussions at both conferences mentioned above. I also helped groom five new female tech speakers, most of them “debuted” with their talks at DevFest Sydney. My Docker Captain application was approved towards the end of June this year, and I became a Docker Captain I have listened to 225 hours of podcasts this year (9 days and 9 hours), equating to almost 37 minutes daily (225 hours /365 days). I will have proof later. The top three are Changelog (master feed), Stack Overflow Podcast, and PodRocket. This year, I traveled to the US and Nepal (after 6.5 years), which was a good experience. Let’s discuss some of the details from the above highlights next. Public speaking in 2024 # I wrote one talk about Serverless Conatiners and one workshop titled How to build an E-commerce product description generator using Gemini. I gave the talk at two meetups and also at Adelaide and Auckland. I did the workshop in Sydney for Build with AI Sydney 2024 at Google Sydney office and for DevFest Hobart. I also did a short talk with title How to nurture sustainable tech communities: experiences since 2006 in February for GDG ANZ Summit 2024. In total, I did seven public talks/workshops this year most of them in Sydney. In addition to that, I did an internal talk at Simply Wall St. about the portfolio limits feature we deployed in April of this year. So, I wrote three talks and one workshop in 2024. You can view a reverse cronological list of all the talk I have done in public in my public speaking repo. Blog posts of 2024 # Similar to 2022 and 2023, this year, I wrote 25+1 (this review) blog posts. I wrote two blog posts in most months, but in March and June, I wrote only one. I wrote three blog posts in February, April, July, and December to balance it. The top 5 blog posts published in 2024 are: Most viewed blog posts of 2024 # How to use Nginx with Docker Compose effectively with examples How to use RabbitMQ with Docker and Docker Compose; a beginner’s guide How to use docker compose depends_on a beginner's guide How to use Google Cloud Shell Editor to deploy a project from GitHub to Cloud Run How to use query params in Nest.js a practical step-by-step guide Most of the blog traffic came from SEO (Google). Some numbers indicate over a million page views this year, less than in 2023, but it is a fantastic feat. Posts about Docker do well on my blog, and this year is the first time I have written about Nest.js, which I have used at work since 2019. I should write more about Nest.js in 2025. I plan to scale back blogging in 2025 to one monthly post and target 14 or 15 blog posts. The number of users and page views has significantly decreased this year compared to 2022 or 2023. Regarding ranking, this blog moved from the 882178th website in the world in 2023 to the 590709th position in 2024 on SimilarWeb as seen below: This might mean the world’s search traffic and internet traffic to the blog decreased in 2024 due to LLMs answering most of the users' questions. Podcasts/Interviews this year # I was fortunate enough to be a guest in two podcasts. First, the popular StackOverflow Podcast titled From PHP to JavaScript to Kubernetes: how one backend engineer evolved over time. I had emailed them and got a reply back, had a quick pre-recording chat with Ryan. Then, the recording happened on an early Saturday morning (late Friday afternoon in the New York time zone); after some weeks, it was published and has had thousands of listeners till now. You can also listen to our conversation below: I was in Nepal after a long time this year in August and had the pleasure of having an insightful (and long) conversation with Anup Ghimire for The Doers Nepal podcast. The podcast episode has the title Debugging Your Career: Advice from a Senior Software Engineer and has garnered almost 12K views on YouTube now. You can enjoy our conversation in the Nepali language here: Those were the two interviews I did this year. I also did an online panel discusison for "IT Carrer in Australia" about Frontend vs Backend vs Full Stack: Navigating Your Career Path - hosted by Yana Martens in May. The other panelists in that discussion were Phillip Johnson and Nicholas Kircher. You can watch the panel discussion below: I have moderated a couple of panel discusisons in 2024, which is discussed in the community activities section below. Community activities # As GDG Cloud Sydney's organizers, we organized 11 meetups in 2024. I attended ten and missed the one in August. I also spoke at one of our meetups about serverless containers. In collaboration with GDG Sydney, we organized two full-day conferences, Googie I/O Extended Sydney 2024 in June and GDG DevFest Sydney in October. Both of these conferences had over 150 attendees. Google I/O Extended Sydney 2024 was a single-track conference, whereas GDG DevFest Sydney 2024 was a two-track conference. I mostly looked into the content for both of these conferences. That meant evaluating and choosing talk, finding panelists and mentors, and grooming new speakers. I also moderated the panel discussion about AI in both the above-mentioned conferences. For grooming new speakers, I helped five (or more) new female speakers give their debut conference talk at GDG DevFest Sydney 2024. We helped them with content, delivery, and a dry run to foster more confidence in them when doing the actual show. Anima, Lakshmi, Monika, Ranjana, and Utkrista did their first conference talk at GDG DevFest Sydney 2024. Among them, Monika was invited to Melbourne to do the same talk, which gives me some extra pride 🙂. This year, I helped some people become Google Developer Experts, Google Cloud Innovator Champions, and Women Techmakers Ambassadors. Thanks to Matt for facilitating this journey for those six lucky individuals. I also recruited two new co-organizers for GDG Cloud Sydney this year. A big thanks to Reeya for her superb support for our events, from designing graphics, recording, and editing reels/shorts, and managing some logistics to being an amazing MC at DevFest Sydney. Became a Docker Captain # In addition to being a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for Google Cloud since 2019, I wanted to be tagged with another Developer Ambassador program. I emailed Docker to apply for being a Docker Captain in 2021 and 2023 but never heard back. This year, they added a form for being a Docker Captain, and thankfully, Eva replied when I filled out the form. She organized a short interview (chat) and approved my application, and I became a Docker Captain in late June of this year. When writing this, there are only 3 Docker captains in Australia. Developer ambassador programs repo # A developer ambassador program is a program a company runs to promote its products or services by that organization's representatives (but not employees). As a member of any developer ambassador program, you are expected to produce technical content like blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc. You are encouraged to talk about their products via public speaking or even contribute to open-source projects and forums like Stack Overflow. It comes with some benefits. I have started an open-source repository to list the developer ambassador programs I know about. There are 40+ developer ambassador programs listed in the repo; eight are students only programs. Some popular ones are AWS Community Builder, GitHub Campus Expert, Google Cloud Champaign Innovator, and Microsoft MVP. If you know of any developer ambassador programs missing from that list, please add them by opening a new pull request. Listening to Podcasts # With a daily average of ~37 minutes, I have listened to two hundred and twenty-five hours of podcasts this year (9 days and 9 hours). The stats from Podcast Republic, my podcatcher of choice, is as follows: The five most listened-to podcasts in 2024 are: ChangeLog Master feed - includes other podcasts like Ship It, Practical AI, etc. You must listen to Changelog News for your weekly Dose of software engineering news in under 10 mins. The Stack Overflow Podcast - their relatively short (<30 mins) podcasts are a great listen. PodRocket - great weekly episodes on frontend web development by LogRocket. Investoploy: Stuart offers fantastic advice on investing and building wealth with an Australian perspective. Rework - by 37Signals, it is always great to listen to Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and the host Kimberly about the way 37Signals work. Other podcasts in the top 10 include In Depth, Compressed.fm, Software Engineering Daily and ModernCTO Podcast. Misc # Below are some of the other things I have done or achieved this year: My GitHub stats show that I have made over 1,000 public contributions on GitHub and participated in Hacktoberfest. We do not use GitHub at Simply Wall St. I think I can call myself a (partial) LinkedIn Influencer now, with a million impressions reaching 93K+ people in 2024. I have also walked 1.87 million steps in 2024 if that counts as a stat. I would like to thank the members of the Xplorers group for their warm messages of thanks. I attended Serverless Days Sydney 2024, AWS Summit Sydney, Microsoft AI Tour twice, and Google Cloud Summit Sydney. I also attended other meetups and events like BeerOps. Hopefully, the 1:1 chats I have conducted have helped many in multiple areas, such as career advice, what to do next, how to find a job in Australia and other useful topics. The photos related to the above things can be viewed in this 2024 recap photo album. Conclusion # Looking back, 2024 was a productive year. I attended many tech events and was fortunate to be a guest on two podcasts. I also wrote the usual 25+ blog posts. I look forward to 2025 but will scale back on things I have been doing, like blogging. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2025.

View Entire Post