end-2024-blog

Goodbye 2024! This is a long one, possibly my longest. Again using this as a journal/post-it-note for myself in the future more than anything.

Yes its only November, but I wanted to get this in while I have some time to go thru it, and clear up this site a bit and close out some older issues/ideas I wont be able to get to.

Its been an interesting year with a lot of personal changes on my end (no I wont go into them here!), so this year from a developer perspective hasn't been much more unique outside of the usual. I did keep up with some guitar practice, learned a few new licks and have kept it somewhat consistent lately. Will continue to spend time practicing while I can and just enjoying time with the family!

Going into the new year I plan on expanding some of my developer skills, and cleaning up my github. I think its time to do some spring cleaning and updating some of my super old repos, and also finishing some features completely missing from my chrome-neo-plus project, which is live, even without key missing features. Sorry whoever actually is using that thing!

Coding update

So there's been 3 main things I've been looking into on my end worth noting:

• looking into modern compiler options with vite/rollup
• looking back into go
• leveraging more AI in my day-to-day

Beyond these, I'm looking into gearing back up into open source related work, along with cleaning up my github.

Vite and rollup, the future?

I've lost track of nx development and updates, as I've focused more on lower level tooling in the form of newer bundler technologies such as rollup and vite (which I think use ESM Build under the hood? I forget.)

I've been interested in them as another gap/knowledge area I think I should expand on as a developer who is always interested in using better tooling to improve the developer workflow. I'll keep looking into these in my spare time mostly as a curiosity, as I can't think of many personal use-cases where I'd want/need to tweak anything beyond the presets already out there.

Personally I think if the web ecosystem moves past webpack based tooling, these rust based ones seem like the way to go. Which leads to my next topic. Either way I'm going to be looking back into nx updates and its ecosystem to see where it is nowadays.

An old interest, go

Go or golang is a programming language I've been interested more or less since it was announced. I stopped focusing on it since there was very clearly no reason for me to look into it with the ability to use nodejs as a web developer. However, I feel like I'm at a point where I should expand my horizons a bit more and gain more practical experience with some newer technologies.

As such looking into a language I've always felt good about seems like a nice change of pace. Go has gone thru a number of changes the last few years, but the overall language and ecosystem is the same. I'm not sure if I'll be able to leverage it day-to-day at all but I'm looking at a few smaller projects that might work with go, rather than nodejs.

See if I post about getting any of this done next time!

AI here to stay, but still not impressed much

I've been seeking to leverage AI more in my every day life. I still use github copilot to help get "fancy autocomplete" and help with larger niche use-cases, but lately I've also been using github gemini for more generic tasks (not chatGPT, because I'm still on the google train!). Its been helpful in some aspects but I still don't feel like it does much more then help digest what I could find on the web in a majority of cases.

I'll still be looking to leverage this more in the common months, but I'm still a huge skeptic. I can't see it going away, but I also can't see it getting much more useful outside of more integrations with other tools. For example I had Gemini act like an editor/reviewer for this blog post and asked it to give hard recommendations of improvement and I only got some high level examples, and even less hard examples that are obvious. I'm not sure if the size of this post impacts it or what, but I'm not impressed. And no I didn't accept its recommendations either!

I still firmly believe AI is still best executed as a "UI" for interacting with a complete system generically. The more integrations and the more powerful those are, the more useful the AI will be. "AI as UI" is also something I'm actually thinking about looking into more in this common year as a project idea, but we will see!

Book update

I made a very key (and perfectly incorrectly timed!) purchase in the last few months that really pushed my reading into a new level. I jumped onto the boox palma train at the exact worse time. For those that don't know, the boox palma is essentially a phone sized e-ink-reader that runs full android, so you can install any android app and use it like a kindle/e-reader but also do most thing a phone could, such as browse the web, check your email and even watch videos (its possible, but its black and white and not the best experience).

I've used this device to replace my kindle and it fills an interesting niche as a device where I can read both kindle (via kindle app) my google play books, and still read stuff on other apps such as wikipedia (for wikipedia dives lol), feedly and libby (library app, hopefully to replace all other apps). Reading stuff on it has been a huge pleasure, which is reflected in my book review below.

Unfortunately, I got this device at the perfectly wrong time as shortly after I got it, they announced the second version and put the first version on sale. However I'm happy enough for now with this current version I'll just suck it up and stick with it until I run into more issues lol.

In terms of actually reading I've grinded thru a good amount of books this year, some I've wanted to read for a while and some other's that I just randomly picked up. Some key ones:

Starship troopers and 1984

Both of these are name-brand classics, however both felt somewhat like a chore to read. I think its because these are both well known enough that going into them I more or less knew what to expect. That said both fall prey to simply feeling like they overstay their welcome in some aspects. Its highly likely this is just due to being older books written in a different time for topics that were more intriguing years ago, but have been retold/redone so many times today that they feel less impactful.

Either way I'm glad I read them, but I found the other random picks to be more consistently more "fun" to read.

The Midnight Library and Mickey 7 (series)

These ended up all being "page turners". With the Midnight Library being one of the few books I read that isn't sci-fi, but it was an engaging and interesting piece.

I grabbed Mickey 7 once I heard about it being made into a film (or series?) and it was a hugely fun read. Looking forward to seeing how they adapt it, as I think it will be a fun watch.

Multiple other titles

I read a few other titles not mentioned, but its more sci-fi. Some good, some bad/boring enough I didn't actually finish. I have a (virtual) stack of other books and more currently ongoing I'll save for next time to talk about.

Closing

This was a good year for me, a lot of good stuff happened (a lot more than I mentioned above). Its been an interesting time to be alive, and I'm grateful for what I've gotten and experienced. Looking forward to 2025 and beyond, and I hope you are too!

Until next time, keep learning, keep building!