1. What did you do in 2024 that you’d never done before? Presented live at the software symposium
2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? Well, the women of ATS group kinda died and I’ve been less involved in DE&I because the band took up so much time. Next year I dunno, go to universal?
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Carolyn had baby #3
4. Did anyone close to you die? My coworker, Joe
5. What countries did you visit? None
6. What would you like to have in 2025 that you lacked in 2024? Job security?
7. What date from 2024 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Etched? I don’t know, but a lot of my coworkers were laid off in July
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Speaking at the software symposium
9. What was your biggest failure? The damn koala dynamic loading classes preventing us from using open telemetry. Is that my failure or amdocs?
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Stupid endometriosis
11. What was the best thing you bought? My new iPad
14. Where did most of your money go? Disney
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?Disney
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
l. happier or sadder? Sadder
ll. thinner or fatter? Fatter
lll. richer or poorer? Richer
18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Leet coding
19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Stressing out
20. How will you be spending Christmas? Same as always, we go over Lyn’s and then she and my parents come over our place
24. What was your favorite TV program? Strange New Worlds
26. What was the best book you read? All the Ali Hazelwood books. I guess the one with the chess player. Or Lessons in Chemistry, Dark Matter, 11/22/63. Not sure if those were this year or last year.
28. What did you want and get? To not get laid off.
29. What did you want and not get? My coworkers to not get laid off
30. What was your favorite film of this year? Barbie? Oppenheimer?
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I don’t remember. 39
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? If RTO wasn’t a thing
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2024? All the colors
34. What kept you sane? Singing
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Henry Cavill
36. What political issue stirred you the most? The election, abortion rights
37. Who did you miss? My coworkers
38. Who was the best new person you met? Owen’s friend’s parents
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2024: everyone is replaceable, apparently
41. Summarize 2024: year started out with a literal dumpster fire. we went to Lego land, down the shore, to Disney. Still in SRE doing observability tools. Finally got something deployed to production. Half of my friends were laid off. Next year we have to go into the office 5 days, I blame Amazon. I sang a lot. And there’s drones, supposedly.
