I have wanted to write a year-in-review since around 2018, yet never followed through. It would be great to be able to look back and read my mentality from year to year. But here we are; the best I can do is start now.
The below is long, but I’m writing it for myself rather than expecting anyone to actually sit through it.
The biggest change in 2024 is that this was my first full year as a father of five. We had baby Buck in December of 2023. Raising a new child never gets old. He’s currently learning to walk and has the most delightful smile.
My wife and I celebrated our 10th anniversary!
There aren’t too many specific things I can call out here other than to say I have grown as a Catholic this year. In trying to categorize the past few years, I have broken it down as:
What that has actually looked like this year has been listening to lots of podcasts, debates, reading a bit, trying to pray more, and some focus on ascetic discipline.
For the first time in years I am officially a student again. I am currently undertaking the Postgraduate Certificate in Shroud Studies (remotely) at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum. I have been fascinated by the Shroud of Turin for a few years now and was eager to learn as much as I can. Long story short, if you think it’s proven that the shroud is a medieval forgery, there is a lot more to know about the Shroud that might make you question that conclusion.
For me, the big highlight of the year would have to be health and fitness. 2023 had been the year of back problems. I threw out my lower back between 5-10 times. Two times that stand out in particular were my back issues ruining family events. The first was a trip to Knoebels, leaving me unable to keep up with everything the boys wanted to do. The second was throwing out my back during the car ride to our Ocean City vacation and being largely incapacitated for the whole trip.
I had struggled with back issues for over ten years at this point, but 2023 was the worst of it. I finally resolved to fix this in 2024 and to get in better shape overall. A big goal was to completed a Spartan race. January was going well until I threw the ol' back out again at the end of the month (then exacerbated the problem about a week or two later). So finally I started going to physical therapy and after about three months, I was starting to feel better, but I had missed the Spartan races I signed up for at that point. And the back problem flared up again, but to a lesser degree, lasting about two weeks.
So that was around August and with not having actually worked out for most of the year due to all this and eating poorly, I was really not in good shape. That’s when I decided to quit the junk food cold turkey and embark on a year long animal-based diet. I did this both for health reasons, but actually my primary focus was on doing this as an ascetic discipline.
Since then, I have lost about 45 pounds.
I have been working out mostly consistently and can now do somewhere between 2-5 pullups. I ran one 5k in October and finished just under 30 minutes, then got that down to 26:16 at the Delco Turkey Trot 5k on Thanksgiving. A big achievement more recently was reaching 6 miles on my Saturday long run.
My work in 2024 was entirely focused on Omni, building out their dbt integration. It has been a lot of fun, the team at Omni is really impressive. Focusing solely on building has been a really nice change of pace since leaving Crossbeam. I still feel like I’m recovering from my Crossbeam days. Life as a technical startup co-founder was a bit stressful.
The big features I shipped this year were:
“Virtual dbt schemas” - This is a feature that allows Omni users to do their modeling based on schemas that don’t really exist, but that instead query the warehouse dynamically based on where you’re in a development branch or production. This is the foundation for a development workflow where you can build your Omni models once, while testing against development warehouse data, then instantly incorporate this into production.
“Push to dbt” - This builds on the development workflow experience, where you can take an existing Omni model, convert it to a SQL query, and push this as a model to your dbt repo.
“dbt workbook tabs” - This is then a way to query your dbt models directly
within Omni. It’s always a pain when you’re building dbt models to preview what
the results will be; my workflow was always to execute a dbt run first, then
use a command-line client to select from that table and see the results. The
dbt workbook tabs are a way to do all this for you. It opens up the possibility
to build a full dbt model within Omni, with all the data preview / charting
capability there for you, and then combine this with “Push to dbt” to get the
model into your dbt repo.
“dbt IDE” - This is the latest work and perhaps the most exciting, because it starts to really pull all this functionality together. It’s a way for you to browse your dbt repo and then edit dbt models within the dbt workbook tabs. This really starts to glue the full dbt development story together.
This was my second year as a beekeeper and the first year I got honey. I can’t remember the exact amount, but I think I got about 70 pounds. I tried my hand at making mead too and it’s not bad (but is it good?).
I didn’t read very much, which is a problem. One highlight was finishing Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
I played flute publicly for the first time in about 14 years and then played again two more times. Each was at my Church. Hopefully I will play again in the coming years.
Programming side projects are mostly not a thing for me anymore, but there has been one exception over the past few months. I am nearly finished a project to make Bitcoin Core multisig wallets feasible to use by a layman.
I have some goals for 2025.