2024 Year in Review

How It Started

At the outset of the year, I had some goals I wanted to hit in every domain of life.

Professional

• Build automation projects in C#, Ruby, Python, and Java

  • For each language: 1 Mobile, Web, Desktop, and API project

• AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification

Physical

• Weigh under 200 lbs (lose 25 lbs)

• Develop healthy habits:

  • Strength training

  • Daily protein

• Get rid of my knee pain

• Sleep 7-8 hours a day on average

Financial

• Make my first $100 online

• Increase my salary by $10k/year

Business

• Launch 5 paid digital products

• Reach 100 Email Subscribers

• 1k followers on LinkedIn

• 1k followers on 𝕏

Environmental

• Move to Door County

• Join a remote-first startup

• Get Sadie (our cat) a friend

How it went

Professional

I didn’t end up building any of those automation projects.

I did earn my AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, and that was a fun time. I ended up creating a study guide for anyone who wants to complete theirs too. It was the first digital product I actually charged money for.

In retrospect, most of my professional development came from my new job. I learned so much about Playwright this year, and even wrote a few blog posts about my discoveries. I have a short backlog of other Playwright posts I want to write. Here are the ones I wrote this year:

• https://blog.thesocialqa.com/paste-text-from-your-clipboard-in-playwright-typescript

• https://blog.thesocialqa.com/fixing-a-flaky-playwright-test-with-a-loop

• https://blog.thesocialqa.com/how-to-handle-opening-a-new-tab-in-your-playwright-test

Another cool experience I had was giving my first conference talk. You can read more about that here.

The most surprising aspect of my career development this year was getting the opportunity to work on the marketing website changes for the launch of the Ethereum Protocol Attackathon at Immunefi!

Even though I’m definitely the most junior on my team in terms of my web dev skills, they’ve embraced my ability to help out with smaller tasks that are mostly HTML/CSS-focused. It’s been a joy to bring my full self to work every day.

Physical

I actually stayed the exact same weight lol. Didn’t lose any weight, but didn’t gain any either.

(I suppose I should be grateful, given how busy I was this year, could’ve been a lot worse)

Looking back, this year was an amazing giant leap forward for my health:

Protein and weight training are daily habits for me now. I actually feel weird when I don’t have protein or work out for more than a few days, so it’s definitely ingrained in my psyche at this point.

My knee pain finally went away. Of course, if I push my knee joint really hard at the gym, I can get the knee pain to resurface, but I no longer get flare-ups from:

• 3 sets of 10 barbell squats with a challenging weight

• quadrupedal movement (the “bear crawls” of parkour)

• small jumps or landing from a short height

• going up stairs

It’s safe to say my knee is finally recovering thanks to all the strength training I’ve done for my legs this year. That was right up there with losing 25 lbs., so I’m pretty excited to say the least.

Financial

I blew these numbers out of the water.

I actually made my first $1000 online this year (and then some) and increased my salary by $20k/year.

Not much else to say here, except it’s easy to underestimate what’s possible in a year.

Business

This one’s a mixed bag, but largely a success. I created 6 digital products, but only made money from 3 of them:

• AWS Cert Smasher (February) → Study guide for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam

• QA Job Magnet (March) → My QA job-hunting playbook combining strategies from online business, traditional job-hunting, and social dynamics

• Social QA Bootcamp (November) → My first online QA course, a done-with-you learning experience complete with a Telegram community, self-paced learning content hosted on ThriveCart Learn, and 1:1 mentoring in subjects like AI, test automation, exploratory testing, and community engagement

Each product was more valuable than the last, and each one taught me new skills.

This year was a huge learning experience for me as a new entrepreneur. I paid for coaching in areas like copywriting and high-ticket offer creation, studied email marketing and got my first sales, networked with founders and spent over 2000 minutes mentoring QA professionals on ADPList, and saw my first successes on social media:

• 1000 → 5500+ followers on LinkedIn

• 8 → almost 500 email subscribers

• 

I had success on 𝕏 too, but not as much as I’d hoped for.

I forgot how many followers I had at the start of the year, but I was aiming for 1000 and landed at 700+, which isn’t terrible. You win some, you lose some. I was mostly active on LinkedIn this year anyway, once I realized most of my audience was over there.

Environmental

My wife and I wanted to move out of the Madison, Wisconsin, area this year, and we successfully did that in July when we moved to Door County!

That’s where we got married 3 years ago, and it’s the most gorgeous, quiet, quaint, cozy, perfect place to be at this point in our lives. We don’t know where we’ll move next, or when, but right now, we’re loving the opportunities to see lighthouses and shipwrecks, go to local seasonal events, and visit the many state and county parks that made us fall in love with the region.

We even started a website where we document all the lighthouses we’ve seen, in addition to other experiences we like to collect: https://cosmicbobsleigh.com/

(The image rendering on that site is 1000% not optimized lmao)

Another goal I had this year was to leave Trek and join a remote-first startup.

I did that when I joined Immunefi <3

Nothing wrong with working for Trek Bicycle per se, I just missed startup life. And I’ve been loving it all year ever since I’ve been back.

Fetch was my entry point into the tech world, and it left an impression on me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of startup life, but for now, it’s a good time.

And we did get our little kitty, Sadie, a friend. Her name is Bean <3 They LOVE each other.

(yeah I stole it from my wife’s Instagram, fight me lol)

In Conclusion

I didn’t list everything I did this year, because there’d be too many highlights. But as far as the goals I had set out to accomplish this year, I’d say I did alright.

The major misses this year were:

• Weight loss

• New programming language/automation framework knowledge

• 𝕏 growth

But maybe those will find their way onto my list for next year.

I had a lot of growing pains this year, and I’m hoping to maybe reduce the stress I put on myself outside of work in 2025.

That’s for my New Year’s Resolutions blog post, though ;)