2024 - A Year in Review
Last year brought a few challenges and misfortunes. From changing companies to broken bones, Trish and I learned more about ourselves and our abilities than we ever anticipated. I had seven months off from the beginning of February through the end of July. Trish returned to her passion for horses and started competing near the end of my funemployment. A few months later, her saddle malfunctioned, and she found herself with a broken wrist and a broken ankle.
From last year's review:
I only have one goal for 2024: breathe.
I had plenty of time to breathe, so this turned out to be an excellent goal. Whether it was on the ski slopes or mountain biking, I had lots of heavy breathing in the first half of the year thanks to a nice severance package and a zest for adventure.
I'm gonna review 2024 using the following perspectives:
Personal
The year started with a trip to Cabo San Lucas. Trish and I have a friend with a condo down there, so we joined them for a weekend in mid-January. I stayed the following week, working remotely. Another friend flew in, and we golfed on some of the most beautiful courses I'd ever seen: Palmilla and Solmar. Both were all-inclusive, which I didn't even know existed. It basically means that all drinks and snacks are included. On Sunday, we went deep-sea fishing and caught a couple of Marlin. You haven't experienced forearm pain until you've spent 45 minutes trying to reel in a huge fish. The first one got away at the end, but we successfully landed the second one.
Shortly after, my funemployment began.
I started looking for a new gig in April. Since finding a job is often about who you know, not what you know, I flew to Atlanta for Devnexus and networking. There, I attended the JUG Leaders Summit and the Java Champions Summit before the conference. I spoke about micro frontends with JHipster and stayed for the speaker festivities after. You can read about this experience in A Delightful Trip to Devnexus.
The following week, I did a marvelous road trip to the Utah JUG in Stout the Syncro. I skied at Copper, mountain biked at Fruita and Moab, and skied at Snowbird and Alta before my talk. Then, I hit Steamboat and Winter Park on the way home.
We attended our niece's graduation from Michigan in May, watched the Nuggets lose to the Timberwolves in the playoffs, almost won a fowling (bowling with a football) tournament, and my job search started heating up. At one point, I had 15 interviews in one week and interviewing felt like a full-time job.
We did some fun rafting trips on the Colorado River in June. Our rafting family didn't win any permits in the lottery, so there were no week-long trips.
I wrote about our ski season in late June. My only trip outside the Rockies was to a friend's birthday celebration in Sugarbush, Vermont. The conditions were less optimal than I'm used to. When it snowed a foot on the last day, the power went out and the lifts didn't work. 😅
July brought a trip to Montana, my 50th birthday celebration, and Trish started competing with horses again. I started a new job with CrowdStrike at the very end of the month. You can read about these happenings in Life Update: New Job, Same House, and Same Awesome Family!
Jack turned 20 in August. He didn't try out for the CU basketball team, but still plays a lot. Near the end of the year, he made things official with a love interest and is experiencing a whole new range of emotions.
Abbie celebrated 22 in November. It's her senior year at CU and she shocked us over the Christmas break by breaking up with her boyfriend of five years. Her puppy, Gracie, has been a good emotional support companion.
Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro
We rested Stout the Syncro again for most of the year, save for my Utah JUG road trip and a weekend adventure to Rhythms on the Rio in southern Colorado. They had a VW-only camping section right next to the stage, which made the community aspect all the more enjoyable.
Hefe the Bus kept truckin' along. He didn't win any trophies at VWs on the Green this year, but we still had a great time.
We did a cruise to Red Rocks with the Colorado VW Bus Club.
And I replaced our mailbox with something more stylish.
Professional
With a new job at CrowdStrike, most of my time was spent getting up to speed on cybersecurity and CrowdStrike's Falcon-related products. I created developer.crowdstrike.com (powered by Hugo) in my first month. I've been practicing Go and Python and published two blog posts:
I've started working on screencasts too, but none have been published yet.
I studied for and achieved a CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) certification. I also got my CCFA (CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator) certification last week, but technically that didn't happen in 2024.
Speaking
According to TripIt, I took 13 trips to 15 cities in two countries. Only two trips were for conferences: Devnexus and KC/DC. Normally, I'd say they were work-related, but since I was unemployed at the time, community-related is probably a better term.
Community
I continued helping the Denver JUG find speakers and a venue for our meetups. We switched to meeting in south Denver, at Thrive Centennial. This was mostly my decision because they have a larger room and it's closer to my house. We return to Thrive Cherry Creek when the Centennial location is booked.
Projects
The main open source project I worked on in 2024 was JHipster. I became a project co-lead in the spring, mostly to help do releases in a timely manner. JHipster had 10 releases and ~2 million downloads in 2024 (up 700K from 2023). Our most downloaded release was JHipster 8.7.3 on November 1st. We started updating and releasing blueprints before announcing releases.
I love the new website we published on August 28th and releasing JHipster 8.8.0 (with Spring Boot 3.4 and Angular 19 support) on Christmas Eve was a nice way to end the year.
2025
Professionally, I'll be writing (and helping others publish) more blog posts about CrowdStrike's Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. I might speak at a conference or two. I've submitted to a couple of CFPs and got accepted, but getting approval to speak has been a challenge. As one of the top cybersecurity companies, we traditionally make our documentation and tutorials only available to customers. When folks talk about our APIs and (open source) SDKs, it's at one of our Fal.Con conferences.
My leadership team would prefer I do talks and workshops about Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. Since these are products we sell, I feel like any talk I'd do about them would be a vendor pitch, even if I live-coded the whole time. This is a no-go for most developer conferences. It should work nicely for Fal.Con, though. And that might be all that's required since it sells out every year.
Personally, our big family vacation already happened with a visit to Puerto Rico in early January. I'll write about that in a blog post shortly. Abbie graduates from CU in May and starts her career this summer. We'll be celebrating, supporting, and planning some adventures with her when she moves back in. We hope to work remotely from Winter Park in June and Montana in July. We figure if we can work East Coast hours, we can have some fun rafting/biking/golfing adventures in the afternoons and evenings.
I have only one goal for 2025: be grateful.
I have a lot to be thankful for with an awesome family, a gorgeous place to live, adventurous hobbies, and fun VWs to drive. And, Trish got us VIP tickets to Dead & Company at the Sphere in May! She started following the Grateful Dead in the 90s with multi-day shows and wanted to finish her long strange trip in a similar fashion.
If you want to stay in touch, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Flickr.