2024 is finally over. I can't decide if it feels more like a long distant memory or one that has raced passed me with a loud "Whoosh". We're just about a month into the year so I thought now would be a good time to look back on the year and look forward to for the year ahead.
With that in mind, I wanted to write my first annual review to kick the year off (and hopefully this blog in earnest). I'm not a huge fan of setting big, bold, make or break resolutions so this review will be more about reflecting on things that have happened this year and being a bit more intentional about the future.
On the 17th of April we welcomed Penelope (Penny) Joy Dawson into our lives. It still feels surreal at times to realise there are three of us now. Learning to be a dad is such a wild ride, it's been exhausting and challenging but endlessly rewarding. There's nothing that makes me happier than discovering a new thing that makes her laugh or smile.
It's been a treat to get to introduce her to my parents, and her wider family in general. She's growing so fast it's like each time she sees them it's a completely different type of meeting. The pace at which babies grow really is something I hadn't appreciated before and is fascinating to watch. I can't wait to see how she grows this year, learn more about her personality and all the new dad lessons that will be in store for me in 2025.
We went to Center Parcs for our first ever family holiday in 2024. I was a little apprehensive about going as Penny was only a few months old and I had no idea what it would be like to go on a week long trip with a little one but I'm so glad we went.
Center Parcs was great, we had a nice little flat surrounded by trees and everything you'd need was a walk away. There are tonnes of activities but we had quite a chilled week - highlights for me were exploring the woods, taking Penny on a pedalo, crazy golf and a high ropes course. I'd love to come back over the next few years with friends and family.
Even with all of the logistical running around, getting everyone in and out of the accommodation, and busy days of activities. There's something about leaving your home for a week and not being able to do any work or continue with your daily routines as normal that makes you sit down, reflect, and appreciate things that you might not otherwise.
It was great to spend some quality time with Louise and Penny and for her to spend some extended time with her grandparents (wife's side) who joined us for part of our trip. I'm a convert and I've become the annoying Center Parcs advocate at parties now.
As if I've been going to parties!
One of the things that came off the tracks for me in 2024 was staying on top of my health and fitness. In previous years I've really enjoyed the pursuit of weightlifting. I love setting and breaking goals, learning good technique on compounds, and the battery charging feeling you get from being with your own thoughts for an hour. This year I've felt like I just haven't been able to justify the time. I don't know if this is parent guilt, a genuine lack of time or just a lack of discipline and motivation on my part but I haven't really done much intentional exercise this year.
Looking back, it looks like there tends to be tension between a handful of areas of life and it's a balancing act trying to invest the right amount time and effort in each area; (in no particular order) these are probably being a husband, being a dad, pushing my career forward, keeping up with friends & family, and managing my fitness.
Maybe it's because fitness seemed to be the least consequential to to other people and that's why I dropped it (I'm not sure how true that is). In any case, I'd really like to get back on track this year.
I really love our old home - it's just within the South Downs, and has loads of walks from the doorstep and the village is a short country walk away. There's a great community on our road and it really feels like nature and fresh air is right on your doorstep. We love the outdoors and it suited us perfectly while we were there.
With our first steps taken into parenthood though, we realised that we need a home that's more practical and with that in mind, we put our house on the market early in the year to try and find something in the village, closer to friends, family and all of the amenities we need on the daily.
This was our first time selling a house, and to be honest, I drastically under-appreciated not having to do this when we were first-time-buyers. It's a logistical operation trying to make sure that your house doesn't look like a baby-sized bomb has gone off, ready for viewings and also to shuffle our lives around the comings and goings of prospective buyers.
It took a while but after plenty of viewings and the better part of a year, we found our house. We're almost two weeks in to living in the new house and although there are still boxes around and patches of tester paint on the walls I'm already seeing the benefits of living in the village and having a bit of extra space. It's an exciting time and I can't wait to build new memories with Penny and Louise in the place that Penny will come to know as her home.
I love building websites and writing software - I love that it's technical and you get to peek behind the curtain of modern technology and see how the world works. There aren't really limits to the software you can create - you can create an application as simple or as complicated, as useless or as useful as you like.
Over the years I've realised that the thing I love the most is that I can write code and build things that really help people in business who are trying to achieve something - it's like seeing someone trying to light a fire and realising that you're stood here with a jerry can full of gasoline.
I've tried to spend a large part of this year narrowing down what it is I love about my work and how I can lean into that and develop myself as a professional in that direction. If I can learn about business more, the problems people are trying to solve and how technology can unlock real value for them, I'd love it if I could apply those learnings in a real tangible way.
I've not had much mental bandwidth to keep up with many books this year, but after finally discovering audiobooks, I've managed to get into a few which I've enjoyed and taken something from.
"The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors."
I heard a lot about Good Strategy Bad Strategy before actually picking it up as being the strategy book. Working in a field where I'm trying to optimise the shopping experiences of buyers and the conversion rates of online stores, I'm fascinated with how and why people make decisions. And what makes a good or bad decision. At the heart of good strategy is the art of effective decision making, understanding your environment, and also other peoples decisions.
The book starts out by setting the scene 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar. Rummelt gives an engaging summary of the battle and the key decisions and strategic actions carried out by Horatio Nelson.
Over the course of the book, Rummelt then continues with a series of real life examples and situations to break down good and bad strategic decision making in an engaging way.
There's so much to unpack in this book it might deserve it's own post, and definitely another read.
I actually just recently started reading The Three Body Problem over the Christmas holidays. I was always unsure about whether or not to pick this book up as I'd heard mixed reviews about it being overly technical and lacking in character development.
So far I've found the book to be really engaging - the scale of the book is broad and it seems like this is a story about physics, humans understanding of physics and its implications. It's like if someone took a 'what if' thought experiment about real world physics and extended it into a book spanning generations. I read somewhere that Liu is originally an engineer, so this style of storytelling makes sense to me when I look at it from that angle. I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction anyway and so far I love it.
I'm about a third of the way in and so far I love it.
As I mentioned earlier, no real hard goals here, but something I definitely want to get back on track with is my fitness. I'm a short walk away from the gym now and Penny is also at a more manageable age so I don't really have much of a reason to not follow through with this intention.
I think I'm going to try and have a back-to-basics approach with this and revisit one of my old workout plans and follow its steps as I did when I first started working out. I've got some old spreadsheets where I tracked my progress before so I'll try to use those as a blueprint for this year.
One of my intentions this year is to seek out more regular feedback. I always appreciate getting good feedback from people (in work and life) and I have a tendency to keep it top-of-mind for a while before eventually the next priority comes along.
Good feedback is something that in previous years I've tended to benefit from maybe a couple times a year. People can surprise you with the feedback you receive if you ask the right questions, but this isn't something I feel like I've really taken advantage of before.
My plan this year is to try to check in with a few key people this year a bit more regularly to see how things are going, if there are things I could do differently, they need or are missing, and using that for more frequent course-correction.
Also good feedback, I think, is quite hard to get - there's skill in asking the right questions of people that result in the most insightful answers. I'm hoping that this is a skill I can develop in 2025 and continue to get better at in the future.
Something I've definitely been guilty of in the past, as a software engineer, has been getting hyperfocused on solving the task at hand to the point where the actual value to the end user, the business, or the customer has become distorted or even lost. It's easy to get so tied up in the technical solution to a novel business problem that you end up building a technically perfect product and looking for ways that the customer can utilise it. Rather, I want to get better at truly appreciating the pain points of the business and working backwards from there to find a smart solution. No one is paying you to write code so that they can print it out and hang it on their walls - they are trying to solve actual pain points in their business and the need your help.
My plan for this is to learn more about product ownership through leveraging work connections, reading more books and just trying to develop a more customer-first approach to thinking about work.
One of the other things that has almost completely fallen by the wayside has been reading. To try and get back into this, I bought a kindle last year and that was a huge help, it became so much easier pick up when I have a few minutes.
There's also an app called Readwise that I've experimented with before but I'd like to get more into. It basically takes highlights from your Kindle and then sends you these digital flashcards either by email or via your mobile app.
This in theory should be great for me as there are always small nuggets in a book I'll be reading that I'll highlight and ruminate on for a while but ultimately forget about. I couldn't get it to stick as a habit last time so maybe I can use my ambition to use Readwise more as a vehicle to help drive my intention to read more.
I'm clearly a little rusty when it comes to writing. Although I knew I wanted to get into the habit of writing and to write an annual review, I wasn't sure how much I'd be able to write or if I'd enjoy it. But the very act of writing the review has been a great experience.
It's nice to look back on the year and appreciate what's happened and also get enrgised about the coming year. And to top it all off, I've got something real and valuable to me written down that I can come back to in years to come.