2024: Year in Review

Another year draws to a close and while we don't have hover boards or flying cars yet, we're on the brink of 2025 already!

The Book (continued) 📚

My book was published in the beginning of the year and has been sold over 300 copies since launch! My goal was mostly to experience the book writing process and selling over a hundred copies already vastly exceeded expectations. I have received some offers for new books as well, but given the time and effort it took, I did not follow through on those opportunities. 😅

For those who are interested, the book is still available as hard copy or digital version!

Artificial Intelligence 🧠

The AI train is still picking up steam, and with the genie out of the bottle, it's become an ubiquitous part of everybody's life. I've moved to a team which investigates leveraging AI to provide better customer service via chatbots.

From frontend capacity, I'm mostly involved with providing the interfaces for these agents. I'm also leading the research in how we can train our internal AI tools to provide better and faster results when ingesting large sets of internal manuals and procedures. This initiative has a lot of potential, so I'm very excited about the possibilities here!

The "first" talks 🎤

This year I had to deal with limited resources and support from my employer, which led to a different approach and setup in my talks and CFPs. I was able to give a couple of talks of things that are very close to my heart, such as the latest features of current gen CSS and the first ever FrontNation!

I was invited at another premiere: on the first edition of C3 DevFest I talked about Design System Maturity Models and met some cool people, like John Romero and Una Kravets!

Another first was a hattrick: speaking at the same venue three years in a row! I completed this streak at FrontMania, with another talk on the current gen CSS capabilities. I received a lot of positive feedback on this topic! 💜

Another first was an invite to speak abroad, on the CodeMash 2025 conference! 🇺🇸 Due to unforeseen circumstances however, I had to decline this invite.

On Vue.js Global Summit I talked about what I've learned from doing a multitude of projects in the Vue ecosystem.

Program Committee

I've continued my program committee activities for JS Nation. This was a first to contribute to the full cycle, which was still very interesting and fun to participate in. On top of that, this year GitNation organizes a new JS Nation event in New York and I'm part of that program committee as well! 🗽

In New York, I had a role to play moderating the discussion panels for both JS Nation as well as React Summit conference. I must admit, speaking with core React maintainers, my appreciation for their challenge of both pushing boundaries as maintaining compatibility is a very unique and interesting challenge. As one of the people at the table said: "the value of React is in the millions lines of code written past, present and future". I am paraphrasing here, but it does provide a very good reason for maintaining certain parts and ways of doing things.

Socials

I was not particularly focused on increasing or even maintaining a social media presence. I do notice that Twitter (or X) seems to be in rapid decline, LinkedIn is still proving to be stable. The decline of Twitter is sad, since it used to be a very open way of connecting with developers around the world. Luckily, seemingly overnight, tech twitter jumped over the Bluesky 🦋. It's still a rather fresh jump, but it seems to have a better "stick" than the Mastodon alternative a few years back.

Career and work 🧑‍💻

I moved again! In the first quarter of this year, an opportunity opened up to pursue more Engineering Manager responsibilities. I've since then been working as an Engineering Manager in a hybrid role, where I partly contribute to frontend development, but also transition into assuming a management role. This was a tough balance at first, but I'm now comfortable in managing teams.

The final update however, is that I will not be able to pursue this goal in the immediate future, due to organizational restructuring. This limits my growth potential within Jumbo at the moment, so I'll have to see how to shape my future career path.

Our company went through a hefty reorganization and severe budget cuts this year, which unfortunately led to the collaboration between Fontys University of Applied Science's InnovationLab and our Jumbo Tech Campus was ended. I spent a lot of time and energy in bringing those two together, so that was a though decision to accept.

Mentoring

Career Day and Invites

With three colleagues I represented Jumbo Tech Campus as a potential organization for graduate assignments and we set up a special day to invite students over to give more information on the Jumbo Tech Campus and promote Jumbo as a tech employer. It was a very successful event, with over 40 students visiting our head office and expressing interest in Jumbo as a potential employer.

More bucket list 🪣

Since there's more to life than work alone (and the things outside of work shape us even more), this section is just as important as the learning part!

See the world 🗺️

Long Weekend in Amsterdam 🌷

Via Home Exchange we landed in a nice little house in the North of Amsterdam. It was within walking distance of the Wondr Experience (which we obviously visited for glorious selfies). We also explored the city centre. The nice thing was to use the public ferries to cross the IJ every time. We visited some of the museums and took a boat tour. Had a lot of fun being a tourist family!

Snowboarding in Austria 🏂

It was a while since I went on a skiing / snowboarding trip with "the guys". We went to Zell am See this year and had loads of fun! It was warm however and conditions have definitely changed over the years! 🥵

Train Travels in Italy 🍝

Based on a Home Exchange request in Rome, our visit to the city transformed in a bigger tour, where we visited some famous sites by train! We started by visiting the famous canals of Venice and boarded the train to Florence. In two very rainy days we explored the Duomo, Old town and bridge and boarded the train to Pisa! There we had to take some posing photos with the leaning tower, but we had just as much fun exploring the country side by bicycle!

Our final stop was Rome (or, more precisely, Santa Marinella near Rome) and we spent our days chilling at the beach front and doing quick day trips to the ancient city. It was hectic, traveling to so many locations with the four of us, but we had a good time! Traveling by train was new, and worked well!

Amsterdam Conference ⛴️

I visited Amsterdam for a second time. This time I stayed at the Kapitein Anna hotel (it's an old fashioned boat!) as part of my activities on the program committee of JS Nation. I was also invited to speak at the C3 conference, so I had an extended stay this time! I attended the conference, but also took some time to wander around in Amsterdam for a day. It's pretty nice to visit some of these sites on your own: going to musea, visiting some sights and just some relaxing. Had a great time with the conference attendees as well during the speakers' diners, conference and after parties! 🥳

Looooong Stay in Bali 🏝️

We had an exceptionally long home exchange stay during the summer: we stayed for more than five weeks on Bali, in a small (non touristy) village called Blayu. The house was overlooking rice paddies (from the swimming pool) and featured a dog (Charlie) to give walks and play with. We took our time to explore parts of the island: we went snorkeling with dolphins at Lovina, visited some nice waterfalls, unwinded on the Nusas near Bali and stranded on Gili Air.

The most fun we had was interacting with the locals: flying kites in the rice paddies 🪁 and visiting the sites that see very little tourists. This is particularly difficult in Bali, since the island is pretty much overrun with tourism which leaves a visible impact on the island. This is one of the reasons we prefer doing home exchanges over visiting hotels, to at least limit our footprint.

I had some pretty cool dives as well: hanging out with massive sea turtles and seeing reef sharks resting under crevices. 🤿🐢🦈

Visit Bruges & Doel 🇧🇪

As part of a yearly tradition, my father in law, brother in law and my son and I (the "men" from my wife's side of the family) plan a short weekend with activities. This year, my son and I were the organizers and we had an awesome itinerary (if I do say so). We spent the weekend in Bruges in Belgium and cooked together on the first evening and played games. Next, we wandered around the old town with an escape route, visited the Fries Museum and did a tour of the canals, followed by some beers and a good diner. The last day we visited the ghost town of Doel and held a laser battle in an abandoned gas station! 🔫 That was such good fun! Especially in the somewhat unsettling and graffitied remains of a small town.

New York City 🗽

This one was a blast! I received an invite to join the conferences of JS Nation and React Summit in New York and decided to add some extra time there, since I've never visited the city before. For the two extra days I've had a full schedule of sights to see, to get the most out of the brief visit. It was a very familiar sight, since I've seen lots of sights already in movies and tv shows. Walking around in Manhattan was a lot of fun!

I particularly loved the old skyscrapers of Midtown and the old brickwork buildings, exploring Central Park and taking in the streets and sights all around Manhattan and a small bit of Brooklyn. I ended my city trip with a nighttime visit of the Empire State Building observatory. It was quiet on the platform, despite the number of people there and with very little wind it was a special moment to quietly soak in the lights, sights and sounds of the city.

Home Exchange 🧳

When traveling, we try to make use of HomeExchange. It's a platform where individuals or families exchange their homes with each other for a period of time, typically for a vacation or holiday. HomeExchange allows people to experience different destinations and cultures while staying in the comfort of a home, rather than a hotel or other traditional accommodation.

💡 If you're interested in this, or want to sign up, feel free to use our referral code which nets you (and us) some Guest Points to start with: lydia-b4aeb

Health 🏋️

Mostly I've been able to complete at least one workout every week, save for vacations. I formed a small road cycling group with two guys from my area and we had a good rhythm during the sunny Sundays. Again, I did not meet my yearly kilometer goal, so maybe it's time to tone it down a bit to make it more realistic! 😅

I started to use the standup desk more often though, and I do notice that it really reduces the amount of lower back pain I'd normally experience when standing or walking for extended amounts of time. So I'll definitely keep doing this.

I ran again! 🏃💨 Because of an injury, I have quit a long time hobby of mine: running. This year I had a very good reason to try it out again: there's a local race where the track passes within 25 meters of my house. Every year I saw people running and figured that I should at least complete that race once. This year was the 10th anniversary of the event and I decided to go for it. It was a 10 kilometer run and I had not practiced or trained for it, but I felt that I would have had a decent shot in completing it. I have decent stamina, I have ran these distances before and I do train (almost) weekly in a gym.

I managed to complete the race! Not my best time, but definitely the best this year! It went as expected: the first 7 kilometers where manageable, but the last kilometers where pretty exhausting. I did make it though, and without injury! Maybe there's room for additional small scale running again! 🤔

Other random things I never did or experienced before:

My birthday is very close to my daughters'. For the birthday party, we went to a riding school to have a kids-riding-horses-party! Much to my surprise, my wife arranged for me to participate as well: riding a big horse instead of a pony! 🐎 It was a lot of fun and a nice addition to the birthday celebrations.

In Efteling, a theme park near us, there's a professional theatre production running for some time, called CARO. I learned that for some parts of the show, they are looking for kids between 7 and 10 to join the show. Both our kids were very enthusiastic and we signed them up. This was the first time to see both my kids on stage during a professional production. Awesome! 🎠

For Father’s Day my wife had a wonderful surprise in store! She arranged for me to get a flying introduction! ✈️ Our kids could join in the backseat of a very small single engine airplane. The pilot / instructor took off and gave some instructions on banking, steering and navigating. After the introduction I could steer the airplane by myself! 🧑‍✈️ It was a great feeling!

We had a perfect day for it: blue skies with some very summery cloud formations. This gave us a wonderful view over the city of Deventer and its surroundings. It was a great experience!