Annual review 2024 - 1) Overview

Last year, having made an effort of migrating the blog (again), I’d read through a lot of my old blog posts - particular those end of year summaries. As a result, I made a concerted effort to sit down at the end of 2023 and make my way through a template that I drew up / lifted / pilfered.

Little did I know, that the whole thing would become a bit of a thing, and ended up taking me the best part of a month to cover every section that I wanted. And actually, I didn’t cover every topic I wanted - I just ended up pulling the trigger on publish at some point.

It turned out that once I sat down to write, each section ended up being a multi-part essay - and I ended up splitting it into 5 sections when it came to post it all on the website.

But I’m glad I did it. I’m glad that I have a time capsule into my thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing at the time. My hope now with this review is to just write. Get down a stream of conciousness as raw and unfiltered as possible. Then perhaps towards the end of January with a little period to mentally detach from one’s own writing, I’ll compare my 2023 review to 2024 and set about seeing what went well, what didn’t go so well and what was a complete failure. To that end, maybe I’ll learn something, and maybe I’ll be able to better goal-set into 2025.

  1. Intro
  2. Best of and memories
  3. Health - Running
  4. Health - Weights, weight & supplements
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Mini Q2 review

What distinguishes you from other developers?

I've built data pipelines across 3 continents at petabyte scales, for over 15 years. But the data doesn't matter if we don't solve the human problems first - an AI solution that nobody uses is worthless.

Are the robots going to kill us all?

Not any time soon. At least not in the way that you've got imagined thanks to the Terminator movies. Sure somebody with a DARPA grant is always going to strap a knife/gun/flamethrower on the side of a robot - but just like in Dr.Who - right now, that robot will struggle to even get out of the room, let alone up some stairs.

But AI is going to steal my job, right?

A year ago, the whole world was convinced that AI was going to steal their job. Now, the reality is that most people are thinking 'I wish this POC at work would go a bit faster to scan these PDFs'.

When am I going to get my self-driving car?

Humans are complicated. If we invented driving today - there's NO WAY IN HELL we'd let humans do it. They get distracted. They text their friends. They drink. They make mistakes. But the reality is, all of our streets, cities (and even legal systems) have been built around these limitations. It would be surprisingly easy to build self-driving cars if there were no humans on the road. But today no one wants to take liability. If a self-driving company kills someone, who's responsible? The manufacturer? The insurance company? The software developer?