What Happened in 2024?

We are done with 2024, and now is a good time to reflect on what has happened over the past 12 months. I was not planning to, but my feed convinced me to give it a try . Plus, it is a good opportunity to revive my “Retrospective” series.

Free and Open Source Software

I’ve been a “prolific contributor” at $WORK, but less so with my personal projects.

• Spatial Shell  remains my most “popular” projectWe should reach 100 stars on GitHub in 2025 😅. , but except for a very minor 7th release in January, I have not touched it. It’s basically a done project, and I very much enjoy using it on a daily basis. My main regret is that, contrary to what is stated in its README, Spatial Shell does not work at all with i3.
• ezjsonm-encoding  was initially written for Spatial Shell, but I turned it into its own OCaml package in 2024. It is a JSON-only encoding library heavily borrowing on Data-encoding API , but with a more flexible default behavior for object parsing. I enjoyed writing the documentation, inspired by a tweet from Dmitrii Kovanikov Yes, cool kids moved to Bluesky in 2024, and Dmitrii is definitely a cool kid. . That being said, I have never bothered to benchmark this package properly, so if performances are important, it may not be a good fit for you.
• jsonrpc2  is, as of January 1st, 2025, an experiment in providing a general-purpose framework for servers and clients communicating with the JSON RPC 2.0  protocol. I quite like the API I’m proposing there, and maybe I’ll try to polish and publish it in 2025.
• bepo-tsrn.nvim  is another thing I have done for myself, but published as if it was a public good. Now, instead of having to copy/paste the same Neovim configuration file on every computer I use, I can just type yay -S neovim-bepo-tsrn-git and be done with it.
• celtchar  has seen its first commits since 2021, which is not nothing. As a reminder, celtchar is a little tool I have written to generate ebooks and static websites for the stories I write; and as I was doing the 2024 edition of NaNoWriMo , I found myself in need to add a missing feature (supporting books split in parts, not only chapters).

Overall, I’ve been defaulting to OCaml for the past two years or so, and I am starting to think it is time to widen my perspective again. I will probably start with relearning GoI don’t know why, but I have been mildly obsessed with this language lately. .

Blog posts

2024 was not a very productive year when it comes to this website. I have published 5 articles, which is half the number of publications of 2023. As a logical consequence, not a lot of folks have visited my website this year. Funnily enough, the most read article (by far) in 2024 was published in 2023To be fair, it was published on December 30, 2023. .

That being said, I am quite happy with the content published in 2024.

• Using git maintenance with Encrypted SSH Keys is the first article I published in 2024. It is a direct consequence of my trip to Brussels in February to attend to FOSDEM . If you haven’t already, you should watch Scott Chacon’s talk  about Git less known commands; it is the only reason why I learned about git maintenance.
• Installing a LUKS-Encrypted Arch Linux on a Vultr VPS is mostly a gift I have made to Future Me. It is a very specific how-to that I can use to quickly set up a new server with disk encryption. Funny story, I was planning to publish a follow-up about how I use systemd-nspawn to run my web services in containers , but no matter how many times I tried, I’ve never quite found a good way to tell this story. As I plan to educate myself on Kubernetes in 2025, it is not clear I will ever publish it now.
• Introducing bepo-tsrn.nvim is probably the less useful article I have published in 2024, considering I expect the userbase to bepo-tsrn.nvim to stick to 1 until the very endBut who knows? Maybe one of you will prove me wrong! .
• On Vestigial Structures hardly qualifies as a blog post, and is mostly a joke. It is also the only content on my website that was mostly generated by ChatGPT, and it is flagged as such. I don’t like using AI to write, but I do appreciate having a reviewer always at hand.
• Serving This Article from RAM for Fun and No Real Benefit was very fun to write. This little experiment was stuck in my head for basically two years, and it turned out basically exactly as I had pictured it. That being said, I want to learn about CDNs now.

Overall, I still enjoy having my own little corner of the Internet, but if there is one thing I’d like to improve in 2025, it is its reach. I’d like you folks to run into my website, instead of having to promote it every time I write something. 2025, the year of SEO?

$WORK

2024 started with my decision to go back to a Software Engineering position, after giving an honest try at being an Engineering Manager in late 2023.

I want to remember 2024 for two things.

This year, more than ever, I have tried to appreciate my work beyond my individual contributions. I am confident in my programming skills (although I have so much to learn), but being an accomplished engineer is much more than contributing code. Making sure every engineer in the team can work to the best of their current ability, fostering a work environment favoring growth and initiative, estimating as precisely as possible the amount of time needed to deliver the next important thing, collaborating efficiently with non-technical teams... I am becoming increasingly interested in these areas.

Besides, this year was all about delivering and deploying in production. It’s been a wild ride , and I loved it even if it was very demanding. After having mostly contributed to R&D projects, the focus on UX, backward compatibility, etc. was very refreshing. I learned so much through the year, and had many opportunities to make significant impacts.

In 2025, I want to keep learning about software engineering, and maybe start sharing my thoughts on the subject on my website.

Talks

I gave only one talk in 2024, at a conference called EthCC . It was actually a follow-up to the talk I gave the year before. You can watch me deliver the talk here , but if you are more into written content, I have also published a transcript on this very website. I actually loved writing it down, and plan to systematically publish similar content for every recorded talk I will give in the future.

I also had the opportunity to participate in a Twitter Space .

This year, my public speaking opportunities were all $WORK-related. I would like to change this in the future, because there are enough events out there for me to start speaking about something other than workIt’s too late to apply to FOSDEM, but maybe I can find something to say to an event later in the year! I think. .

Sport

This year was a bit of a disappointment, sport-wise. I tried several times to get back to running regularly, and failed miserably. I went to Lyon for a 10km run without proper training, and skipped the half-marathon I signed up for. I should update my Running Log nonetheless. I started swimming regularly during the Summer, only to pierce my earlobes in September 😅.

Let’s hope I do better in 2025! I am planning to register for the Triathlon de Deauville  with my sister. That promises to be fun! And I want to commit to the 20km de Paris  as well.

On the bright side, I have started to use my bike again. I love riding around Paris, especially at night.

Final Notes

Overall, I’ve devoted a large part of my time to $WORK in 2024. Hopefully, I will find a better balance over the course of 2025, which should give me more time to explore and experiment more things.

Anyway, happy new year everyone! And happy Dry January!