2024 In The Rearview Mirror

At the end of every year, I write a retrospective of what I did, learned, felt, watched, played or listened to. It's the perfect way to reflect on everything, figure out what was good, bad and what could be better!

If you'd like, you can read my posts for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Last Year's Predictions

Last year I made some predictions (or hopes) of what would happen this year. Did I get anything right?

I expect to take big steps towards owning my own house. I really want to stop paying rent and hopefully get a house instead of an apartment. It’s more work, but it’s more fulfilling and freeing.

Eh, partially, I guess? I did save money towards that end, but a change of plans made me not look into buying anything for now. More on that later.

I expect to write even more on this blog, and continue to expand on the topics I post about. Dev articles aren’t going anywhere, but I don’t always have something to post about in that regard.

✅ I got this one right! I did write more this year, and while the topics didn't get as varied as I'd liked, I'm still happy with what came out of the blog in 2024.

Also, I want to add proper support for categories and filtering, as well as search. As I post more, even I am starting to struggle finding something I wrote in the past to reference. Additionally, some code refactoring is always welcome.

❌ Nope, I did not do that. Not this year at least. I wrote about my desire to redesign my website and all that work has been moved to that redesign. It did not get ready (or started) in time, so that was a wrong prediction.

I also want to travel a bit next year too - either to the US to meet my work colleagues or to Italy to see my brother. And of course, do some sightseeing!

✅ I did travel this year! I traveled to New York and Chicago. More on those trips later.

Personal Life

Not much happened on my personal life this year, now that I think about it. In a good way. I feel like I've been able to mature a lot in the past couple years, after the autism diagnosis, therapy, and coming to terms with who I am and who I can be. Turns out everything gets easier when you learn not only that you should be kind to yourself, but how to be kind to yourself.

Travel

Last year, I said I was hoping to either going to the US to meet my work colleagues or to go to Italy to see my brother. Since I already had been to Italy, I chose to go to the US, and it was pretty fun! My wife and I traveled there in August, near the end of summer. We spent ~5 days in New York and ~5 in the Chicago area.

New York

New York City is, no other way of saying it, complete and utter chaos. But in a (mostly) good way! Being so big and having so many people from everywhere in the world, there's just no shortage of things to do and to see.

We went with a mentality that we'd rather do less and have a great time than to try and do everything and get stressed about it. But turns out we were able to do pretty much everything we wanted! We got a lot of tips of the best times to go to each place and were able to plan some of our days accordingly.

We went to some of the most famous places like Rockefeller Center (and went to the Top of the Rock at sunset), the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. Also the Natural History museum and The MET.

Some of the nicer surprises were the experiences based on pop culture stuff. We went to The Friends Experience, an entire place dedicated to the Friends sitcom, with original items used in the show and really faithful recreations of Monica's and Joey's apartments, as well as the Central Perk coffee shop. It was a weird feeling being in that place that I'd never been before, but knew every corner. I was worried it'd be just a shameless cash grab, but it was actually pretty cool.

Being a big Nintendo nerd, we also went to the Nintendo Store. It was, honestly, a bit underwhelming, but still great to see so many things based on games I love.

But nothing we did there can even compare to the experience of going to a Broadway show! We went to see The Great Gatsby, and wow... just wow. It was honestly the most incredible thing I've ever seen, and I don't say that lightly. The music, the scenarios, the performances, and how well all that transitioned in front of your eyes, it's just mind-blowing. I'd never watched a musical play (only movies, which I hated), but it's now one of my favorite things. Too bad there's nothing like that where I live, but whenever I get back to NYC, I'm definitely watching more musicals.

Chicago and Aurora

On my birthday, we took a plane to Chicago. We celebrated by having a famous deep-dish pizza at Gino’s East. It’s pretty good, but I’d kinda classify it as a pie and not pizza 😅

The main reason we went to Chicago was because I wanted to finally get to meet my work colleagues in person. Most of them live in the city of Aurora, which is around an hour from Chicago by train.

Meeting them was one of the highlights of the whole trip. It’s nice (and weird) to finally meet people you’ve only spoken to online for the first time. They were really lovely as usual and made us feel very welcome there.

Since we were in Chicago anyway, we did some sightseeing there too. We went to the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, the Bean and even went to the top of Willis Tower, which was literally shaking from the wind.

Downtown Chicago is really pretty, way prettier than NY, but understandably there’s a lot less going on. Oh, and it was hot in there. I’ve never felt so hot in my life. It was around 38ºC during the day, but felt like it was over 40ºC. 🥵

Tragedy

2024 unfortunately was the year where the state I live in got hit by a big tragedy, with a lot of consequences to everyone who lives here.

At the beginning of May, the state of Rio Grande do Sul was hit by absurd amounts of rain in the matter of days, which put almost the entire state quite literally underwater. So many people lost their houses, belongings, and even their lives. Entire cities were lost, and so much of our infrastructure was damaged and is still far from being rebuilt.

Luckily, I wasn't personally affected by it (besides the comparatively trivial shipping delays and/or being unable to travel to neighboring cities). My city stands in a mountain range and even though we had a lot of rain, the water naturally flows away down the mountains (and sadly flooded the cities in the valleys or in the river deltas). But it was still heartbreaking to see people suffer so much because of it. And it does hit much harder when these things happen so close to you.

The bright side of it all is how many people came together to help the ones in need, from all over the country. Brazil is enormous and it felt like everyone did their best to help us pull ourselves around. It does help you restore a bit of faith in humanity.

Blog

Another good year for the blog! I've published a total of 18 posts so far, not counting this one. It's my record, though 5 of them were the new Cool Links series, which is not really original content. Even if we don't count those, we still have 13, one more than last year!

The big thing this year was the creation of the Cool Links series, a monthly blog post where I put all the best links I've saved during each month. It's a natural evolution of the Reading Recs I started posting last year, and I'm happy with how they're turning out. It's always good to have a chance to link to other websites and comment on them, without having to spin up a blog post for each one of them.

Another new thing is my newsletter, which, to be fair, is more of an email feed of the blog instead of a newsletter. I've started it in October, and it's not being a huge hit but I didn't expect it to. It's meant to be an additional way to subscribe to what I write.

My favorite posts of the year were, once again, the more personal ones: Best longterm goal? Not having one and JOMO is a Beautiful Thing.

Work

Since last year I’ve been working at Useful Group, a lovely agency in Aurora, Illinois, USA. I’ve been pretty happy with my job there, working on nice projects and most importantly with amazing people. It’s so refreshing to find people in the software development industry that are nice and actually care about other people and about doing good work.

On the side projects front, I didn’t do much this year. I worked on the redesign of my website in Figma, but didn’t get to coding it yet. I learned a lot of cool CSS stuff and leaned into Progressive Enhancement as much as possible at work. Wanting to improve our sliders at work, I ended up developing a web component called enhanced-css-slider, which I’ve been using at work for almost a year.

Fun

The best part of the year – the fun things I've watched, listened to or played this year.

TV and Movies

This year I haven't watched any "serious" TV shows. I haven't really felt like starting to watch something new and instead just re-watched some sitcoms as my "lunch show". What I did watch was a bunch of movies, for which I started writing some quick reviews using the QuickReviews web app. I plan on putting all those quick reviews up on my website eventually, but for now, here's some of the best ones:

• The Office US was the only new (for me) show that I watched in 2024. It took my wife and I a few tries before it actually clicked for us, but once it did, it's so much fun! The dead-pan, slightly awkward (or very awkward) humor is my jam. We watched the entire 9 seasons once, then re-watched it up to season 7 right after;
• Inside Out 2: You can feel all sorts of emotions on this one (hah!), but the main one is joy. Amazing movie, funny, relatable, touches on very important topics with good humor and a lot of sensibility. Props to the Brazilian dubbing and localization which was amazing and probably made the movie even better than it originally was!
• Bacurau: It took me way too long to watch this movie, but I'm so glad I was finally able to watch it. Absolutely incredible, raw, weird and full of symbolisms that will keep me thinking about the movie for days. Another masterpiece in Brazilian cinema.
• Grave of the Fireflies: Just as beautiful as it is sad. What a movie. 🥺
• I'm Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui): This one hits hard. It's a brilliantly told true story of just one of the thousands of families destroyed the military dictatorship in Brazil. Its depiction of Rio de Janeiro in the 70s is very on point. The details make everything much more relatable. It's a powerful reminder of why we must celebrate and fight to keep the rights we have today.

Games

• World of Warcraft is undoubtedly the game I've played the most in my life, being a big part of my teenage years. I had been on and off the game since 2013 and then off since 2015, but this year I started playing it again. Its new expansion, The War Within, has been a blast. It's just a world I love being in and I've finally had the time to play it again. Where else can I be a humanoid cow that shoots lightning bolts?

• Last year I played Disco Elysium for the first time and it was genuinely one of the best artistic experiences I've ever had in my life. So, this year I watched my wife play it for the first time, to try and have the experience of playing through it all over again. Seeing everything again just made the game even better for me. It's so powerful, funny and sad, with so many glimpses of hope. It's an emotional rollercoaster and I get emotional just thinking about it.

Music

• What Happened to the Heart? is the new album by Aurora and my most-listened to album of the year. I'll admit I didn't like it on first listen, but after the second one it just grew on me and it's one of my favorites ever now. It starts by being what you expect from her, then it gets weirder and weirder in the best way possible. I'm just sad I wasn't able to see her live again this year.

• The Mandrake Project was the first solo album by Bruce Dickinson since 2005. It's full of great songs and is amongst the best of his career (Iron Maiden included). I was lucky enough to be able to see him live in Porto Alegre in April of this year. The concert was amazing, his singing is still fantastic, his band was great and the crowd just makes everything better.
• Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is my new favorite album from Deafheaven. Last year I mentioned how it was growing up on me and this year I listened to it even more. I just love the mix of the melodic parts and the heavier ones.

What Awaits in 2025

Well, first of all the plan for 2025 is to move. We're moving out of Brazil to give living abroad another chance. After the bad experience in 2022 we want to give it a fair try by going to an actual city with actual things to do. The idea is to try Italy and Austria, but we'll see, nothing is set in stone.

Another not-as-big-but-still-big goal is to actually go ahead with my website's redesign. The new design has grown up on me and so I think it is the right choice. The only thing I'm still undecided about is if I should go ahead and do a full rewrite (possibly with Astro) or just update the visuals. 2025 Matt will be wiser and more capable of making that decision.

As for writing more on the blog, I'm not sure this time. Of course I want to, but I think I had a good cadence this year. I definitely want to continue with the monthly links and adding some non-blog content to the site (like the movie quick reviews).

Wrapping Up

Overall, 2024 was a great year for me. After the chaotic 2022, its two following years were definitely calmer. I think now that 2025 will have a lot more going on, but hopefully I'm better prepared to handle all that now.

See you next year!