Reflecting on 2024 and Goals for Next Year

This is my seventh year writing a reflection blog to look back on the past year and set goals for the next.

Personal Life

This year, I finally achieved my dream of purchasing a home. By regularly managing my household budget and life planning, I was able to organize my finances and find a property that met my conditions and preferences, leading to a satisfying purchase.

Good properties tend to move quickly, so it’s best to complete pre-approval and budget adjustments before starting your search. This way, you can act immediately (i.e., submit an offer) when you find a suitable property.

If I ever have the chance to buy another home, I’ll make sure to keep this in mind.

This year, I focused on the following learning keywords:

Code reading skills (understanding specifications by reading implementations)
Coding skills (improving existing implementations)
System design
Databases
Computer science
Developing and adding features to a Go-based reverse proxy
Redesigning and developing a CMS (rebuilding the blog system for bmf-tech)
Agile, Scrum, project management, and development productivity
Kubernetes

While I made progress in terms of input, I fell short on output, leaving me with a sense of frustration about what I actually accomplished this year.

Looking at my Trello tasks, I see many tasks related to theoretical learning. I feel like I have less disposable time each year, so I’ve been trying to focus on being productive and achieving results in shorter periods. However, I still feel there’s room to make better use of my time in both work and personal life, and I want to explore this further next year.

Work

After taking six months of parental leave, I returned to full-time work this year. It felt like I was regaining my rhythm, but I wasn’t idle—I actually changed jobs. It was my first job change in 5-6 years and came at an important stage in my life, so there was a fair amount of pressure, but I managed. I’ve been enjoying my new job since joining.

This career move was a great opportunity to boost my confidence. I’ve reached a point in my career where I can no longer rely on potential alone, so I need to continue honing my performance. This realization brought its own kind of pressure.

While I’ve done various things at both my previous and current jobs, I don’t feel like I’ve experienced significant personal growth this year. My focus has been on leveraging my existing experience and knowledge to the fullest, rather than acquiring new skills or knowledge. While I’ve had some new learnings, I wonder if I’ve become less sensitive to new challenges as the years go by.

Perhaps I need to focus more deeply on one thing, achieve overwhelming results, or solve difficult problems to truly feel a sense of growth.

Reflection on Last Year’s Goals

My goal for this year was to "create new weapons."

While I didn’t create any new weapons, I did confirm that I can still fight with the ones I already have. In that sense, this year might have been about realizing that I didn’t meet my goal.

Polishing existing skills and creating new ones is always important, but I’ve decided to let go of this unmet goal. This is because I feel that generative AI, as an auxiliary tool, is changing the way we choose our tools.

Goals for Next Year

My goal for next year will be "choosing the right weapons."

In the past, my goals have always been about career and skill development, but since that’s something I’ll always strive for, I’ve decided to take a different approach this year and set a goal that challenges my sense of judgment.

While I feel like I’ve come up with something clever, there’s also a part of me that thinks I haven’t really thought it through.