Quick and only partially coherent review of 2024
Not a great year, but also not the worst.
My freelance business did not fare that well for most of it. It did improve slightly towards the end, so this year is starting on a better note than 2024.
There are some freelancing/job prospects that may or may not pan out at the moment.
2024 was mostly defined by my indecision and a monomaniacal focus on the newsletter. Because I kept a relentless weekly pace, the newsletter itself grew by roughly a thousand subscribers. That’s not much compared to, honestly, most others playing in the “let’s analyse tech” space or even compared to many active software or web developer commentators.
The newsletter doesn’t makes sense as a hobby. The blog itself works fine as a hobby but there is some cost to maintaining a newsletter with this number of subscribers.
It only makes sense if it’s a genuine business expense. That means it needs to be a part of a larger business strategy, which in turn means it need to either result in leads for freelancing projects or sales.
This year the newsletter didn’t really do any of those things.
But I focused on maintaining a release pace for my newsletter because that was simpler than trying to answer a bunch of tough questions I really needed to be answering.
This led to a messy year.
- Where did I want to take my ebook or course business? Anything “AI” is a dead end for me because I consider it to be categorically unsafe for business without drastic reform of the companies that make them. You can’t build a business on “whatever you’re planning, just don’t do that”. Commentary like Ed Zitron’s has very different economics – requires a much larger audience than mine to be financially sustainable – and, honestly, he’s already doing a great job of delivering that kind of commentary. There’s no point in just running a newsletter that’s “like Ed Zitron’s, but much less fun”.
- Releasing a second edition of The Intelligence Illusion that made it crystal clear that I don’t think this tech is “ready for business” was pretty much all I could do in that vein.
- I also didn’t know how to follow up on Out of the Software Crisis. I could do another book that refined the ideas in it, but that also felt pointless when it’s manifestly clear from the popularity of LLMs for development and the software we’re forced to use that there isn’t much interest in actually making better software.
- I didn’t feel capable of following up on my attempt at a course on test-driven web dev without node. It felt like the web dev community as a whole and me were just on a very different path . Every attempt I made at researching what sort of problems web devs were having that I could help with ended in frustration.
- Now, in hindsight, these observations might not actually true, but what matters is they felt true at the time, which made it difficult for me to move forward.
- Not taking a newsletter break earlier – writing the newsletter took up a lot of my spare time – meant I never really gave myself the time to consider any of these questions properly.
- Another consequence of my indecision was a number of projects I worked on this year that I never finished or released.
I also spent much of the past year helping my sister find a publisher for her graphic novel. This proved to be incredibly depressing because, even though we got rave comments from the authors, critics, and editors we got to read it, not a single publisher showed interest. And pretty much every venue stopped accepting submissions in the latter half of the year, citing a flood of “AI” generated submissions.
That was not an uplifting experience.
2025 #
I’m still on my newsletter break. Not sure when I’ll start it again. It’ll happen at some point.
I’m starting to get a clearer idea of what I’d like to be doing. On a personal level, I’d like to get back into storytelling which I gave up on about a decade ago. How that went was an enormous personal disappointment at the time.
Video? #
I’m also interested in getting back into video as a part of my photography hobby. Back in a former life – twenty-five years ago – I was heavily involved in video and audio. I was a part of the original Icelandic film school’s second cohort, which was a single semester thing at the time, not the degree it is today. I also worked for a brief period in both radio and on the tech side of TV (vision mixer). And I was a part of making a couple of extremely bad short movies. That ended when I decided to focus exclusively on web dev.
I’ve kept up with the technology since (as in, I know what Log footage, Rec. 709, LUTs, and 32 bit float audio are, that sort of thing) but not kept up any actual practice. Since I can’t justify any hobby expenses at the moment, I’d have to make do with the capabilities of my phone, but that should still be fun.
Workwise, I also think video would be a logical progression as well, but I’m uncertain about the format or approach yet.
Effectively, there are three paths for video:
- Personal experimentation that’s an extension of the photography. No audience to speak of. Done just for fun.
- Projects that I think might be interesting to people, but also might not. Video essay or interview formats that are a bit of a shot in the dark.
- Projects I’m reasonably certain would have an audience. For example, screencasts on dev topics that I discover by researching common problems.
I might only do the first, in which case none of you are likely to notice it as video is quite a bit more cumbersome than photos so I probably wouldn’t bother to share it like I do the photographs.
Ideally, I’d figure out a way to do all three in a way where the three approaches complement and feed into each other, but I’m not going to worry to much if I can’t figure it out. I need to experiment a bit.
Writing #
The newsletter needs to justify itself, but writing does not. I’ve already had to stifle the urge to blog about random topics several times during my break. Most of them would be off-topic for the newsletter at best and outright disasters at worst, but would be fun to write.
Like, I think it would be a lot of fun to write a deep dive into Thai BL and GL TV series, comparing and contrasting them and their production with US and European TV production, highlighting how their business models create a dynamic that’s very different from what we see here, as well as linking it back to the history queer media and even geopolitics.
It would tank the newsletter completely if I sent it out to subscribers (so I wouldn’t) and – judging from my analytics – overall get less traffic than a three-year-old link post, but would be fun to write so I’ll probably get around to it at some point this year.
So, writing is still fun as a general practice. Figuring out what would kind of writing and what topics are good for my career and business, on the other hand, is still frustrating.
More than anything, I’d like my writing to be more hopeful than it was last year. 2025 looks like it’s going to be substantially worse than 2024 and we’re all going to need to draw on our emotional reserves to get through it all. Hope isn’t optimism and doesn’t require it. But we need to actively maintain and support our hope with our emotional resources and we need both to be able to survive times that are difficult. My writing hasn’t been helpful as I’ve tended to focus on the negative.
I’d like to change that. It’ll take me a while to figure out how, but I’m reasonably sure that at least one of ideas I’m noodling around with at the moment will be workable as a lens to focus my newsletter and my blog into a more productive tool for both the audience and my work.
Fingers crossed.