Recently 2024

Happy end-of-2024! It’s been a pretty good year overall. I’m thankful. There’s no way that I’ll be able to remember and carve out the time around New Years to write this, so here’s some end-of-year roundup, ahead of schedule!

Running

This was my biggest year for running on record: 687 miles as of today. I think the biggest difference with this year was just that nothing stood in the way of my being pretty consistent and putting in the miles: the weather has been mild, I haven’t had any major injuries, and long runs have felt pretty good.

I was happy to hit a half-marathon PR (1:36:21), but my performance in 5Ks was far short of the goal of sub-20 – partly because Brooklyn’s wonderful 5K series was run at the peak of summer, with multiple races at over 85°F.

I learned the value of good lightweight running gear: Bakline’s singlets and Goodr sunglasses were super helpful in getting me through the summer.

Work

Val Town raised a seed round and hired a bunch of excellent people. We moved into a new office of our own, which has a great vibe. It’s been good: we’re doing a lot of ground-up work wrangling cgroups and low-level worker scheduling, and a lot of UX-in work, just trying to make it a pleasant tool.

Frankly, with every product I’ve worked on, I’ve never had a feeling that it was good enough, and accordingly, for me, Val Town feels like it has a long way to go. It’s probably a good tendency to be sort of unsatisfied and motivated to constantly improve.

New York

It’s still such a wonderful place to live. Late this year, I’ve been rediscovering my obsession with cycling, and realizing how much I whiffed the opportunity to ride more when I lived in San Francisco. I guess that’s the first time I felt genuinely nostalgic for the West coast. I miss DC a bit too: it’s one of the few cities where my friends have been able to stay in the city proper while raising children, and I miss the accessible, underdog punk scene.

But Brooklyn is just a remarkable place to live. My walk score is 100. The degree to which people here are in the city because they want to be, not because they have to, shapes so much of what makes it great.

Other ‘metrics’

Relative to my old level obsession about self-quantification, my ‘metrics’ are pretty moderate now. Everything’s just backward-looking: I’m not paying much attention to the numbers as I go, it’s just fun to look at them year-over-year trends.

That said, this was a lackluster year for reading: just 18 books so far. I think I just read an above-average number of books that I didn’t enjoy very much. Next year I’m going to return to authors who I already love, and stay away from genres that – the data shows – I don’t like.

Whereas this was a banner year for watching movies: not great! Next year, I want to flip these results. Of everything I saw, Kinds of Kindness will probably stick with me the most.

Placemark

It seems like a decade ago that I released Placemark as open source software, as developing it as a closed-source SaaS application for a few years. But I did that in January. There have been a few great open source contributions since then, but it’s pretty quiet. Which is okay, somewhat expected: there is no hidden crowd of people with extra time on their hands and unending enthusiasm for ‘geospatial software’ waiting to contribute to that kind of project. Placemark is also, even with my obsessive focus on simplicity, a pretty complicated codebase. The learning curve is probably pretty significant. Maps are a challenging problem area: that’s what attracts a lot of people to them, but people who use maps persistently have the feeling that it couldn’t be that complicated, which means that few users convert into contributors.

There are a few prominent efforts chasing similar goals as Placemark: Atlas.co is aiming to be an all-in-one editing/analysis platform, Felt a cloud-native GIS platform, and then there are plenty of indiehackers-style projects. I hope these projects take off!

Figma plugins

I also kept maintaining the Figma plugins I developed under the Placemark name. Potentially a lot of people are using them, but I don’t really know. The problem with filling in water shapes in the plugins is still unsolved: it’s pretty hard and I haven’t had the time or motivation to fix it.

The most energy into those plugins this year, unfortunately, was when someone noticed that the dataset I was using - Natural Earth – marked Crimea as part of Russia. Which obviously: I don’t draw the countries in datasets, but it’s a reasonable thing to point out (but to assume that the author is malicious was a real downer, again, like, I don’t draw the countries). This decision from Natural Earth’s maintainer is heavily discussed and they aren’t planning on changing it, so I switched to world-atlas, which doesn’t have that problem.

Which was fine, but a reminder of the days when I worked on maps full-time and this kind of unexpected “you’re the baddie” realization came up much more often. Sometimes it was silly: people who complain about label priority in the sense of “why, at zoom level 3, does one country’s name show up and not anothers?” was just silly. The answer, ahem, was that there isn’t enough space for the two labels and one country had a higher population or a geometry that gave their label more distance from the other country’s centroid. But a lot of the territorial disputes are part of people’s long cultural, political, military history and the source of intergenerational strife. Of course that’s serious stuff. Making a tool that shows a globe with labels on it will probably always trigger some sort of moment like that, and it’s a reason to not work on it that much because you’re bound to unintentionally step on something contentious.

Other projects

I released Obsidian Freeform, and have been using it a bit myself. Obsidian has really stuck for me. My vault is well over 2,000 notes, and I’ve created a daily note for almost every day for the last year. Freeform was a fun project and I have other ideas that are Obsidian plugin-shaped, though I’ve become a little bit let down by the plugin API - the fact that Obsidian-flavored-Markdown is nonstandard and the parser/AST is not accessible to plugins is a pretty big drawback for the kinds of things I want to build.

Elsewhere recently

I’ve been writing a bit: Recently I’ve written about dependency bloat and a developer analytics tool we built at Val Town, and started writing some supplementary documentation for Observable Plot about parts of its API that I think are unintuitive. On the micro blog, I wrote about not using GitHub Copilot and how brands should make a comeback.

This blog got a gentle redesign in May, to show multiple categories of posts on the home page, and then in August I did a mass update to switch all YouTube embeds to lite-youtube-embed to make pages load faster. I’m still running Jekyll, like I have been for the last decade, and it works great.

Oh, and I’ve basically stopped using Twitter and am only on Mastodon and Bluesky. Bluesky more than Mastodon recently because it seems like it’s doing a better job at attracting a more diverse community.

I’m looking forward to 2025, to cycling a lot more and a new phase of startup-building. See you in the new year.