2024 Year in Review & 2025 Outlook

It’s the end of the year again, spent just like usual. Eating osechi at home, watching the Kohaku Uta Gassen, and wrapping up a wonderful 2024. I’d like to use the seven questions mentioned on NiceChord to review my 2024 and look forward to 2025.

1. Highlights of the Past Year

• January: Went back home to vote, and hit the gym with my brother and friends.
• February: Discovered the masterpiece game Terraria. I loved the music, art style, and gameplay (even got a little addicted).
• Early March: Started contemplating whether to buy a house in Japan; after three weeks of house hunting, I decided to pull the trigger.
  • For about 10 million TWD, you can buy a brand-new, two-story house about 30 minutes from the city center.
• Late April: Got the keys to the house. I couldn’t have asked for more—it feels truly wonderful to live here.
• July: Took my company’s 10-day “Refresh” sabbatical to travel to Tokyo. After strolling around Ochanomizu, I bought my very first electric guitar. I started focusing more on playing and enjoying music rather than just memorizing sheet music.
• In March, I started building a quantitative trading system for Japanese stocks, wrapping up the first year with around a 15% return. The hardest parts were data collection and cleaning; writing the strategies was actually fairly straightforward.
• October: The thought of quitting my job surfaced, and I met up with friends from Twitter/X. It turned out to be the best decision I made in 2024—I met a group of warm, energetic people.
• October: Hosted a book club for Designing Your Life, connecting with a new group of peers to exchange ideas about our life plans.
• November & December: Published various articles, including Career Retrospective and 日名遊實.
• Started working on a new project with a friend, which will be announced soon.
• Met Yuan, the founder of Zeabur. Thanks to a tweet, we had mizutaki (chicken hot pot) together in Fukuoka.
• Reached out to someone on Threads to ask about collaborating after seeing their post. They turned out to be an incredibly earnest person; we had a meal together and exchanged ideas.
• Registered as a sole proprietor (kojin jigyo).
• The biggest highlight was probably resigning from my job. My post on LinkedIn connected me with all sorts of interesting people, and even led to collaborative partnerships.

There were many highlights this year. Of course, I continued writing technical articles, but there was also so much more human interaction and connection. I really love this kind of life.

2. The Hardest Parts of the Year

• Making the decision to quit. My job actually offered stable pay, good working hours, and a great environment.
• The insecurity and anxiety caused by a low savings balance.
• Feeling like I struggled with procrastination and lack of focus, and that it was getting progressively worse.
• Struggling to figure out how to build a personal brand / create content, spending a long time searching without taking concrete action.
• The lack of steady cash flow after resigning.

3. New Self-Discoveries This Year

I used to be a tech zealot, but this year brought an almost 180-degree shift—I feel like a completely transformed person. Beyond wanting to get closer to the product side to understand users’ real needs, I stopped using obsession with minor details as an excuse not to ship. I love technology, but I also love people and hearing their stories. I enjoy interacting with people, doing things that genuinely help others, and I am completely open to taking on roles beyond just being a developer.

Reaching this age, I’ve started realizing that things I take for granted—whether in development or mindset—are things many people might not have noticed or realized yet. The taste and perspective accumulated through experience manifest in so many aspects of life.

4. Things to Stop Doing Next Year

• Doomscrolling: Keep social media usage to a bare minimum.
• Obsessing over metrics out of my control: post likes, clicks, views, and comments.
• Envy: Stop envying all kinds of talented people.

5. Things to Start Doing Next Year

• Waking up early and getting back into a regular weightlifting routine.
• Experimenting with different content creation formats, including live streaming, short-form video, long-form video, audio, etc.
• Getting to know more people across different fields and roles.
• Curating my social circle to interact only with people who bring positive energy.
  • Becoming a person who radiates positive energy and offers real help.
• Putting Things and Reminders to good use to practice GTD (Getting Things Done).
  • The goal is GTD; using Things is because it’s great—and expensive.
• Reviving my YouTube channel and experimenting with new styles.
  • Building on the above, making use of more flexible time after quitting to speed up video editing and output.
• Doing SEO intentionally.
  • My tech blog has always just been about writing whatever I felt like, but after Google dropped my traffic, I realized it’s something I need to keep in mind.
• Indie development.
  • Finding a niche/track I want to focus on; until then, experimenting broadly.
  • Being open to tasks outside of pure coding.

6. Things to Keep Doing Next Year

• Writing and publishing articles.
• Learning electric guitar and making music.
• Connecting with people both inside and outside my field.
• Hosting book clubs.

7. The First Step to Take Today

Even though it’s January 1st, I still wrote this article, and I went weightlifting this morning!

My biggest goal for 2025 is to do everything I can to find a sustainable, self-reliant monetization model—meaning I don’t have to return to a traditional corporate job. Here’s to making it happen!