2024 in review

Inspired by notnites' blog post, here's everything of note that I did in the past year:

January

• I worked on a web app for a friend's pooled COVID testing service, but this fell through.
• As far as I can tell, this is when I started thinking about Alchemy - a project I'll talk about later.
• I played an obscene amount of Celeste and had fun beating the game for the first time.

February

• I made a new role bot for the ACM UMN discord in order to replace the old Go code that was hard to extend. This one was my first time using Bun, and it was honestly pretty good.
• I started work on a "discord stock exchange bot", which was supposed to be like a little stock trading mini-game where you could buy and sell stock in users, but this project got abandoned, mostly because I don't know anything about the actual stock market.
• I started helping one of my friends with a game that they were making in Godot, but he abandoned the project after a couple weeks.

March

• I made another Discord bot, this time so that my friends who play Reign 2E could easily roll dice without having to count up all their dice pools.
• I had a lot of fun in my type theory course, but this is about where it really started squishing me into paste.
• I saw Glass Beach in concert and met a new friend there :-)

April

• I made [Kozuka][https://kozuka.kmwc.org], a web app for conlangers to generate words for their languages, because Awkwords kept going down and I really don't like the way you can only use capital letters for categories.
• I switched to NixOS! At least, this is when my flake got put up on Github. I have really liked Nix so far, and I'm pretty glad I'm running it.

May

• I drove up north and saw the northern lights with my friends :-)
• I significantly reworked my NixOS flake.
• I read The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and found it really interesting. It's probably the first real book I've finished in a long time.

June

• I started working on the web app for Game Vault Con!
• I played a bunch of XCOM 2.

July

• I continued work on the Game Vault Con stuff. I think it actually started towards the end of the month? I can't remember.
• I made anneau, which is simple webring software. I still need to deploy this.
• I spent a lot of time with my friends :-)
• I visited home for a bit which was alright.

August

• I moved in with my girlfriend, which genuinely completely fixed my mental health.
• I started working on a Blades in the Dark hack inspired by Disco Elysium, and ended up with a really pretty PDF. The campaign so far is fun but it's been on pause with the semester ending and holidays.

September

• I made a page to convert between real-world time and the time system used in a friend's conworld. It looks really pretty!
• I tried cloning tabspace because I don't like their dark mode handling, but I didn't get too far.
• I started making a way to play Jaipur online with friends. I got kind of stuck with making the AI, but I think this was mostly abandoned because me and my girlfriend stopped playing Jaipur as much.

October

• I made the garden, a fork of jzhao's Quartz, which I still need to deploy. It's intended to be a space for me to dump my Obsidian notes so that I don't have to spend a bunch of time converting them into real blog posts.
• I made a fun challenge for the ACM UMN CTF, where you have to implement a really weird little Forth.
• I took another crack at developing Hanas but hit a wall when it turned out that Prisma is really slow on NixOS for some reason.
• I saw Porter Robinson in concert!

November

• I made Hazy, a new backend for the ACM UMN MinneHack registration system, currently running in production.
• I did a lot of work for my web dev class, including making a really complex commenting system.
• I started working on a SillyTavern-like project where the frontend looks like Discord, but I never really finished it.

December

• I started working on another compiler... It's not done yet, but it'll be for Alchemy.
• I did a little bit of Advent of Code but did not finish, not even close. Finals really hit :(
• I made this blog!
• I made my post about ergativity!
• I went to the Machine Girl show and had a great time.
• My fursona commission came in! I still need to fix up the background a little bit but I love it.

For 2025

I wanna do more projects! I wanna get further with Alchemy (this is the first time I've gotten farther than parsing in writing a programming language), and ideally I'd like to finally get some more work done with Hanas. Next year is also the year I finally graduate from college, so I'll be needing to find a job - we'll see exactly where that leads. I'm excited for 2025!