Last year I was grateful to write my review whilst sitting outside a cafe in Dali, embracing the cool 15 degree climate. This year, I’m in freezing cold Sapporo drinking a carton of the delicious local milk.
For simplicity, I’m largely sticking to the format from my 2023 annual review.
Life and Work
The more senior someone becomes the less they create. As I’ve taken on a new role at Jenni overseeing the team, more time is spent managing, communicating, and setting direction. This is higher leverage work, the more aligned a group of people are toward a goal, the higher chance of success we have. The downside of this is less time to create.
You’re never too senior, old, or wise to create. Every act of creation runs the full gamut of emotion from elation to despair. Most importantly it forces us to learn skills on the fly, maybe the most important meta-skill we can acquire.
My main project was ‘Sticky‘ iOS app for Anna, she wanted a simple text to flashcard app to use on the go to remember legal terms and new words she’d picked up from reading books etc.
The process of building the app over the weekends was super fun, I wrote about it here. It was cool to see how much better LLMs were getting at coding tasks as time progressed, too.
At Jenni we’ve grown revenue just over 120% to $630k MRR. We’ve focused on our core researcher persona and grown comfortable with letting go of revenue from poor-fit users. With this decision, we are able to focus on creating value for a specific user group.
Our big bet is that this explicit focus helps everyone in our team get clarity on which trade-offs to make, simplifies our messaging to users, and delivers more value over time to these users.
We are in a moment where the barrier to entry to build software is almost non existent. It is easy to spin up some generative features and ship a web app, but it is still fiendishly difficult to solve the last 5% of polish that makes a product retentive. We must be laser focused on delivering surplus user value through out product in order to compete.
The team had some incomings and outgoings but we’ve started to move fast with purpose again which is exciting. Here is a recap of some of the features we shipped in 2024.
I was invited to speak at 3 AI in Education events at Singapore Management University, KL Leuven, and De La Salle Medical School. It’s always nerve wracking leading up to the talk, always fun after the first 30 seconds are over.
Health and Fitness
Every year seems to follow a similar pattern of progress and good routine and then either sickness or travel derails it.
Singapore offers a discounted body scan service so along with a friend we conduct a test every 3/4 months. In September I was down to 8% body fat at 73kg. After travelling and getting shingles my training suffered and by December I was 10.3% body fat and 73.6kg.
Diet is the limiting factor as I eat out 9/10 meals in Singapore (v.s cooking 9/10 in Europe).
Earlier in the year I was primarily doing general bodybuilding style training of 3 sets 10/12 reps.
I built a Notion dashboard to track all types of exercise but forgot to update it since changing gym. Roughly my exercise has been comprised of:
- Lifting (~120 sessions)
- Bouldering (approx 25 sessions) + 1 outdoor session in China
- Swimming (approx 20 swims)
- Long distance cycles (3 rides)
Since November I’ve been training at a powerlifting gym. Each member has their own program mapped out on Google Sheets. The program responds to feedback and effort rating of each set. I started out super light to get used to regularly squatting and deadlifting. I like this sustainable approach. It also means I do not have to think of the fly what to train, it is already pre-programmed.
Some bikepacking fun:
- Peak District with Marius. This ride was pretty brutal with strong winds and cold weather. Fuelled primarily by full english breakfasts. We made a little video for memory’s sake.
- Austria to Slovenia with Marius. We’ve spoken for a whilst about a ride through Slovenia, this ride covered 70% of the Slovenia West Loop. We entered through Triglav in the north and followed the loop around to Ljubljana. The weather was less than ideal but the scenery was stunning.
- Cotswolds with Dan. One day ride with stops at the quiet little towns in the cotswolds in perfect autumnal British weather.
Places I visited
I didn’t travel too much this year, the only new country for me was the Philippines. I visited with my colleague Justin for two AI in education conferences. If I were blindfolded and dropped in Manila and asked to guess where in the world I am I’d say Latin America. The colors, warmth of people, and love of music is something unique in this region.
- Philippines
- Japan
- China
- Hong Kong
- Malaysia
- Thailand
- Germany
- Denmark
- Slovenia
- Austria
- UK
What were my highlights?
- Skiing in Hokkaido
- Seeing John Mayer in Copenhagen and London (solo acoustic tour)
- Outdoor climbing in Tibetan region
- Anna contacted a bunch of my friends and family to make a happy birthday video, a genuine S-tier gift
- Getting hard pitched by a timeshare at Wyndham in Phuket
- Two weeks with Jenni team in Singapore
- My dog passed away whilst I was visiting home. A strange highlight but I got to hold her on my lap whilst she was put to sleep
- Brunches and coffee with friends
- Guitar jam with friends
Reading
Completed
- Mental Models Vol 3 by Shane Parish
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
- A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
- Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (re-read, again)
- Are We Human? by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley
- Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang
- How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
In progress
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
Did not finish:
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville – couldn’t stand page after page of in-depth whale knowledge
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Review of 2024 goals
- Succeeded in 12 posts on this blog.
- I also did more social posting this year (discussed below). I’m always torn between the convexity of social posting v.s. the benefit of thinking through long form writing on my blog. Blogs are basically dead as a channel to build an audience but does that matter? When writing for social platfors my goal is to get a reaction from the world. When writing on my blog my intention is to take my notes and reflections and turn it into a coherent thought. Each to their own.
- Failed at 10 lengths freestyle in my pool. Maxed out at 6 lengths before switching the breast stroke to rest. Need lessons, breathing technique still sucks.
- Didn’t write too much about being a solo designer. My reading and writing has been oriented around building software.
- Fluctuated with Chinese practice. I always spike pre and during a trip to China then quit. Resigned myself to the reality that I need to go to an immersive class like this one at Tsinghua University. Someday, someday.
- I did spend more time learning Javascript and React, mainly through Mimo and YouTube videos, having the feedback loop of learning and then putting it into action helped a lot.
- Re-built my habit of picking up the guitar, if only for 10 minutes at night. Played significantly more than 2023.
What did I learn?
Social pressure works. I did two bets with friends committing to posting on LinkedIn/ Twitter 3x per week, the cost being money and social shame. Any activity I am finding it hard to self motivate should be put through this mechanic.
Unless you feel like you’ve over-communicated to the point of being annoying twit you have likely under-communicated. I used to assume writing a strategy document and seeing people had read it was enough. This was naive, if it is a strategy decision that shapes how people make decisions it must be relentlessly over-communicated.
What was missing or in excess?
I edited this category to include what was in excess. “What was missing” seems to hint at the need to add something new which contradicts my general via negativa approach.
I’ve realized how everyone around me despises how much time they waste scrolling on their phones. This includes me too. I’m not often scrolling video feeds but I have two unhealthy vices:
- ‘Educational’ videos on YouTube (guitar, programming, design)
- Tech twitter
The latter is arguably more harmful. Whilst I need to stay up to date with the latest AI developments it does feel anxiety-inducing to see what you believed to be true yesterday to be displaced by yet another new, ground-breaking thing. My caveman biology is not equipped for such a relentless pace of change.
2025 Intentions
Continue writing on this blog. 12 posts again feel like a reasonable cadence.
Take more street photographs. I am planning to spend a month or two in Japan which should get rid of my excuse that Singapore is bad for photography.
Continue building more software for my own or friends use.
Continue lifting at my current gym with the current program until I hit 140kg deadlift and 110kg squat.