Hello 2024

I’ve been meaning to get back to blogging and writing long form content again. Writing is such a great way to get my thoughts down on paper and de-clutter my mind. Furthermore, it’s the only way I know to reinforce what I already know or teach it to other people. As Aristotle says, “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach”.

So back to 2024. What are my goals this year and what do I aim to achieve with writing? It’s simple really - I just want to document my learning. I often get caught up heads down learning new technologies and never giving back. The problem here is you do and learn so much at work but never personally document your accomplishments. If you do have to, it is in form of internal work content or perhaps a brag document for promotions. I really just want to get back to just writing for fun and carrying people along as I figure things out. This in turn helps build a personal brand and an online presence. So I’ll be killing two birds with one stone.

That said, here are the 3 things I am most excited to learn this year.

Kubernetes. It is the de-facto for container orchestration and cannot be ignored at this point. Every cloud provider provides a managed Kubernetes so you can be sure your application can be ported easily from one cloud to another. Well, not without a few hiccups but definitely nothing major.

Rust. I’m still very early in my Rust journey but I like the idea of a systems language that gives you the control of low-level langugages like C and the productivity of higher level typed languages like Java. I know Java is a very verbose language. However, considering many critical systems over the past 10 years are built on Java, safe to say it is still king. I also want to invest in learning a language I will still be using in the next 5-10 years for my personal projects. I enjoy reading up about the implementation of system level applications. Over the next few years (as God grants me perfect health and time), I plan to build toy Operating Systems, IoT systems, databases and distributed systems and programming languages.

Homelab. This is the big one. While not necessarily a technology per say, I’ve always loved the idea of having my own server at home where I get to do whatever the f**k I want. I plan to play around with Type 1 Hypervisors like Proxmox and VMWare Esxi, spin up a bunch of VMs just for fun, run a media server like Plex or Jellyfin and lots more. This is my playground and I’m super excited to get started. For the hardware, I did a ton of research and almost bought a used Dell R730 from Amazon and EBay. However, I learned about an Intel NUC (short for Next Unit of Computing). What sold me on this is it does not consume a lot of power like the enterprise style servers. Furthermore, it makes zero noise - this is perhaps the biggest thing for me. The NUC packs a lot of punch for its size. Great things come in small packages afterall. I purchased the Intel NUC 13 Pro and looking forward to homelabbing.

If you made it here, thanks for reading. Shoot me a DM on Twitter to let me know what you are all looking forward to learning or doing this year. I opted out of adding a commenting system here on the site due to spam. By the way, this is also another part of writing on the internet I’m looking forward to this year - connecting and networking with other people. We learn faster when we have a community. No man is an island.

Update: I added Disqus for comments.