This is now becoming a tradition for me to do. We're wrapping up 2024 and this marks the third consecutive year that I've done a look back at what I accomplished. Here is 2022 and 2023 if you want to read those. There were some big changes for me this year, as it involved switching companies and a step away from the media industry where I have spent most of my career. Here is the breakdown of what I learned and did in 2024.
Big transitions
In December 2023, the publishing company I had worked for since 2017 was sold to a new owner. My year began with figuring out the dynamics of new ownership, shifting priorities, and navigating a changed landscape. The new owners were aggressive in buying and selling media company assets, with 70 acquisitions or divestitures in its short 20-year existance. The scale of assets was significantly larger, but there was no unified tech stack like before—when I primarily managed six main brands. I dove in where I could and noticed a common thread: all the properties used AWS.
Active Interest Media
I took the initiative to do a deep dive into the AWS accounts. As I learned more, I discovered that no cost management measures were in place. By purchasing savings plans, reserved instances, and decommissioning unused infrastructure, I saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.
One quick win that I uncovered was that compute instances were still running and incurring a fairly significant cost for a branch of the business that had been sold two years prior. After getting those instances decommissioned, I laid out a plan for consolidation and right-sizing, auditing, and automating the cost savings with the AWS CDK. This was my first and only major project at the company before I decided to move on.
Transition to the public sector
The company sale was a transition and a choice that was made for me. I decided that if I had to transition anyway, it would be on my own terms. Having spent nearly my entire career in publishing and advertising, I became interested in applying my skills in an industry that contributed to the public good.
This industry pivot led to a challenging job search. I did all cold applications without using the wonderful network of peers, friends, and colleagues that I'm thankful to have as a practitioner with two decades in the field.
After several months of searching, I secured a new role as a full-stack engineer contractor with 10x, the federal government's very own venture studio, under the General Service Administration's Technology Transformation Services.
This new landscape is much more complex, with a steep learning curve. One major adjustment was the shift in schedule. My previous job involved just one 30-minute meeting every Thursday. In contrast, my current role often involves back-to-back meetings, and working across 4 different time zones. Initially, I struggled with context switching between meeting mode and development mode, but I eventually made some changes that helped me overcome this challenge.
Learning in the context of projects
Adapting to a large organization's complexity meant learning a new tech stack as well. Despite initial self-doubt, I eventually found my footing. One project took me into data science territory, leveraging the Chrome User Experience Report API, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Scikit-learn. This built on the Python skills I had started developing in 2023.
In another project, a teammate's expertise in TypeScript inspired me to level up my own skills. I'm excited to continue growing in this area in 2025.
Work on the horizon
Beyond current projects, I've been proactively learning skills for future work. For instance, I delved into AI and explored the things in the evolving web performance landscape like speculation rules, long animation frames, and interaction to next paint. This saw me look more into the Chrome Devtools Protocol and extensibility API, and I spent more time in the performance panel of devtools reading flame charts this year than I have in years past.
As it turned out, there was a nice carry over between AI and web performance because the course I took had an emphasis on statistics and correlations. It focused a lot on interpreting data, and that's an essential part of uncovering opportunities for web performance improvements.
Training and knowledge sharing
Despite the challenges, my new role has brought rewarding opportunities to share knowledge. I’ve connected with enthusiastic learners, which I find deeply fulfilling.
As far as sharing my knowledge goes, I have been providing advice when people reach out to me and have landed a few pull requests that have an impact outside my team. As I look into 2025, the thing that I'm most excited about is sharing knowledge. In my last article, I mentioned how writing helped scale my impact at a small media company, and I know that there will be plenty of opportunities to write, do webinars, and conduct workshops in the coming months at my new position.
This year, I laid the groundwork for what's to come by testing out some new presentations and adapting them for a new audience, I delivered two training sessions at my consulting firm—one on web performance and another on AI—and gave a third presentation on web performance to a government audience. These sessions were well-received, with several attendees seeking further advice on web performance. It’s exciting to collaborate with like-minded individuals who value user experience and inclusion, and I look forward to developing these relationships further.
Community engagement
This year, I’ve been active on the Web Performance Slack and recently joined Bluesky. The web performance community continues to impress me with its generosity and expertise. I’ve had Zoom conversations with several members of the performance community and hope to attend a conference someday. A North American event would be especially exciting, allowing me to meet some of these wonderful people in person.
I'm excited to see what Bluesky can offer because once the performance community started leaving Twitter, it was more difficult to get a conversation going in the stream of my day-to-day work because it seemed so spread out.
Looking ahead
As 2025 approaches, I'm eager to continue building on this year's work, especially in the realms of public sector performance, and continuing my contributions to projects that have the potential to affect millions of people. I also hope to engage more with the community, possibly through conference speaking, and deepen my impact within the federal landscape.