2024 in Review: What I Built and Learned

2024 was the year I stopped coasting and started building again. After a period of professional stability, I felt the itch to create: a new blog, new skills, new certifications, and the satisfaction of finishing projects I had started years ago. Here is what happened.

This Blog: A Complete Rebuild

I had an old WordPress site that I had not touched in years. It was slow, clunky, and felt like a relic. Over the summer, I rebuilt everything from scratch using Next.js with static export, Tailwind, and TypeScript. The result is a site that loads in milliseconds, costs almost nothing to host, and is genuinely pleasant to maintain.

I also wrote my first blog posts. Two JavaScript tutorials for beginners and a personal story about restoring my 1968 Dodge Coronado. Writing in public felt vulnerable, but the feedback was encouraging. It reminded me that sharing knowledge — even basic knowledge — matters.

AWS Certified Developer

I earned my AWS Certified Developer certification. The preparation forced me to go deeper into services I had used casually: Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Cognito. Understanding the security model, IAM policies, and deployment patterns at a deeper level has already paid off in my day-to-day work.

If you are on the fence about cloud certifications, my advice is: the value is not in the badge. It is in the structured learning that forces you to fill gaps you did not know you had.

The Dodge Coronado: Finished at Last

After two years of work, my Dodge Coronado 1968 restoration is complete. I painted the car myself with zero prior experience, using a wall-painting gun and homemade primer. It was the most rewarding project of my life — not because of the car, but because of the people who helped me along the way.

I wrote in detail about the restoration in a dedicated post with photos and the full story. If you enjoy car restoration or just want to see what happens when a software engineer decides to paint a car, it is worth a read.

Leading at The Knot Worldwide

2024 marked my first full year as Technical Software Lead at TKWW. Leading a cross-functional team of engineers has been the most challenging and rewarding part of my career. I learned that communication is more than half the job: writing clear proposals, managing stakeholder expectations, and creating an environment where engineers can do their best work.

Mentorship has been the highlight. Watching junior engineers grow, ship features independently, and gain confidence is genuinely more satisfying than any line of code I have written this year.

What Did Not Go Well

I wanted to write more. Three blog posts in a year is not terrible, but it is not great either. I also planned to contribute to open source and did not follow through. These are goals I am carrying into 2025.

Looking Ahead to 2025

I have ideas brewing. A side project I cannot talk about yet. More writing — technical deep dives, leadership reflections, and probably another car story or two. If 2024 was about laying foundations, 2025 is about building on them.