We’ve almost completed a full rotation around the sun, so let’s take a few minutes to reflect on the past year…in both work and personal life.

Work

I was quite busy this year, as with every year, but this time it felt different. Mostly because it’s the first time in my career where I’ve had projects not ship. However, a lot of new technology was played with and learned.

TypeScript

Let me preface this by saying I’ve worked with many programming languages (C/C++/C#/Go/Python/Java/Verilog/JavaScript), so my opinion here feels valid. But overall, TypeScript is an “OK” improvement over writing vanilla JS. While the typing support is nice, the overhead of bundling / compiling / version mismatching and compatibility / configuration / etc is a bit much (I am a backend Python developer with no previous experience in building production ready TS modules). Even with modern tooling, I only had a decent experience, but I still enjoyed it. Honorable mentions:

• Turborepo: high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos
• Changesets: manage versioning and changelogs with a focus on multi-package repositories
• tsup: zero-config TypeScript bundler

Using TS in the first place was a requirement for a project I was working on. The goal was to build a new and modern integrations engine on Prismatic…the underlying technology being built on Node. Unfortunately, after a re-org at the end of summer, this project was sunsetted…

EventBridge / SQS

Building event driven services on AWS probably got me the most excited this year. Since our company had merged and acquired others, engineering leadership at the time had a vision of connecting all our products via an event bus. This is a pretty standard event driven system. Something occurs in one product, and it emits an event other products can listen for. The main backend wasn’t anything fancy, just a simple api first Django rest application. Honorable mentions:

• Python Semantic Release: automatic versioning and changelog generation
• ruff: extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust
• uv: extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.

The lead architect and myself had some back and forth on wether to use Confluent Kafka or EventBridge/SQS. Ultimately, we decided to trade off cost for simplicity. Since we were already in the AWS ecosystem, it made sense to use their provided services. Overall, building an event driven system without Kafka comes with its own set of challenges, but it was a fun learning experience.

Spark / Glue

Now, this was an interesting pivot for me. My background has mostly been building web applications, APIs, and backend services. I’ve never worked with big data before, but was somehow tasked with building out a data lake house platform…from scratch. The goal was to take all our products databases, and ingest them into a data lake/house; initial load + incremental updates. The lake house would then be consumed by AWS QuickSight where our product teams and senior leadership can get insights and drive innovation.

Seeing my proof-of-concept evolve into an actual data platform within a couple of months was quite exciting. Cheers to my team members Pete and Eric for making that possible. Honorable mentions:

• Airbyte: open-source EL(T) platform
• Medallion Architecture: data design pattern used to logically organize data in a lakehouse, with the goal of incrementally and progressively improving the structure and quality of data as it flows through each layer of the architecture (from Bronze ⇒ Silver ⇒ Gold layer tables).
• Iceberg: is a high performance open-source format for large analytic tables.

Personal

Personal life was just as busy really. My partner and I finally built up the courage to move into a stellar apartment together in the city. Additionally, we got the most perfect cats we could ask for.

May & Gray

We were also able to take a few trips this year. Most notable were Italy (where my partner is from) and Bali. It was my second time to Italy, but this time was special as both our families were able to meet for the first time.

Verona Arena

Chioggia

Bali was a dream vacation. Anytime I can get away to warmer weather and beaches, I’m in. Did a good amount of partying, but also a lot of relaxing.

Rice Fields

Ubud

Really looking forward to 2025. I have a few personal goals I’d like to achieve, but I’ll save that for another post. Cheers to a great year! 🥂