What a year this has been, for bad and for good! I wanted to try something new and as I've never done this kind of year-in-review thing I thought it could be fun to take some time and write about what I did in 2024.
Another year with Gleam
Let's get the important stuff out of the way first, Gleam went v1 this year! This was a huge milestone and the community growth that followed it has been incredible to witness.
The language itself has grown loads since going v1, getting fault tolerant compilation, amazing improvements to the language server, some new pieces of handy syntax, and so much more. I'm really excited for what's in store for the upcoming years and so incredibly proud to be part of this project.
During the summer I've also started working on a fun Gleam project called squirrel, it allows one to work with SQL in Gleam while retaining type safety and a great developer experience. My plan for 2025 is to write a couple of blog posts about this sharing what I've learned and its inner workings, I think it's really cool.
In December I went to Rome to meet two Gleamlins that were visiting from Canada and the UK; it's always great being able to put a face and voice to the people you chat with daily on the internet.
A year in conferences
I would have never expected it but this year I managed to attend (and talk at!) so many conferences, it's a literal dream come true:
In February I attended Fosdem with a dear friend of mine. He made the trip all the more special! Also I'll never forget this Fosdem because in the BEAM room, Louis announced that Gleam would soon become v1. I was so excited, I could barely stand still in my seat!
In May I went to Krakow with my brother to attend Lambda Days. It's my second year attending and it's always so much fun; to make it even better, this year Hayleigh was talking about Lustre (I'm afraid the video is not up yet as I'm writing this). And I did the crazy thing of doing a lightning talk about snapshot testing. It all happened so quickly I was terrified, at one point my watch went off and warned me my heart rate was concerningly high!
Ok, so I know it's technically not a conference, but in August I was in London for a Gleam meetup. Meeting my online friends in person easily beats any conference anyway!
Back to conferences, in October I was in Copenhagen to give a talk about Gleam at GOTO. The conference had such a nice vibe! I got the chance to meet Kris Jenkins and Evan Czaplicki; proving me that "you should never meet your heroes" is a really bad saying.
October was a really busy month, a couple of days after GOTO I went to Code BEAM Europe. I had a blast: everyone attending was so nice, I feel so lucky to be part of the BEAM community! This time I gave a proper talk about snapshot testing, sadly it's still not up yet.
Last but not least, this December I gave a talk at YOW! Australia. All the speakers were truly amazing, not just from a technical standpoint. They are just great people to hang with and I'll forever cherish the time we spent together being silly and shouting "MANGOES!".
Hello, 2025
My big goal for the upcoming year is to open a GitHub sponsorship page, I've been putting this off for months now because reasons™️ and 2025 is the year I bite the bullet and finally do it.
Another way less ambitious goal I have is to try and read more books, both technical and novels! My to-read list is growing way faster than I can keep up, so I'd love to dedicate more time to that.
That's it! 2024 was far from perfect, it was really crappy at times. But I'd rather focus on the fun times I had than dwell on the negative stuff! Fingers crossed that 2025 will be even better, I wish everyone a happy new year 🤞