Inspired by Tim Riley’s year in review, I wanted to reflect a bit on what I did this year. It’s not going to be as impressive as his but I’m hoping it’ll serve as a way to push me forward into 2025.

Work - CashApp

I started 2024 working my third year at CashApp (part of Block) and was made redundant in a round of mass redundancies. Contrary to popular opinion on layoffs, I think it was a great move by the company (not forgetting it’s a problem they got themselves into by overhiring and overbuying companies). The inefficiencies and the sluggishness were very noticeable in several parts of the company; including the area I was working on. I learned a lot during my time there though; specially the inner workings of a huge product with many teams, lots of politics, and mircoservices to maintain. I learned Kotlin (which is actually great!), Kafka, gRPC and had a taste of a very difficult monolith and nice and also difficult microservices and all the gears needed to make both work.

I’m particularly proud of helping the Foundation team there adopt Hotwire with Kotlin. I didn’t do any dev work for that but I contributed to the overall vision of it by sharing my experiences with Rails and Hotwire.

I’m grateful for my time there but it was not the best place for a person like me. Thankfully my life was quite simple at the moment so being laid off wasn’t disruptive to me. I also managed to time my exit very well because I landed an amazing job shortly after that.

Work - Buildkite

I got an amazing job at Buildkite as Staff Software Engineer for the Package Registries product. I’d never worked in the devtools domain so it’s been quite a challenge to change from Fintech and consumer products to such a technical one but Buildkite’s bet on going Full Rails Monolith has made it incredibly pleasant. It’s such an easy and delightful codebase to work on!

After a very thrilling and fast paced 6 months, we launched Package Registries as part of the launch of Buildkite’s Scale-Out Delivery Platform.

In these 9 months, I’ve also been carrying the Hotwire torch and lighting the way for the company to keep investing in a simpler way of making web apps. I made Package Registries the first section of the app to fully adopt all the advancements of Turbo 8 and Stimulus (as opposed to enabling it in specific sections like we do in other parts of the app) while making way for small React components where needed. I was very lucky that the company had already declared bankruptcy on the React SPA approach and had put a lot of effort into de-reactifying big chunks of the app.

To do so I’ve done a few things including:

• Going all in on Hotwire for Package Registries. It’s the only section/product to fully embrace it.

• Organising a one-day party to gather multiple engineers to pay some front end tech debt. We managed to dereactify more stuff, adopt Lookbook to document our components, pave the way to get rid of legacy stylesheets and script files etc.

• Helping revitalise the front end “guild” to get engineers excited about Hotwire

• Paring with engineers from other teams to reinforce the Hotwire/Rails way.

• Sharing Hotwire goodies constantly in company-wide engineering forums.

It has been both a technical challenge and people one too and I’m loving it. We’ve made great progress this year and I’m sure we’ll continue to slash more complexity next year!

Speaking, Writing and OSS

I had a bunch of personal stuff going on this year so I didn’t achieve as much as I wanted in this area. I gave a couple of talks this year at local meetups in Melbourne: an intro to Turbo at MelbJS and look into Oaken at Melbourne Ruby. I didn’t write much on my blog but I did record my first screencast on a gotcha I found with Turbo.

Personal life

It was a good year full of milestones! My girlfriend and I got engaged (with a very elaborate plan 😂), we bought a house, a car and visited our families back home. I also made a solo trip to New Zealand’s south island; it’s a ridiculously beautiful country.

The first half of the year I was super into working out but the second half was practically void of exercise which resulted in a massive back spasm that took me out for days. I’m trying to organise my life in a way in which movement is obligatory so I’m ditching working from home and I’m working from my local co-working space and I’m loving it.

What’s on for 2025?

I have a few plans for next year… let’s see how I go with that:

• Writing a talk about how we’ve adopted Hotwire at Buildkite and submitting it to Rails World!

• Working more on my proposal for action view attribute builders

• Record more screencasts and blog posts.

• Build a product using Hotwire Native. I haven’t built anything native since the Turbolinks native days.

• Exercise and write regularly.