My 2024 Year in Review
TLDR: 2024 was a year of career focus. I traded travel and online content creation for settling into Berlin and making significant career advancements.
- 🇩🇪I moved back to Berlin permanently.
- 🇺🇸🇮🇹🇬🇧🇺🇸I did 4 trips: Las Vegas, Sicily, Northern Ireland, New York City. (TIL: Northern Ireland does not have its own emoji flag). US was for work, the rest for vacation.
- Work:
- I shifted my focus to Developer Experience. While I still created content for our blog and YouTube channel, I mainly led the development for our API docs and SDKs. I also contributed Open-Source integrations and spoke at hackathons.
- Got promoted to Senior II Developer Advocate at AssemblyAI (similar to L5 level at Google)
- Took on more leadership and strategy planning responsibilities and temporarily led our Dev Rel team. While I still enjoy being an IC, I also enjoyed the new leadership part. Moving over to a manager track could be a possible career path - something I have to think about in the future.
- In December, I made the most difficult career decision for me to date and decided to leave AssemblyAI. As I am writing this, I am no longer working at Assembly and will start my new role next week in February. These past three years at Assembly have been an incredible journey - one worthy of its own blog post someday. To my teammates (in case you're reading this), thank you so much! Thank you for the laughter, the support, and the shared successes. I'll miss working with you all!
- 2024 YouTube channel stats:
- 1 video (damn🥲)
- 2.8M views
- 170K watch hours
- +20K subscribers
- $7.575 (with only 1 created video, this is still a sweet passive side income)
- Fitness:
- Unfortunately, I overtrained last year with my running and developed plantar fasciitis. This is still ongoing and prevents me from running. The good thing is that I can still do many other sports.
- Started kettlebell training.
- Started indoor cycling with Beat81. It's more fun than I expected!
- Bought a gravel bicycle and started doing bike trips.
- Did regular bodyweight workouts.
- Even though I worked out 4-5x/week, I still sit way too much (due to my job and the forced running break). One big focus for next year is to get in more steps and do more stretching routines. Hopefully this also helps to fix my injury.
Learnings
#- "Sometimes it's time to learn, and sometimes it's time to earn." (Thanks Matt for this advice)
- "Titles don't matter, it's the learnings that matter." (Thanks Kelly 🫶)
- Every unexpected change - even if negative - also brings new opportunities.
- Startups can feel like family, but they're dynamic environments. People come and go, often very suddenly, so build emotional resilience by focusing on supportive professional relationships and avoid over-reliance on individuals. This doesn't mean you can't develop genuine friendships, though.
- Communicate more actively with your manager where you want to be in 6-12 months.
- "The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience." - Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (great book!)
2025 Goals
#- Excel in my new job
- Create more content again (YouTube/blog/socials)
- Overcome my injury
- Get in more daily steps
- Regular stretching or yoga workouts
- Try out a new sport
- Meet new people
In summary, 2024 was a good year and I'm feeling content and grateful.
Cheers,
— Patrick