2024 Recap
Happy New Year! 🥳
What a year 2024 was, some ups, some downs, but I'd like to think mostly ups. It was an incredibly busy year and definitely made me think about slowing down a bit this year. Not only did I have my actual job, which in itself was extremely busy, I also took on a couple of side projects, which then didn't really leave room for much relaxation, I'd spend evenings and weekends writing code for my side projects, going to sleep and then writing code for my job, rinse and repeat throughout the year.
Speaking
2024 was the year of me finally getting comfortable with public speaking. Granted, I still get nervous right before I start, but those nerves settle after a minute or so, once I've got into the flow.
Last year I gave a few talks at a few different events such as:
- The technology and engineering structure where I work, to students and staff at Teesside University
- The Wonders of PestPHP at our company Engineering Get Together
- Moving to Github Actions at our company Tech All Hands
This is something I want to keep doing for this year and I've got a few topics in mind related to APIs.
Career Growth
2024 was very much a year of just getting stuff done, and my oh my was there a lot to get done! I consider last year the year of laying foundations of some major projects we've got coming up this year. I was able to use some new tools I wanted to try out and worked with some great people along the way. I was sad to say goodbye earlier in the year to a bunch of the engineering folks we had.
Side Projects
I continued working with a charity that I've been re-building their members area for, which was a project actually started in 2023. As of right now, my bit is done, I'm just waiting to hand it over to a local agency who is going to be support it going forward.
In March, I started helping out on a SaaS product founded by the founder of where I actually work. I jumped at the opportunity because it allowed me to use tools I'd wanted to try out for a while and also also allowed me to put all of the ideas I'd had in my mind about how a product should work, into practice. Work on this will continue in 2025 but as of right now, it has launched and has paying customers.
One thing I will say about side projects is last year definitely made me realise my own limit a lot. At one point I had my main job, the SaaS product and the charity project and I think it was too much for me to take on. I'm at a much better place now but I was very much on the risk of burnout a few times.
Open Source
2024 was a great year for my Open Source contributions. I was able to contribute to projects such as PestPHP, SaloonPHP, FindAPR.io and more. I love contributing to Open Source projects and hope to continue this for 2025.
Aside from contributing to projects by other people, I also found the time (somehow) to launch a couple of packages of my own
Lawman
Lawman is a package that makes it easy to architect test your SaloonPHP integrations, using the PestPHP Expectation API. I found myself writing the same expectations over and over again and thought it would be really handy to have some dedicated expectations for SaloonPHP, that I can just re-use whenever I need them.
Profanify
Profanify is a Profanity checker for PestPHP which allows you to add a test into your application, which will then scan your codebase for Profanity. This was the first Open Source project I'd created which actually had significant contributions from other developers, so it was a learning curve for me in learning how to deal with triaging them!
2025 Goals
I'm setting myself some goals for this year, I don't like the word resolutions, I resonate more with the word goals:
- Attend a conference and finally meet some of the folks I've been interacting with in person.
- Build and launch another PestPHP plugin, I have the idea already, I just need time to sit down and build it.
- Have just 1 side project. I have a demanding job and 2024 has taught me I need to make time for myself.
- Give at least 1 talk to an audience.
- Take more holidays from work and spend more time doing things that don't involve writing code.
2024 Goals
Let's look over the goals I set in my recap from 2023:
❌ Getting Faker Stripe Listed on FakerPHP
This didn't happen, but in fairness, I didn't actually try for it. Faker Stripe did however pass 20,000 downloads and gets ~900 downloads every month or so, so perhaps I'll submit it to be listed this year. I do need to make sure it's up to date with the latest Stripe API version though!
❌ Attend an in-person PHP Meet-up
This also didn't happen, no conferences really aligned date wise that worked for me. I've already rectified this though and I'll be attending PHPUK 2025 next month in London!
✅ Deliver a talk at work about PestPHP
This one I did do, I stood up in-front of 100+ people and rabbited on about PestPHP for ~20 minutes! You can find more information out about that talk here - I spoke about PestPHP.
