2024, The year I pressed reset: Career change, Back to TypeScript (for now) and new habits

Sometimes the biggest transformations start with a series of small decisions. In 2024, I made three choices that completely reshaped my professional and personal life: stepping away from a senior technical role during tech’s most uncertain year, embarking on a month-long journey to London, and committing to what seemed like a simple habit – daily journaling and time tracking.

That last decision, surprisingly, had the most profound impact. Tracking every day of 2024 fundamentally shifted how I view my priorities and where I choose to invest my time. It revealed patterns I had never noticed and helped me make decisions I might have otherwise second-guessed.

As I step into 2025, I want to reflect on these changes and share what I’ve learned – both for my future self and for others who might be considering similar transitions.

Farewell to Gfinity

After nearly four years at Gfinity, where I progressed from a front-end developer to technical lead, I made the difficult decision to move on. While I’m grateful for the experience and the excellent team I worked with, I felt it was time for a change as I was stagnating in my role and my vision no longer aligned with the senior leadership.

During my final year, I was able to lead my team with the roll-out of several significant improvements:

• We achieved a 93% cost reduction by migrating our sites from GCP to Fly for Node.js hosting, maintaining performance and stability throughout the transition.

• I developed a custom product tracking system using Crawlee, GCP functions, and Node.js, resulting in an 80% reduction in scraping infrastructure costs.

• We implemented Hashtag labs advertising with a custom placement algorithm, moving from a revenue-sharing model to a fixed-cost structure that increased our advertising revenue.

• I spearheaded the migration of StockInformer sites from legacy C# and VB.net to a modern Nuxt 3 codebase, leading to more frequent releases and improved uptime.

• Led the roll-out the redesign of our shared design library that empowered our editorial team with enhanced curation controls, leading to a measurable increase in page views per session

• Launched and integrated a new property, TCGRocks.com, into our network, expanding our digital footprint

• Led the gradual migration of all network sites from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3, ensuring smooth transitions while maintaining site performance

• Supported the migration of our Siege Laravel server and Golang microservices from bare metal to Fly.io, significantly improving system reliability and observability

Learning and Growth

2024 was also a year of lots of learning. I deep-dived into modern Laravel, mastered Docker through Brian Holt’s container course, and explored Vue 3’s internals with Evan You. I completed the Linux Journey curriculum and learned to build desktop apps with Electron and Tauri as well.

A significant focus was on web technologies – I studied service workers, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), WebSocket protocols, and WebRTC for real-time applications. I also picked up Phoenix LiveView and improved my development workflow by learning VIM motions and proper touch typing.

Perhaps most importantly, I completed Yale’s “The Science of Well-being” course on Coursera, which had a profound impact on my perspective and daily life.

Side Projects and Community Engagement

Throughout the year, I worked on several side projects:

• Built Chromastery, a Tailwind color palette picker
• Developed JobGettr, an app to tailor your resume for each job, powered by AI
• Migrated my personal site to Astro from Next.js
• Built a peer to peer video chat application called Litsi

I also began working part-time with Clickout and became more active in the local tech community by attending meetups and conferences like DevFest Kathmandu.

Looking Forward to 2025

After a year of extensive exploration, I’ve made some deliberate choices about my technical direction. These decisions aren’t just about choosing technologies – they’re about aligning my tools with my career goals and working style.

Why I’m Going All-In on TypeScript

My journey in 2024 started with plans to focus on Laravel, but I’ve come to realize that TypeScript better aligns with my current career goals. While Laravel remains an excellent choice for indie hackers building sustainable businesses, I’ve discovered that my passion lies elsewhere – I thrive on exploring diverse problems and building various solutions rather than maintaining a single product.

TypeScript offers several advantages that match my needs:

• Robust tooling that supports rapid prototyping while maintaining code quality

• Flexibility to evolve projects beyond the prototype phase through easy refactoring

• A vast ecosystem that enables building anything from web apps to desktop software

• Strong job market with numerous opportunities at companies solving interesting problems

  I’m also planning to expand my expertise into React and Go. While they might not be my first choice for personal projects, their position as industry standards makes them valuable additions to my toolkit. The goal isn’t to master every technology, but to be proficient enough to contribute effectively in various professional contexts.

Shifting Focus: From Framework Exploration to Problem Solving

2024 was my year of framework exploration – I dove into everything from Laravel to Rails to Phoenix. While this broadened my perspective, it also limited my ability to ship projects. For 2025, I’m taking a different approach:

1. Shipping More, Learning Through Building: Instead of framework-hopping, I’ll focus on launching more projects and solving real problems.
2. Exploring New Territories: I’m particularly excited about:

• The local-first movement and its potential for creating resilient applications
• Real-time technologies and their applications in modern web development 3. Embracing Progressive Web Apps: I’m making a conscious decision to step away from native app development. While native apps have their place, the constantly changing app store policies and restrictions have become more burden than benefit. The web’s openness, ease of deployment, and maintenance advantages make PWAs an attractive alternative for most use cases.

Pragmatic AI Integration

While AI generates plenty of hype, I’m taking a practical approach to incorporating it into my workflow:

• Selective Usage: I’ve actually disabled AI code completion as I found it was hindering rather than helping my learning process.

• Strategic Implementation: Instead, I’m leveraging AI tools as thinking partners for higher-level planning and architecture discussions.

• Focus on Productivity: The goal is to use AI where it genuinely enhances productivity without becoming a crutch or distraction.

  This approach to AI reflects my broader technical philosophy for 2025: being deliberate about tool choices, focusing on solving real problems, and maintaining a balance between exploration and productivity.

I’m refining my focus to be more intentional and impactful and limiting it to the following areas:

Technical Focus

• Mastering fundamentals: TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, C, computer systems, Golang, and React
• Deepening my expertise in Nuxt
• Exploring both real-time and local-first applications
• Expanding into PWA development as an alternative to traditional app stores

Professional Growth

• Contributing to open source projects
• Studying more existing codebases
• Exploring cybersecurity
• Integrating AI tools into my workflow

Personal Development

• Adopting a more focused learning approach instead of trying to keep up with every new technology
• Emphasizing depth over breadth
• Creating and launching prototypes more quickly

I’m looking for my next long-term role – somewhere I can grow and contribute for at least five years. My favorite part of being with Gfinity was being able to improve the company, team and codebase for an extended period of time. So, even though job hopping might be better financially for me, I would prefer to find another long term company to work for.

My goal is to focus on strong fundamentals while solving diverse problems with a consistent tech stack, rather than constantly switching between technologies.

The tech industry continues to evolve rapidly, but I’m excited to take a more measured, focused approach to my career growth in 2025 and beyond.