2024 In Review

2024 was busy and 2025 has been unrelenting so far. While this post is about looking back in review I did want to mention a few things:

Many people are aware of the dangerous fires happening all over Southern California. The biggest fires were in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Thankfully neither place where I live. I know people who lost their homes and I can’t imagine the road to recovery.

My family and I had to evacuate our home due to a quick spreading fire called the Kenneth fire. It was a small fire that pales in comparison to all the others. Living where we do, we came close to losing our home back in 2018 with the then biggest fire Woolsey. Point is we're safe and we finally have some rain to help. Now let’s get back to last year!

Family

I love starting these reflections off by looking at my foundation aka to be my family. We bought a house, and rebuilt the entire inside before moving the family in. We got to host our families for Thanksgiving and Christmas which was great.

Buying a home and doing major renovations puts a financial strain on the family. Add in the potential for fire damage and you've got an unpleasant situation. Things going in the right direction now.

In September my eldest kid went to his first Dodger game (we're more American football fans than baseball fans but still). I was lucky enough to catch 2 game balls (without a glove). He's excited to have a keepsake, a small piece of history, since the Dodgers won the World Series.

Baby isn't a baby anymore. He's a toddler running around the house. He can say a lot of words (for a toddler). He eats all the time and is super strong. If only he slept more I'd have more chances to write, but it is what it is.

Community

I completed my 6th and final year on the Association for Software Testing's board of directors. I wrote a thank you note to the whole community. The organization is well on their way with CAST 2025 announced an open Call for Papers.

I published 2 blog posts last year. Wow that's disappointing. I published a few more at work but I never found time / habit for being able to write consistently. Working on the consistency for 2025.

Work @ STELLA

STELLA Automotive AI continues to grow. We saw a big increase in revenue last year. Each day it seems like I tackle new challenges. In Q4 I lead a migration of all our customers from AWS to Azure. This meant building a plan and schedule, working with a third party vendor and organizing our internal teams to help. (In addition to making sure customers knew but saw no negative impact).

When I joined the company I inherited a team that did a lot of glue work across the org. I was able to map out how their work had changed over time (including how I changed it). Then I was able to get them raises and a few people promoted. One of the areas I've been failing is in training them to be better software testers, but that will be better this year.

Websites

In the past this is where I'd finally take a look at traffic for both Kenst.com and TestingConferences.org. I don't care to do it this year but I do want to reflect on a few things.

1. 100 subscribers! Ok I hit this in February 2025, but it still counts.
2. In my role at STELLA I don't spend much time in GitHub. Combined with a notifications problems, some Pull Requests have sat open far too long. I have some fixes coming for this!

Books

I like the idea of keeping track of what books I start and which ones get finished. I'm interested in what patterns emerge over the years in my choices:Started and finished:

1. Deep Work by Cal Newport
2. The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Started but didn’t finish:

1. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
2. HBR Guide to Better Writing by Bryan A. Garner
3. Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia
4. Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadow
5. Automation Awesomeness by Joe Colantonio

How was your 2024? Hit reply or leave me a comment and I'll respond.