Year in Review 2024

It’s already February of 2025, and I am running behind schedule on writing this article! Since I’ve been writing year-in-review posts for so many years, I figured I’d rather write this quickly and keep the streak going rather than break it. Here goes!

A Great Year with Family and Travel

It was a good year! I spent lots of time with my family, and I also managed to go on a two-week vacation to Korea. In addition to that, I took a business trip to San Francisco to meet my work team.

Side Projects

I continue to work on Koala Cards, my open source project, and it’s been rewarding to see it slowly mature. While I still don’t have a ton of users, it’s encouraging to see folks start using the app. Alongside Koala Cards, I dabbled in a few other fun open source projects:

• A simplex chatbot
• A Forth programming language–inspired stack manipulation game
• A TypeScript port of the FSRS spaced repetition algorithm

Running

When it comes to long distance running, I did far less in 2024 compared to 2023. The only notable running-related event was volunteering at the Great Western Half Marathon. No races for me this year, though being a part of the event is sometimes just as fun.

Learning

I continue learning Korean, and that effort paid off when I passed the TOPIK exam with a score of 3. In 2025, I intend to keep studying and plan to take the test again in April. I hope to get a better score this time and continue growing in this area. Learning Korean is fun on an intrinsic level—and it also gives me the motivation to keep pushing forward with my Koala Cards project.

In terms of reading, I dove into a Korean history book and also tackled the famous paper on the 10,000-hour rule. There were a few other technical and leadership focused books that mae the list, as well. I’ve been learning a lot about the OpenAI API, thanks to my involvement with Koala Cards. There’s always something new to learn and it seems like the LLM space is not slowing down.

Looking Ahead to 2025

2024 was a relaxing year filled with friends, family, hobbies. Looking forward to 2025, I want to get more serious about running again—like I did in 2023. I’ve already registered for a few races and I’m hoping to set some personal records.

When it comes to growing my Korean skills, I think it’s time to push myself beyond just taking the TOPIK exam. I’m considering starting a project that will challenge me to actively use my Korean language skills, which have matured significantly over the past year. I’m not sure what that project will look like yet, but I believe it’s worth investigating.

That’s it for this year’s review. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next video!

Happy 2025!