2024 in review

We made it. Another notch in my belt. As I mentioned before, the ending of every year pervades me with an intense feeling of gratitude. I’m painfully aware of my health limitations, of the unstable and chaotic state of the world, of the insurmountable list of problems we must confront as civilization.

Although it’s difficult not to feel certain anxiety and sadness sometimes, the core emotions were I find myself on more often is gratitude. It’s unquestionably connected with my amazing son, wife and family. They really make everything worthwhile.

So, let’s write down for the future some of the things I was able to do with them in 2024, and some of the events that happened on a more personal level.

PHYSICAL

Although I’m conscious that it’s more of a two-way highway, I often think of the physical as THE enabler, the main thing I’ve got to get right to have a good year. Of course, if you follow some good habits, their compounding interest will improve your health, but luck still plays a good part, and the starting point can make the habit adoption incredibly more difficult.

Anyway, I failed again.

Following my life framework, I envisioned 2024 as The year of frugality. The year’s vision is designed to be holistic, and I did pretty OK in many areas under that vision, e.g., I bought an order of magnitude fewer books, reduced social apps in dozens/hundreds of hours, bought very few things outside of this list (mostly comics and some replacement clothes)… However, when it comes to health, although I contained my weight problem, I was not able to make a substantial improvement.

The gods handed me a few things that didn’t make it easier. During the first quarters of the year, a nasty knee pain made every movement a punishment. Then in the second half I developed a very strong neck pain that, after an MRI discovered itself as a cervicobrachialgia. After some fail in Osakidetza, I got really good treatment for both at Ars Medica, so if you are in the Basque Country I totally recommend them.

Of course, this would be one of the main things to fix in 2025. I plan to use my focus on habits to reintroduce some that worked in the past but that I let lapse for different reasons. Let’s see how that goes.

PROFESSIONAL

Of the many blessings life has given me, an important one is the opportunity to work over very long stretches of time with my customers. That is the case of Verkami, Europe’s best and most successful cultural crowdfunding platform. I’ve been working uninterruptedly on this project for more than 15 years.

When we started, Heroku, S3, and EC2 were all quite new; the term “responsive design” had been just coined, and the merchants of cloud computing hadn’t arrived yet at the Temple. So many things have changed while I’ve worked on this project. It was the first app where I could say, “A million people use my code” and the product’s name became a verb (that is the only true indicator that you have made it in any cultural sense).

For all this time, Verkami has been fundamentally centred on the concept of the pledge, the discrete amount that every user contributes to fundraising projects. In 2024, for the first time in a decade and a half, we have changed that and have launched Presales (extending the fundraising period), Add-ons (additional rewards that provide near-infinite options for the projects’ authors to offer their backers) and the option to include a Bonus (pure support without reward from the backers to the authors).

Although they may seem like small changes from the outside, all these features required an almost complete revamp of the internal concept of pledge, accommodating some extra flexibility for the future and ensuring backward compatibility with the millions of contributions we have made through the years.

The result? In less than a year, JUST the bonus option has raised almost an extra million euros to help the authors make their dreams a reality! I’m so proud knowing my code helps to do that.

In Devengo, we have been working hard too to achieve what has been for a long time the company’s most desired milestone: becoming a regulated PSP. Although destiny made us suffer to the end of the year and involved some undesired sacrifices, we finally did it! We are the 6940!

It’s difficult to explain how much hard work a small company like ours requires to get those four digits and the responsibility we are given to them. But we needed it to enable Devengo’s future, and we got it. Even more! Just in time for Christmas, we got the other magic number any financial institution requires, a BIC: we are DEVNESM2.

I’ve also organized myself to physically visit most of the dev team, thank them for their efforts, and try to keep the spirits high by organizing things like a Mexican food workshop, attending a Madrid.rb session, or an express visit to the Museo del Prado.

All in all, a good year in this area.

FAMILY

Probably the most essential thing in my life right now is the immersion of Atlas in the educational process.

As I said last year, we moved Atlas to a new school, Osotu, and we are very -very- happy with the decision. The learning model of the school was so interesting that I attended a training course for teachers they produced and was able to understand the different cornerstones of their model: skills and competencies, emotions, neuroscience.

This year, he has started his second course, and the beginning has been more bumpy than expected due to an unexpected teacher change. When kids are this small, they create super strong bonds with their teachers, and they live the process like a sad, painful breakup. But the new teacher is working hard to get them on board, even if it’s very hard sometimes, so I’m confident the school year will end much better than started.

2024 has also been the year Atlas was officially diagnosed with language-related High Intelectual Ability/HIA. Although it may sound like a blessing, it comes with tough challenges, too, and we are all learning about what it means and what we can do to make the most of it while keeping Atlas happy.

We visited a few places: Amsterdam in May (it was our first time flying for Atlas, and we visited Wikkelhouse when we were there!), Asturias in the summer, and multiple places in the Basque Country throughout the whole year.

We went underground to see the belly of the beast and ended the year by working in the forge!

COMMUNITY

This year, I tried to payback to the tech community a small portion of the so many things I’ve received from it through the years by participating in a few conferences:

I also attended some other conferences and enjoyed some of the talks, especially “When human decisions intersect with automated systems” by Ujue and Karlos in the Bilbostack.

We did some tree planting again in Etxebarri (Bilbao). Tree planting is one of those activities that is always more rewarding AND tiring than expected.

In 2025, I would love to talk again at a few conferences, but I also have this small dream of creating a series of small events mixing technology and food, where I bring interesting people to Bilbao to talk about tech and cook for them and a small attendance. Working title: Tech In Da Txoko.

PERSONAL

In 2024, I reconnected with a few things in my personal space. The first one was comics! I loved Ducks and Ginseng Roots and started buying and reading more and more, a new habit that has already bleed into 2025.

I reconnected with D&D, too! I haven’t played in 30 years, but the new 5e and the 50th anniversary brought so many memories of my good time playing AD&D 2nd edition. I just had to start reading the manuals again.

For a few weeks, it looked like I’d be able to DM my son and his friends (so exciting!), but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Nonetheless, I’m still reading and learning about all the amazing new tools that are available in the XXI century to make the game even better.

When it came to video games, I went full AAA games. I finished AC Odyssey (I loved, loved, LOVED the ancient Greece environment!) and did a massive amount of sidequests -though, not 100% completionist- I then started playing AC Valhalla, but after some 20-30 hours and had problems trying to feel connected with the story. In the summer holidays, I played CoD for the first time(!!) and created a few transmedia connections on the Cold War.

I was also able to develop -at least for a few months- new habits:

  • I designed daily menus for my family for almost two months. I broke the streak because of a few weeks of a lot of work.
  • I published daily notes for 43 days as part of the awesome “100 Days of Notetaking” challenge by Bianca Pereira. I broke the streak because my mom got hospitalized, and I had a few crazy weeks.

There seems to be a barrier on the 40-50 days that, for some reason, makes me drop the forming habit, but I’m going to work hard in 2025 to really build this -and a few other- practices into habits. I like the rhythm they give me and how I feel when I’m developing them.

We went back to the mountains! I have always loved hiking and thought it was a good time to start sharing it with my son.

We are very lucky to have a super dense network of officially sanctioned/maintained hiking routes in the Basque Country so we used them as a guide and had the opportunity of organizing three hiking trips with my son, friends and their kids: PR-BI 15, PR-BI 86, PR-BI 52 (the “PR” means “Pequeño Recorrido”, short hike). More to come for sure in 2025.

We also had time for my usual gastronomic trips: started the year by celebrating our wedding anniversary at Teike, were lucky to taste two of the seasonal menus (winter and spring) at Islares, had an amazing -tough solitary- dinner at Xanglot, LOVED vegan food for the first time ever at the awesome Madre in Amsterdam, pay my respects to Andoni at Villa Fromista, and discover Lasai in the centre of Bilbao. I can’t complain.

Finally, I became a Framework laptop user in 2024. I was already super happy with the return to Linux I initiated the year before, but having the opportunity to use it on the go was great.

Knowing I can expand and upgrade the computer instead of becoming another aluminium brick at home in a few years makes me very happy. I already have my eyes on the new 120Hz, high-resolution display… a super cheap update for a very good new piece of hardware!

Wrapping it up!

That’s all. I do an internal “What I’m planning for next year” and quarterly reviews every year, which I usually don’t publish, but I’m thinking that maybe it would be good to start. Going public may increase accountability; I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.

Thank you for reading this one more year, and I wish you the best year of your life for 2025!

PS: You can read previous year’s reviews: 2022, 2023.