Year in Review - 2024
Reviewing my 2024 Goals
✅ Work: I did advance my career and got promoted to a senior position at my current employer right on time for 1st January 2025. I moved more into the Data Science direction with my work and focused on model tuning and improving forecasting systems. I refactored a huge application updating the underlying python version and replacing important dependencies that were outdated. It was a tedious task, but improved the speed a lot and allows for more customization now.
🟠Health & Sports: I started lifting heavy more, but did not come near my goal to Squat 1.5x my body weight (~115 kg). That being said, I am overall I am happy: I increased my lung function by TODO and found a new way of cardio and endurance training: swimming! I always hated swimming, was very slow and out of breath easily. I started in late 2024 after reading the section about total immersion swimming in Tim Ferris’ 4Hour Body book. This was one of the best things I learned this year and I can not recommend to try it enough (especially for people who do not like swimming!).
My current routine looks like this:
- roughly 7k steps per day
- Sleep ~6-7 hours
- heavy lifting 2x per week via 5x5 programme
- TI swim 1x per week
- Some other form of exercise (boulder, badminton, …) occasionally on the weekends
✅ Vacation: I wanted to do a camping trip to a country I did not visit yet. And we did: We went to Denmark (west coast)! It was great, but weather did us quite dirty, as it was super windy and rainy. After camping for a while we made a u-turn back to Germany and the last days of our vacation was spent on Fehmarn – Wikipedia, which is known as “Baltic Sea’s Hawaii”.
Personal Growth Goals
❌♟️Chess: I wanted to reach 1300 in rapid time format on chess.com, but failed to do so. It is not that I was stuck, moreover I did not find time (or courage?) to play more.
In the end I am only 81 rating points short of my goal. On the good side all my ratings increased, I even reached 1100 in blitz (+118 ppts). Also: I went to my local chess club. Only once due to time and work constraints, but it was a fun experience nevertheless. Maybe I will try to make it a re-occuring thing in 2025?
❌📖 Reading: I wanted to read more, also non-fiction. I only finished one book (but this was a big one): Atomic Habits. Great read and a great source of knowledge and guide for self improvement. I took many lessons from it. I started reading The Witcher series a couple 100 pages. It is nice, but it reads a bit harder than I would hoped (I love the story from having played the video games). Non fiction books will be on my reading list for 2025 again, as I feel it is a good thing to have a mix between fiction and non-fiction reading input.
✅Wealth: I did increase my wealth by [redacted]. Quite happy with my finances. My wife and I bought our first flat and financing plans look quite solid. Increased my monthly savings rate and put even more money down on the classic world ETF A1JX52.
Things I learned
I often said that curiosity and willing to learn is a staple in my life defining who I am. I always try to find new things to dig deep into.
🟠🍞Baking: I wanted to bake more (bread), which I did not follow up to hard on. Baked a few times, worked out quite well, but later this year I tried to cut white carbs from my diet, which basically banned bread from my diet.
✅Machine Learning in Production (Coursera)
- Finally back again on a course from Andrew Ng
- Great course and highly recommendable
- I think MLOps and having an idea what it takes to put models into production is a crucial skill nowadays (cannot be learned by a few chatgpt QnAs)
- Top 3 things I learned from this:
- ML Project life-cycle
- Modern Approach update: Moving from a model-centric AI development to a data-centric development
- Developing reasonable baselines and what to do with them
✅ Consulting Presentations and Storytelling (Coursera)
- Great course I finished in March 2024
- Top 3 things I learned from this:
- Withing the pyramid principle there are multiple approaches to logically tell the story (SCR way, that is the argumentative structure or the grouping structure, i.e. Do A, Do B, Do C)
- Usage of fishbone diagrams for identifying root causes of problems
- Concept of Gravitas
✅Ramen
- I wanted to make ramen for Christmas
- I read the book of Ramen and prepared Tonkotsu Ramen for 6 people
- It was a blast and I learned alot. Will be doing it again!
Health: From Glory to Hell and Back
I needed to undergo some treatment mid 2024, which required me to stop taking important medication. This resulted in a severe downfall of my overall fitness level in the magnitude of of (subjective) estimated -80%. Difference is running 3 kilometer in 08:30 min per kilometer and not managing to get up more than 1 floor without boosting up my heart rate above 120 bpm. It was bad.
The worst of it all: turns out I had not to stop taking this important medicine at all! After consulting another doctor he told me, there is no evidence that this should’ve been necessary. I was outraged. I wrote a sonnet at the time expressing how I felt at the time: Ein Sturm in der Brust
I am by no means a friend of pessimism. I went back onto the meds, got back into my fitness routine and fought back. The second half of the year went better for me. I have no troubles with increasing darkness and more rainy days than other people have (see Winterdepression), this helped a lot. I started to drink a cold glass of water in the morning to kickstart my metabolism. I still do this. It wakes me up way better.
I still cannot believe how this turned out in the end. My heart rate has stabilized again, I am stronger than ever and learned to swim properly.
From a health perspective 2024 can be summarized as “I went through hell and climbed back up!🚀”
Projects
My personal blog and writing: I switched my personal blogs template over to simple and self-maintained jekyll template. I learned a lot how to make changes to css, host it easily on github pages. For 2024, I also planned to write more articles on my personal blog. I wrote a few pieces I think turned out quite well/I am happy with:
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[I made a wishlist (and so should you) mjt91](https://mjt91.github.io/blog/2024/06/28/wishlist.html) -
[How I set up my Phone for Productivity mjt91](https://mjt91.github.io/blog/2024/07/31/how-i-set-up-my-phone.html) -
[Transforming my Master Thesis into an AI Podcast mjt91](https://mjt91.github.io/blog/2024/09/30/notebook-lm-master-thesis.html)
In other news I received some feedback to bring back my “Best of Boulevard” series, where I blog about the 3 funniest stories in German boulevard. I revived that and been posting updates there since September 2024 and plan to keep going at it.
I also wrote about my goals for 2024 (which I posted quite late, but had the goals defined in January already, as it is a yearly habit I follow). This year I plan to again write this but a bit sooner (hopefully 😂).
Other projects: I did not deliver on projects too much. Quite a bummer was that my PUFO Twitter Bot broke down because buchtitel-generator.de went down in August 2024. I always thought to just generate the book titles using some generative AI model (e.g. grok or chatgpt) but never found the motivation to do it. Maybe 2025?
I tested different frameworks to build simple (web-)applications: mjt91/framework-testing I started building my own zettelkasten (which I maintain mainly at work). Public notes are pushed occasionally to mjt91/zettelkasten.
I love using $\LaTeX$. But after my days in academia there is no real use anymore, but I come back from time to time. In April 2024 I created a ref-card with my most used excel shortcuts. The blog post is mjt91/excel-shortcuts-cheatsheet and the cheat sheet is available on my GH mjt91/excel-shortcuts-cheatsheet.
Mission Statement
I wrote about my mission statement first here. I think it is a good plan to revise this together with my review of my goals. So here is an updated version:
- I cherish my wife, family and nearest friends
- I try to find fun in everything I do
- I am not religious, but if someone asked me who my God is, I would answer: chance
- I follow the teachings of Stoicism
- I think analytically
- I am a life-long learner / I am curious
- I form opinions based on facts
- For me, things are not just black or white
- The thought of people remembering me as incompetent is horrifying
- Physical and mental fitness are very important to me
- I generally look positively towards the future
- I am not easily impressed
- The list of those who truly inspire me is very short
- I am an early riser
- I am honest and direct
- One of my mottos is “Hate the game - not the player”
- I don’t believe in free lunch
- I go through life with the attitude that if you truly want something, you must be honest with yourself, unafraid to pursue it, and have fun along the way
- Hard work is important to me (“Put in the hard work!”)
- I am very competitive
- My thought process is driven by “framework thinking”
Top Memes from 2024
I am a big fan of memes. Here are my top 3 of the last year:
