If you open my previous year review, you would find a goal of "row to the best of your abilities, become financially independent, build a community around yourself, have a business or a side hustle which would let you leave the job if required. Build a resiliency inside yourself". I can tell I am on the good path with it, and will try my best to continue with it in 2025.
Personal Projects
System Design Course
I spent the first quarter of the year creating Business Oriented System Design Course, which has 10 lectures and 10 home tasks to create a proper Design Document for a Food Delivery Service. The course was a success indeed: more than 50 people attended from big(like Bolt) and small(like Zeal Holdings) companies and a double-digits of revenue achieved. I will reinvest the money into a) Get people proper certificates from Pearsons's Credly b) improve the course with more business details and practical case studies. I would like to thank Anna Antonova, who consulted me on the course creation and helped this project to succeed!
Architecture Weekly
This year I continued working on the newsletter. It grew up to ~1500 subscribers on the blog itself, plus almost a hundred on Substack and almost ~3000 in the telegram channel! That's a solid growth, but would be nice to accelerate it 10 times. Need to think about how to do it though.
What actually was a big success is getting the YouTube channel to 5000 subcribers and unlocking the monetization:
The biggest video reached 30k views! Thanks to Dylan Bittie for coming :)
Site restructure
As you probably noticed, you're reading this post at blog.vvsevolodovich.dev instead of vvsevolodovich.dev. That's because I decided to dedicate the main hostname for the personal site with offerings and services, while the newsletter and blog should be just a piece of content I create. How I performed the move technically can be found here.
Working at Bolt
I am working my 3rd year at Bolt. This time I had to bring the strategy for my department to life. It was pretty fun: we managed to complete the majority of the projects. The biggest blunder were the lack of PMs which will be solved in February next year, as we have a couple of them joining Billing.
However my personal adventure with Billing ends tomorrow. I will transition to become a Senior Engineering Manager for the newly created Revenue Assurance department at Commerce. Well, new year, new challenges!
As a side note I need to admit, that the tendency in Bolt is not very pleasing: the upper management made a bunch of decisions I don't admire(like RTO), and we will see how it unveils itself in the future.
Working at Supplied
Well, there is also supplied.eu in my life. We're cooking something special there, but I can't tell yet. Follow the blog for more!
Public Speaking
I conducted a workshop about making architecture decisions with the help of AI on the biggest Software Architecture Conference: Global Software Architecture Summit 2024 held in Barcelona. It took a lot of personal effort to there in the first place, but it worth everything. I made multiple amazing folks from the industry which led to a couple of interesting interviews on my YouTube channel. Hope for more in the next year!
Personal Life
The topic of this year is indeed that my kid went to school. The first half a year we were preparing for it and letting him to pass the tests. So the kid went to a class with a great teacher, as we would discover later. Of course, learning math in a foreign language is challenging, but it's going good so far. We pretty afraid, however all those fears were in vain and I am optimistic about the future school years.
The expectation of school while not knowing the schedule jeopardized personal planning and I didn't fulfil the desire going to a gym, so I can continue to exersice at home. Can't tell I achieved any great results in weightlifting; though I ran couple of experiments.
First of all, I understood that it's very hard for me to gain weight - I just can't make myself eat so much. At the same time I discovered that I can easily loose weight - skip the breakfast, ditch the snacks and here you are. I know the rough size of the portion to have a calorie deficit. The problem though is that the look is unpleasant, so I would better avoid loosing weight in the first place.
From the health perspective, I spent a lot of time and money fixing my teeth; it's an expensive endeavour, and finishing the job will require another 2 years at least.
Travel
Unfortunately, very little travel this year. We went to Prague and Barcelona, and that's pretty much it. Hope to catch up next year!
Estonian Language
I can see a significant progress here! I completed the B1 course and now - by the end of the year - I feel much more confident speaking and listening to Eesti keelt. I even have an occasional chitchat with my neighbour, and I don't know who's more happy about it. Elagu Eeesti!
Best Books of 2024
Of course, let's talk about the books! Unfortunately, I am running pretty bad in this department. I purchased several professional books, from which I just scratched "Software Architecture: The Hard Parts"(I had a chance to get it signed by Neil Ford himself, but this mission failed), went through the half of "Become a great engineering leader(pdf)", read "Deep Work" and "Start with Why" and couple of others.
I read some Sci-Fi though this year! The latest one was "Dark Matter" - I highly recommend the book. It's not about science per se, but about the choices we make as human beings - and it greatly resonates with my attitude to this life. There is a very good Apple series too - grab a watch!
A great read indeed was the whole "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy mostly known by it's first book - "3 Body Problem". There is a lot of science and non-science fiction in there. However, there is a bunch of critique on it too, but nothing is perfect, right?
There were tons of short audiobooks of famous fiction authors like Harry Harrison Azimov and others.
I also finished the year with listening to "Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for the Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance. This is indeed an aspirational book which helps working and pursuing my dreams.
Gaming
While my experience with StarCraft 2 was pretty frustrating, I understood what I was doing wrong the whole time and I managed to improve the MMR drastically with ~300 points. Unfortunately, the eSports scene for SC2 is dying with IEM Katowice next year not happening, and having SC2 at Esports World Cup is under big question(it's not announced yet). Well, sigh.
Summary
It was a challenging year, but I think I am on a good track. Really looking forward for the war to end - hopefully Trump and European leaders can take a proper stance against the barbaric dictator. In the meanwhile, I need to continue to work hard on the job and on my personal projects. For example, I really want to launch my own internet shop while strenghning my skills with PostgreSQL. We'll see!
In the end, I want to wish you to be strong, care for yourself and your loved once and follow one of the Bolt's operational principles: short-term pessimism, long-term optimism. Be strong!