This year, I continued to make progress with The Ump Show. I took a little bit of a break as I switched jobs after a decade. The process was kinda long so I spent April/May in the interview process, July/August in finalizing things and off-ramping work, and September-December onboarding on the new job. The process was taking so long, I managed to pick up skateboarding in between!

I also consistently wrote new blog posts this year. I even gave a NerdNite talk based on a post from last year!

Projects

The Ump Show

New stadiums for The Ump Show!

I released the initial version of the game in 2023. The progress in 2024 was a little more uneven as I took several breaks but I did implement tag plays as well as build out different stadiums for different levels for the game!

In May, a popular YouTube channel played The Ump Show on their channel and that helped get a lot more views and wishlists on Steam.

I am hoping I can finally release the game on Steam in 2025.

Work Snapshots

I created a tool for myself to record my computer when I work on side projects. It always runs on my desktop and laptop. Whenever I launch a terminal or an IDE or graphics application (like Blender), the tool will start taking screenshots every 2 minutes. My goal was to just see some progress of my projects but it has also become a nice time tracker! That’s how I know I spent ~56 hours working on making the tool itself!

Minor Tools

This year I also built some smaller tools for myself:

  • Book Wallpaper: Since I read ebooks, I often forget the title of the book as they are less prominent in that format. So I made this Android app that can automatically download a book cover and make it your background so I can always see it!
  • ExplodeVideo: I needed to look at video clips frame-by-frame (that’s the skateboarding life) so I built a small app to explode a video into frames and quickly cycle through them. Eventually, I realized mpv would let me do this so I kinda stopped using it but it was a fun project.
  • TodayInGit

Writing

Visualization from my post on PIDs in games.

Continuing the writing club with Danny and Pete helped me write consistently this year. I ended up publishing 10 posts this year!

Some of my favorites are:

I also gave a NerdNite talk, based on my post from last year. It was very satisfying to give a talk to a curious audience.

Reading

Books

My reading picked up again this year and I read 11 books. Two of my favorite books were:

  • There’s Always This Year: Abdurraqib’s poetry background is clearly visible in this book. I loved how he captures the feeling of watching amazing plays. He also explores the love of a team and a city and the complexity of those emotions.
  • The Path Between the Seas: McCullough, an award winning historian, tells the story of the Panama Canal starting from French bravado and failure to American imperialism and American logistical ingenuity. It was both informative and, in some ways suspenseful as I knew the canal was built but I wasn’t sure how, especially after learning about the challenges.

Some of my other favorite non-fictions were The Declassification Engine, Where the Water Goes and Transformer (no not that one and not that other one either!).

Here are all the books I read:

Articles

Arnold tongue visualizations. It doesn’t really matter what it means when its pretty!

I continued with making random deep dives on Wikipedia. These are the ones that I could find in my history.

Non-Wikipedia article I really liked:

I am sure there are others but I haven’t done a good job of tracking articles I liked this year.

Skateboarding

Barely a manual but I say count it!

I finally started skateboarding regularly in June of 2024. It took me a while to get comfortable on a skateboard but really enjoyed practicing and getting better. I had to stop practicing in the winter but hopefully, I can start again when it gets warmer.