As 2024 recently wrapped up, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the year.
Personally, I’m not a big believer in strict New Year’s resolutions. However, I see value in setting long-term goals and taking time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished, learned, and where there’s room for improvement.
2024 has been a year to remember — packed with travel, projects, and a lot of contributions to the community.
Highlights of the Year
Conferences
In 2024, I attended 14 conferences across several countries and continents.
What stood out to me was the openness and energy of the Ruby community. Every event felt like a mini-reunion with old friends which lead to a lot of new memories. But it also lead to awesome conversations with new friends, that I’m happy to come back to in 2025.
Each conference offered something unique. From technical deep dives in talks to interesting discussions in the hallway track. I learned how much energy and inspiration I gain from the in-person aspect of these events. For me it’s a feeling that virtual events or working remotely can’t quite replicate — which in turn is why I’m attending so many conferences.
Looking back, I couldn’t have asked for a better year of conferences. 2024 set an incredibly high bar, and while it’ll be tough to match in 2025, I’m excited to see what’s coming in 2025.
Talks
I’ve written two new technical talks in 2024, both focused on Hotwire-related topics. These talks reflected my passion for shaping the developer experience within the Rails and Hotwire ecosystems:
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Revisiting the Hotwire Landscape after Turbo 8
This talk reflected on how far Hotwire has come, how StimulusReflex and CableReady might have shaped the state of Hotwire today, where I think the Hotwire-approach is headed, and what I would love to see for the frameworks — both in terms of governance and features, but also in terms of vision.I think that Hotwire is a gift for the Ruby, Rails, and even the wider web development communities. In a way I still think that Hotwire is what makes Ruby on Rails relevant as a Full-Stack framework today. But I also think that there is so much potential to level up the frameworks even more. I will give my best to help shape the future of Hotwire in 2025.
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Leveling Up Developer Tooling For The Modern Rails & Hotwire Era
This was a more technical talk where I explained the story behind building the Stimulus Language Server. I wanted to share the story and timeline behind it, wanted to explain how LSPs work in general, how you can build a simple language server yourself. I also touched on how I think we can improve developer tooling to enhance the overall experience for Rails and Hotwire developers.
Delivering these talks wasn’t just about sharing technical knowledge. A large part was about pushing myself outside my comfort zone to get more comfortable giving talks on stage in front of people after my talk debut in 2023.
Getting to give 13 talks (of which 8 were at conferences) in a single year is a huge privilege I’m super thankful for!
I am grateful for all the incredible opportunities to speak at these amazing events around the world. I’m also super thankful for all the event organizers who trusted me with their stages.
A huge thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts, feedback, and impressions, in-person and online. I’ve grown significantly as a speaker and learned to embrace sharing ideas on a stage. It’s something I’ve come to enjoy and look forward to continuing improving and leveling up in 2025.
Travel
Traveling was a major highlight of 2024 for me. A lot of the travel was motivated by attending conferences and meetups.
Beyond the events themselves, I enjoy combining my travel plans with these events and stay a few days longer because it allows me to explore new places, work remotely, meet like-minded individuals, attend music events, and make new friends along the way.
My 2024 travling in numbers:
- 31 flights
- 15 countries visited
- 7 new countries explored
- 117 days traveling away from home
It’s going to be hard to match (or even beat) this in 2025, but that’s not the goal here. I’m already looking forward to travel, explore more countries, and attend conferences while doing so. I hope to you see you at a conference in 2025!
Travel has become my favorite way to combine professional and personal growth, and I’m already looking forward to more exploration in 2025.
Open Source
Open Source has always been central to my work in the last few years, and 2024 was no exception.
Open Source Time Management
I never felt the need to track my time working on Open Source projects. For me, it’s something I enjoy, and tracking it would make it feel more like a chore than a hobby — exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
That changed when I discovered Timing App, which automatically tracks how you spend time on your computer by analyzing the currently active window and open files and storing the data in a SQLite database.
In mid-2023, I decided to give it a try and started tracking all my work. The experience has been surprisingly transparent and reliable.
You can create projects and let the app automatically assign it to a project based on custom rules you define. It’s an awesome tool and I learned to love it.
My main motivation was curiosity: I wanted to see where my time was going and how much I was spending on different activities. Especially Open Source, since I wasn’t tracking it previously.
Without this tool, I wouldn’t have a good idea of how much time I dedicate to Open Source.
2024 was my first full year of tracking 100% of my time, and it has revealed some interesting patterns — including the fact that I probably spend way too much time on Open Source 🙈.
Here a few stats:
- 2,667 contributions
- opened 467 pull requests
- opened 153 issues
- contributed to repos in 30 different organizations
- authored 1,368 commits on GitHub
- spent over 1,000 hours on Open Source
It’s interesting to see how my Open Source work naturally comes in waves. A lot of this comes from doing non-Open Source work, but a lot of these gaps also line up with my travels.
It really shows how motivated and excited I get to work on Open Source after returning home from events, which is part of what makes it a perfect balance for me.
My goal was to spend 50% of my work time in 2024 on Open Source, which checks out by looking at these stats!
I certainly had a lot of fun working on Open Source in 2025 and I’m looking forward to keep up my contributions in 2025!
Hotwire Weekly
Starting with 1,097 subscribers, the newsletter grew to 1,888 subscribers by the end of 2024. It’s been a successful year for Hotwire Weekly. I was able to stick to the weekly cadence and published a total of 52 newsletter editions in 2024.
Starting (and running) a newsletter without any prior experience has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences I’ve had.
Curating content, staying consistent, and engaging with subscribers have pushed me to grow and helped me connect with a broader audience in general.
I’m glad I took the leap, even when it felt uncomfortable at times, but that’s a sign of learning and progress — let’s embrace it.
A huge thank you to everyone who’s supported this journey! In 2025, I plan to continue refining and expanding Hotwire Weekly.
RubyVideo.dev
RubyVideo.dev was a major focus for me in the second half of 2024. I’m proud of the progress we made.
It’s been super motivating to work on the website, which is why I have spent a lot of time fine-tuning design/details, creating event assets, building new features and lastly, adding events and talks to the website. Here are some interesting stats:
- Added 208 conferences
- Added 16 meetup organizations
- Added 5,014 talks
- Added 2,270 speaker profiles
- Designed 13 new pages and feature mockups
- Designed 862 assets for 172 events (hero sections, profile banners, avatars, cards, and social previews)
Moreover, we added a bunch of new features that makes RubyVideo.dev as awesome as it is today. Here are some of the exciting features I worked on:
- Added an Events Page
- Added an Event Detail Page
- Introduced Talk Topics
- Introduced Talk Languages
- Introduced Talk Slides
- Introduced Talk Summaries
- Richer Speaker Profiles
- New Design
- Redesigned Home Page (including the new hero sections)
- More Social Media Providers
- New video providers (MP4 and Vimeo)
- Richer Conference Metadata
- Conference Artwork (hero sections, profile banners, avatars, cards, and social previews)
- Introduced Conference Schedule Page
- Introduced Conference Speaker Page
- Introduced Contributions Page
- Introduced Lightning Talks as first-class citizens
- Added Lightning Talk thumbnails
- Added Lightning Talk cues
- Added Scheduled Talks
But, the website came a long way. Here are some before/after comparisons. Looking at this now makes me realize how far the website came!
RubyVideo.dev is becoming the go-to resource for Ruby events content, and I’m excited to keep growing it in 2025. If you want to help out, there’s a Contributions Page to see where and how you can help. I’m more than happy to help you get started and involved, reach out!
RubyConferences.org
As mentioned above, 2024 has been an incredible year for conferences. Not just for myself, but for the Ruby Community as a whole!
We tracked and added 38 Ruby Conferences on RubyConferences.org in 2024. I also introduced a new meetups section to RubyConferences.org in 2024, in which we tracked over 500 Ruby meetups.
2024 quite literally has been the best year for Ruby events ever. It’s the first time we beat the previous all-time record from 2015 in terms of talks given at Ruby events in 2024!
We’ve been working hard on something in this space that I’m hoping to be able to reveal more about soon. Stay tuned! Exiting times ahead.
All this makes me really proud to be a Rubyist! ❤️
Other Open Source Highlights
- Released StimulusReflex 3.5 (after a 3-year journey, involving 30+ contributors and 168 pull requests)
- Released Stimulus LSP 1.0, with a lot of new features and improvements.
- Extracted and released Stimulus Parser (written from the ground up with a focus on accuracy to reduced false-positives).
- Started extracting Stimulus Lint, a CLI tool to run the Stimulus LSP diagnostics independently.
- Released an initial version of Turbo LSP.
- Started working on my HTML-aware ERB Parser, built with developer tooling in mind. It should help improve the HTML+ERB tooling in LSPs and Ruby applications.
- Released the
qr_code_scannerandswiss_qr_billgems.
Happiness & Wellbeing
2024 was a year of personal growth. Balancing professional achievements with time for rest, travel, reflection, and relationships has been key.
I’m proud I found a balance that works for me. Not from work, but from the connections, experiences, and new friends I made along the way.
Looking Ahead to 2025
As I look into 2025, my aim is to build on the progress and growth of the past few years. I want to stay thoughtful, focused, and reflective in my efforts. Here are a few key areas I plan to concentrate on:
Writing & Blogging
In 2025, I want to focus more on writing long-form technical content. While Hotwire Weekly has been a great start, blogging feels like an opportunity and great challenge to dive deeper into topics and communicate ideas more clearly and effectively.
I plan to use my blog to document:
- Patterns, techniques, and tools from my day-to-day work.
- Insights and lessons learned from my Open Source work.
- Reflections on the Ruby and Rails communities, including ideas for improving developer tooling, framework governance, and community-driven efforts.
The goal is to share content in a more structured and thoughtful way, beyond quick social media posts.
I hope that these posts will contribute to the community while improving my ability to explain complex concepts. I want to step out of my comfort zone once again. Blogging is also something I’m not super comfortable with yet, which is why I want to start working on it.
Talks & Public Speaking
2024 was a turning point for me in public speaking, and while I’ve grown more comfortable with it, I know there’s a lot to improve. In 2025, I want to reflect on my previous talks and try to learn from them. It’s something I’ve been avoiding for a long time. But now I want to start tackling that.
I will be submitting proposals to conferences in 2025. I also want to give talks about the non-Hotwire topics I’ve been focusing on.
These events have been an incredible experience and an awesome opportunity for me which inspires me to keep going. They’ve become a significant part of my life and I want to keep that energy going in 2025.
Open Source
Open Source will remain an important piece of my work in 2025. A few priorities include:
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Maintaining Core Projects: Continuing to contribute to core libraries like Stimulus, Stimulus Use, StimulusReflex, CableReady, and other libraries in the Hotwire ecosystem. Ensuring they remain robust, relevant, and maintained.
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Improving Tooling: Building on the groundwork laid in 2024 with Stimulus LSP, Turbo LSP and the Hotwire Dev Tools browser extension. I want to explore how we can improve the developer experience for Rails and Hotwire developers even more.
This includes finishing and releasing my work-in-progress HTML-Aware ERB Parser, which can level up the developer experience even further in the above mentioned tools and beyond. The idea is to make writing, maintaining, and refactoring HTML+ERB code cleaner, more intuitive and more powerful — while benefiting the broader Ruby ecosystem.
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RubyVideo & RubyConferences: These community-driven projects have been incredibly rewarding, and I want to keep refining and growing them. I’m excited to see how they evolve in 2025.
At the same time, I’ll be mindful of my own capacity and the importance of avoiding burnout. Open Source can sometimes feel like a cycle of constant expectations, especially if you do a lot of this Open Source work out of passion and as a “hobby”. I want to ensure I’m pacing myself while staying focused on the projects and ideas I truly care about.
Community Engagement
Being part of the Ruby and Rails communities has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my career so far, and I’m committed to remaining an active voice in 2025.
I want to help the community thrive and make Ruby as appealing and accessible as possible. Because in the end Ruby is the language we all know and love.
Personal Growth
Lastly, 2025 will be about continuing to grow as a person, not just as a developer.
This past year has shown me that growth often comes from stepping outside my comfort zone. I plan to keep pushing myself in ways that feel meaningful, even if they’re sometimes uncomfortable.
Conclusion
To be blunt, 2024 has honestly been the best year of my life so far. I’ve never felt as happy, motivated, or fulfilled as I do now. I’m looking forward to carrying this momentum into 2025.
I’m particularly looking forward to improving my writing, continuing my work in Open Source, and staying open to new opportunities and collaborations. It’s exciting to think about the ways I can grow, both personally and technically.
GitHub Sponsors
Lastly, I wanted to give a huge thanks to all the people and organizations that supported me as a GitHub Sponsor, thank you so much for supporting my ideas and my vision by being a GitHub Sponsor!
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post!
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