2024 Year in Review

I started 2024 by taking a huge leap, leaving my technician career behind once and for all to focus full-time on web programming. Despite the huge risk I was taking, I felt confident that if I kept putting in the work, continuously learning, and creating, I would eventually secure a developer position.

Did I get a position? No.

I knew it was going to be an uphill battle from the start, so I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning new frameworks, libraries, concepts, improved my understanding of the fundamentals of programming, and problem solving. With each new technique and skill I’ve acquired I’ve found ways to implement it within each new project I create.

Projects, projects, projects

Initially, I started a project with some bootcamp alumni that was quite ambitious. We got a lot of the back-end work completed by creating GraphQL queries with a MongoDB database, as well as drafting detailed diagrams of how the app’s front-end would flow for each user type. Unfortunately, after spending the first few months of 2024 working on it, the project was put on hiatus due to a lack of availability from some team members.

When that project fell through I refocused my efforts into updating my portfolio. I re-designed it entirely, more than once or twice, until it became what you see today. I’ve since added to and modified it regularly throughout the year. One of my goals for the new design was to implement framer motion (now known as motion) powered animations to it, but I had to settle for the radar scanner animation in the hero section due to self-imposed time limits. Overall, I am happy with how it turned out in the end.

I then attempted to create a Loot Vault v2 using Next.js 14 and was having a very difficult time trying to learn Next while I created the site. At a certain point when I wasn’t making any meaningful progress and was also feeling very unmotivated to follow through with the project, I decided to switch things up a bit…

Game Development

I looked into making a game using JavaScript, and found a nine hour long tutorial on how to create a game with vanilla JavaScript using object oriented programming principles. The video was JavaScript Game Development Course for Beginners by Franks Laboratory on the FreeCodeCamp Youtube Channel. I spent weeks going through the tutorial and then using the final project to create my own version of the game that had a menu system, multiple levels, a soundtrack, sound effects, more character states, more enemy types, and even a boss fight at the end! I called it The Running Dog (Repo) because it sounded cool and was a sort of reference (in name only) to The Running Man movie.

Making a game was just what I needed at the time, and I ended up making two more, albeit similar, games of Classic Tic Tac Toe and Ultimate Tic Tac Toe.

Back to the web dev

It was then time to give Loot Vault v2 another try, but this time with Next 15 and React 19. Next Level Loot is what I ended up creating and while I did run into many issues throughout the development, I pushed through and got it deployed. The main goals of the project were to learn how to make something with Next, and make a far better version of Loot Vault that could showcase how much I’ve improved over the year. I’d say I accomplished both, and that I can also see areas where I still need to improve.

The final project I worked on in 2024 was this blog, which you can learn more about in my previous blog post.

2025 Goals

2024 was a productive year for me and I want 2025 to be even more so. Here are some of my current goals for the new year:

  1. Get a full time developer position or freelance work
  2. Make another game (or two, or three, or…)
  3. Learn Python
  4. Learn Go

I’ve been applying to more positions for the past month and have been taking more time to fine-tune my resume. I have a few ideas for games I want to make in JavaScript in the near future. However, recently I’ve really been into learning Python on boot.dev and have been having a blast the entire time! I could go into it more but that is a subject for another blog post…

Happy New Year and happy coding, everyone!

-EV

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