Adam’s 2024 Year in Review

Family, General, SSW Projects, Tina CMS , , , , , 0 Comments

It’s time to discuss 2024’s highs and lows. Definitely, the high was the successful acquisition of TinaCMS – it is a product we’ve used and loved for a while and it was great fun to work with their team and get to travel to plenty of conferences to promote it. I have mixed feelings about my daughters flying the nest, and happy I dodged a melanoma… hang on a sec… 2 melanomas!

Every year after Christmas I sit down with my girls to do a Retro of the previous year, set some goals for the upcoming year and hear what is important to people close to you.

I’d love to share some of the highlights of our year with you.

My 2024 Highlights

🚲 Riding from Denmark to Sweden and glamping with Jakob and other cool characters I hang out with at NDC. Seth and Josh loved it too, especially the Swedish BBQ 🥩

🦙 Purchasing TinaCMS and continuing the awesome work with the Tina team

🦙 The Tina launch party in Newcastle, with live llamas (thanks Penny it was awesome)

🥖 Finishing the French office renovation and visiting the team. Renos are always difficult, but if you get the preparation right, they usually go well. Thank you Jean for your help with this! ❤️

🚀 Taking the Tina team over to Europe – it was their first time at NDC Oslo
and I presented to a packed crowd all about AI 🤖

🧠 The SSW Brainstorming & Retreats – we created a lot of awesome AI tools & revamped our marketing strategy this year. We spent time on the Sunshine Coast & Newcastle taking in the sights

🎃 Halloween in the USA as a family and catching up with my US buddies

🧑🏻‍💻 Delivering over 100 great quality, high-value projects for our clients, and hearing how much they appreciated working with my team

Group of people on bikes
Figure: A group of us set out to ride across from Copenhagen, across the Danish countryside to Helsingborg, Sweden
Camping with lots of tents
Figure: Glamping in Sweden
Cathedral and people smiling
Figure: Introducing the Sydney boys to the incredible cathedral in Strasbourg
Group eating French food
Figure: Celebrating the end of the renovation – the French Team & Sydney teams meet!
Group of people smiling
Figure: Catch-ups with Scott Hanselman’s family and my girls are always fun. These photos are taken 10 years apart
Man and a llama
Figure: The Tina opening party – I made some new furry friends

Reflections on 2024 – the SSW Retro

I do a yearly Retro with the whole SSW team to find out how their year went too. I love reading about their career and personal highlights for the year! 👀

From the survey, it looks like it’s been a great year for most of the team. It was nice to read about all of the new relationships, engagements, weddings, and babies. And HUGE amount of travel. The team has been everywhere from China to Europe, Canada & the USA, to Japan, and Malaysia, just to name a few.

On the work side, it was great to see how much the devs loved working for our clients and TinaCMS, often having to dig deep to solve some tricky problems.

Highlights from SSWers

Here are a few of their highlights:

📢 Speaking at the User Group on .NET Aspire & Presenting at /NEW, & Being Product Owner for Tina

🌸 Japan – Great time with family

🧑🏻‍💻 Completing FireBootCamp then being hired at SSW

🏢 Moving out with my partner, 🗾Trip to Japan 🍝 Perfected my Rosé sauce

🦸🏻 Presenting – running the Clean Architecture Workshop with Dan, it was awesome presenting with him. Prepared my first user group in Sydney. Working on a new client that was difficult and challenging.

 🎵 Taylor Swift concert and traveling to New Zealand

🦙 Working on TinaCMS – has been an awesome project with a lot of promise
Brisbane Team – Working with great people really motivates you
Leadership – A lot of Scrum mastering and code reviews and helping devs become awesome!

🙌🏻 Working with Andrew H on client work. Levelling up in .NET and Blazor

🎴 Playing Magic – I’ve met SO many new people and made tonnes of new friends playing Magic and it’s a HUGE benefit to me 🙂 Not my wallet though

🥖 SSW Cultural Exchange for 2 months – Going to France!

💍 Getting together with parents and family ➡️ Got engaged ➡️ Got married!

🤑 Certification – Got my CPA
AI – Learned how to use Azure AI speech service and build my first app
China – Visited SSW Hangzhou and improved many of their systems

👶🏻👶🏻 Surviving twins, that’s it…

🧠 Therapy – helped me learn more about myself 💪

Group of colleagues around laptops
Figure: SSW Management + Tina Team doing a retrospective after our retreat
Group in front of a plane
Figure: The team traveling to our first Tina Conference, Serverless Days, in New Zealand

2024 Wrap Up for SSW

We were lucky enough to work on some really cool projects again this year, and we’ve done a lot of fun things along the way. Here are just a few of the things we achieved in 2024!

Yearly stats

SSW Projects – Tech Trends

One of the things I’m proud of at SSW is how transparent we are with everything we do. We have some cool Power BI reports, and they are open to everyone in the company.

Here are some of the interesting outliers from those reports…

Full-stack solutions are still reigning supreme in 2024, with .NET dominating the backend, and Blazor as the #1 frontend. We’ve done a lot of .NET 8 migrations this year to take full advantage of the enhancements and performance optimizations that it brings. In 2025, we will see upgrades to .NET 9 which was just released, so watch this space for our learnings from that.

Here are the top 5 technologies we used:

  • .NET
  • Blazor
  • Azure
  • Dynamics 365
  • Bicep + DevOps
  • Azure DevOps and GitHub continue to battle it out, with hardly anything between them…
Bar chart of technology
Figure: SSW’s Power BI report shows different tech used throughout the 2024 year and for us #1 is Blazor, the Azure, followed by Dynamics. Interestingly they topped out .NET., as well as dominating the figures over Angular and React projects.

SSW TV

Last year I highlighted that our YouTube channel growth, like many in the industry, has slowed significantly. Looking at the numbers for SSW TV for 2024, this is becoming a trend, with low growth for 2024. Many content creators are looking to new platforms like podcasts (long form) and TikTok (short form), as YouTuber viewers continue to switch to competitors. SSW are now doing Shorts, as well as our long-form content, and the popularity of Shorts is again reflected in the stats (see below that 5 of the top 10 are Shorts).

Bar chart of subscribers
Figure: While SSW TV continues to grow, last year the stats showed that there was significantly less growth than in the previous 5 years… that trend has continued into 2024

In 2024 SSW TV has:

  • Released 90 new videos to the public
  • Acquired 300+ new subscribers
  • Received 225,000 views
  • Was watched for 600,000 minutes (that’s roughly 1 year and 2 months of watching!)

Our 10 most popular videos released in 2024 are:

  1. Octopus War Stories – Understanding Transaction-Based Mutex Failure Modes | Alix Klingenberg 📱YouTube Short (46 sec)
  2. Cloud Native Aspirations with .NET Aspire | Matt Wicks & Rob Pearson (1 hour 28 min)
  3. Getting started with TinaCMS | Matt Wicks (15 min 55 sec)
  4. Exploding Intel CPUs and security breaches | SSW Tech News (13 min 17 sec)
  5. Mountains of Discs | Gordon Beeming 📱YouTube Short (51 sec)
  6. Error Mystery Time! | Gordon Beeming 📱YouTube Short (32 sec)
  7. How to Read Source Code: Interfaces and Abstract Classes | Luke Mao (6 min 4 sec)
  8. EF CORE: Implicit vs Explicit includes | JK 📱YouTube Short (34 sec)
  9. AI saved my life! | Adam Cogan 📱YouTube Short (59 sec)
  10. Modern Websites – Why Everyone is Choosing Next.JS & the Best Headless UI Library | Jack Pettit (55 min 33 sec)

Conferences and Community Engagement

The highlight of the conference circuit for me was attending NDC Olso, where I had the privilege to speak about AI, but also ran a booth for the first time! The Tina team turned up armed with a lot of llama-related merch and some great TinaCMS demos. We were at the booth for 3 days and got to speak to hundreds of devs, it was awesome! The dev community really is a supportive and friendly bunch.

Here are some other great events I got to participate in!

🦙 Introducing TinaCMS to the International crowd 1st in New Zealand, then Copenhagen & Porto

🧑🏻‍💻 15 User Groups – special mention to the Newcastle community for letting me speak and host a few times this year. I love visiting ❤️

🧑🏻‍💻 25 in-person training/hack days covering tech like AI, .NET 8, Azure, Angular & Clean Architecture

🧑🏻‍💻 DDD Melbourne where my team had a booth

🌞 2 SSW Retreats & Brainstorming Days

Group of people facing away from the camara in a work setting
Figure: Brainstorming in Brisbane – it was a great group of smart people
Group of people in front of a restaurant
Figure: Enjoying the sun in Brisbane – Twin Waters Resort, Sunshine Coast
Group of people with llama toys and other tech
Figure: The TinaCMS team has a great time with the developers at NDC Oslo
Tech conference audience
Figure: My talk at NDC Oslo – great to see so many people interested in AI

Overall, it’s been a great year – I cannot wait to see what 2025 brings! 🎉

How did your year go? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! ⬇️