2025 in Review

This was a huge year. A HUGE year.

First, we moved. (Yes, if you know the pain, you know.)

Then, our daughter was born.

All the while, I spent the full year at my current full time job (something I haven't done since 2018 - in other words, for me, a big transition)

I continued my activities as a host of the React Round Up, and part of the year with my efforts (though poorly) with futures trading.

Regardless, I sometimes feel a bit lost, more so than any time in my life before.

I've been thinking a lot about everything I've done so far in my professional career. Why did I initially gravitate to remote software and bust my ass for passive income streams? I think originally it was for the following simple reasons:

• travel
• visit and spend time with family and friends who have scattered themselves across the globe

Sadly, at some point, I've lost track of these original goals and honestly, recently I've felt like all my additional efforts are just hustles to make more money as a means to an end. I've definitely fallen into the "lost my spark" / "stuck in the matrix" trap lately.

In other words:

NOT.

HEALTHY.

And in the end, it's really all self-prescribed - it's just an attitude or mindset problem. But as many of us probably know, once you get stuck in this daily 9-5 repetition, it's hard to get out...

Self-Reflection

I realized I needed to take a step back and needed to reflect. What do I value? Like, really value?

• New experiences in general
• Expanding my mind / skillset
• Creating art (photography / drawing / painting / writing. See photography.chrisfrew.in and portfolio.chrisfrew.in)

These are broad topics, but I really enjoy combining them into what I call "Adventuring". For example, a hike through Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, then back to Austria, all in one day. A massive big day out, full of stories.

Or biking out onto some hill or town at dusk to get some neat blue hour pictures.

This year, among many other books, I've read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, where the author Mark Manson talks about entitlement vs. personal responsibility. Recently, I think I've been a bit on the side of entitlement camp. I've got a few products and courses that make money, and I've got other passive income streams built from 2020-2023 next to my full time job. To some reading this might seem amazing. In my case, I feel more like I've become complacent - I've been cashing in on this success and just assuming that everything would continue to grow and get better. As too many know, no matter how successful you are in life (or even if not at all), stagnation always leads to new problems in one form or another.

After our daughter was born, I felt trapped. Trapped that this "9-5+" has now become my reality for at least 18 years (or whenever she leaves the house). As probably is the situation most parents find themselves in, until now, I've never undertaken any project that takes 18+ years. It's a massive transition, and I'm still trying to figure it all out.

You feel like you can no longer travel, no longer visit friends, no longer party, no longer do... well a lot of the stuff you used to. This is all bullshit. You can still do things you used to - it just takes more time and careful planning.

An Aside About Social Media

I find social media increasingly trite, shallow, and downright stupid. I believe it is the major cause of approximately 80% of what is going wrong in the socio-political aspects of the western world. To this end, and also relevant to the topic of "things that happened in 2024", I deleted my LinkedIn in November of this year. I've dabbled a bit with Bluesky, but in reality, Instagram is the only "social media" account that I still have, and that's more or less to share with family and friends the beautiful alps (and that I'm still alive after each trip!)

Finally... Goals for 2025

What's up and coming for 2025? Here's what I've got planned for 2025, this time, I'm ensuring none of these are "if" but making them actualities:

• "Computer shutdown protocol" ritual right at 5 - The sickest thing here is that I can't remember a day where I was completely done at 5 PM... so needless to say, this will be a hard one for me, as I have trouble stopping :)
• One month in either spring, summer, or fall of remote / co-working, WITH my wife and daughter
• Put my art on display for sale somewhere here in Vorarlberg, Austria... If not here then a Christmas market in the US.
• Make CodeVideo a profitable SaaS

At this point, I have too many half baked SaaS including: Kurynt, AMT JOY, Squawk Market, and CodeVideo, and I stretched myself too thing to finish any of them. But finally, CodeVideo really feels like a big one - especially as a rebellion to the nonsense of AI code generation. CodeVideo helps software course creators improve their video and book based course creation with 100x speed. (I'm the first)

I think long into the future detailed and clear software courses are still going to be essential, and this is why: I've read, reviewed, and written a lot of code. Like, really a lot of code. I refuse to think that simple conversational language to get code output is going to be "the future" of software engineering. There are vast depths of expertise and craft hidden in really good software, and that's something you just can't get with a big LLM with a 32K context window.

I think a bigger fear / problem of mine is the worrisome amount of people who are saying that models like GPT o1 and Claude "show true intelligence" - these people, in my opinion, just haven't had enough time in the field to know what really good software looks like, or how it is built. I'm biased, but I'm adamant that the demand for good software engineers will only increase, not decrease, in the coming decade.

Review of 2024 Goals

Let's see how I did. I had:

-My #1 goal in 2024 is to spend more time with family and friends. My efforts with everything I did in 2023 left me with little time for anything else in my life. This has to stop. I don't want to look back on my life and realize I missed so much time with family and friends. I'm going to make a conscious effort to spend more time with them in 2024.

✅ Definitely did this more this year, and our daughter was a big factor in this. But as I've said, I'm basically done with social media and spending the new found time with friends. I've even reached out to folks I haven't talked to in years.

-Master my mind and emotions and slowly and stably build a futures account. This will be excruciatingly slow against the size I'm used to, but it's what I have to do after a bad loss at the end of 2023. I believe if I can do this next year, I'll be able to be profitable for the rest of my life - but this comes down more to a matter of changing my entire concept of discipline than anything else.

❌ While I did finally get to the 1.5K payout threshold on an account back in September, I got too cocky and blew the account the very next day. I've anyway heard more and more sketchy things about funded trading organizations, so I think I subconsciously wanted to just stop it altogether. I'm back to doing passive funds, but if I ever get back into active trading I think it will be through an algorithm - AMT JOY is a step in that direction.

-This one might sound weird, but I really want to make an impact where I'm currently working. It's such a great team, and I want to improve possibilities for innovation, company-wide "hackathon" days, and much more. Every day that passes, more possibilities with technology become possible, and I think it's amazing to be able to talk about these developments with other motivated engineers.

✅ Probably overdid it on this one, and it's looking like it will pay off with a raise / new product owner position.

-Finally hire a co-founder (or at the very least, part-time VA) for my company, Full Stack Craft! As I mentioned before, I'm at my limit for the number of SaaS products I can handle, and I'm looking forward to hiring someone to help me with the day-to-day software development of all our products.

❌ I think I still need to find the right product here, or at least the right direction for my company, before I am ready to take on my first employee.

-Get back into drawing, photography, and art in general. In October, in a random evening of inspiration, I created two new prints and started taking more pictures again art and photography were yet two more things I threw to the wayside in my trading and product efforts this year.

✅ Definitely taking a lot more photos and many new prints are in the works.

Thanks!

That's that, looking forward to 2025!

-Chris