This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
I'm one of those people who love looking back on a year. Reflecting on what I've done, what I've learned, and what I want to achieve in the following year. This year—like many others—I jumped on Twitch to recap my year, review the stats, and talk about what I want to do moving forward.
Here are the stats, things I learned, and goals I have for 2025. The main reason I like sharing these things is to inspire and motivate others. I hope you find it interesting ❤️.
2024 Stats and Achievements
I look at the main things I completed during the year. For me, as a developer advocate and influencer, a lot of what I do is content creation. I check out the number of conferences I spoke at, videos I created, blog posts written, and even GitHub contributions. After adding them all up, you can see the stats yourself:
Finally, I looked at a couple of big things I achieved. I was really excited to win one of DEV's first DEV challenges, and it motivated and encouraged me to submit to more in future, including this one.
I also won some awards that I'm really proud of, and was selected in the "top 3% of most active speakers on Sessionize". Something I think that's really important when it comes to stats and achievements is thanking people 🙏. Most of the things I've achieved in the past year wouldn't have been possible without others: conference organisers who selected my sessions, colleagues who put me forward for opportunities, and those who chose to publish my articles. In one of my LinkedIn posts I tagged and thanked multiple people and organisations who helped me achieve these numbers last year.
Things I learned
Retrospectives wouldn't be useful if we didn't learn anything from them. I picked up some really cool technical skills last year.
Test writing and test driven development
One of my colleagues took time out to teach me all about writing tests for code. I learned about test driven development (TDD), the testing hierarchy, and the importance of writing tests, as well as types of testing. I documented these learnings in a blog post:
One of the reasons I love writing blog posts, is not only to share my knowledge and learnings with others, but to have good documentation that I can refer back to when I need it. There have been at least three occasions since writing the article where I've been building websites and writing tests, and I've referred back to this article. Thus, I encourage you, if you learn something new, write about.
Online Learning
I've known about LinkedIn Learning for a while, having featured it under my GitHub repo of free learning resources for several years, however I feel as though the platform is now well-developed, featuring many different types of learning—from technical to management, project engineering, emotional intelligence, resilience, and more.
As such, I've completed over 60 LinkedIn Learning courses, most in the past few months. It's a great way to upskill and discover new areas of learning. There's also Microsoft Learn where I completed several courses. I'd encourage you to add learning—both formal and informal—to your goals for 2025.
Learning to say no
This is one of the hardest things, especially for someone like me who really likes to help people. Learning to say no—and actually doing it this year—taught me a lot. I gained a lot more time that I could use for more impactful things, and other people valued and respected my time more. Whilst I've always known these things, and have been to so many different talks on the subject, it's really hard to actually do. But once you do, there's something liberating about putting it into practice.
I believe it was during Christina's talk at NDC London last year that I finally thought "Right! I'm going to do this".
Not only is she a brilliant speaker, but she also pointed out one of the things I struggled with when saying "no": how not to feel bad about it. I'd recommend giving her talk a watch.
Goals for 2025
I think it's really good to reflect on what we've done and learned and look forward. Well, from this post, it's clear I did a lot, and learned a lot from 2024, so how do I top that? On New Year's Eve, as my husband and I sat on the beach, sipping champagne and waiting for the fireworks, we asked each other about our goals for this year.
So if you want to hear about how I structure yearly goals, and learn a bit about my 2025 goals, check out my next blog post:
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