As many of us continue to fill our bodies with holiday treats, I’ve been trying to find the right word for my year-in-review post. “Uncomfortable” was probably the most fitting. Things that felt more stable in past years felt squishier this year, which made life feel a bit more uncomfortable than I would’ve liked. Thankfully, my personal pillar of life was a solid one which gave some footing in this unstable environment. So let’s get to the details.
2024 Work
From a work standpoint, things were decent overall, all things considered. I worked on a handful of projects with clients. Things were still design system focused, but in a variety of categories like:
- Design token consultation
- Design system codemod and documentation work
- Design system build in web components
- Generative AI work around design system component generation and usage
For some reason a lot of it felt a bit slow, like we were gaining traction and then getting knocked off of our feet. But in the end, we were able to deliver so valuable deliverables to our clients. A few of our partners were new while most of them were folks we had previously worked with. It’s always great seeing friendly faces that you have enjoyed working with in the past.
AI was, unsurprisingly, the talk of the web design and development industry. It seemed to be mentioned in any commercial on TV by the early part of the year. If I’m being honest, it’s one thing that provided a good bit of anxiety early on in our explorations with it. All of the questions from “will this take my job?” to “will this be used in terrible ways in the world?” were running through my head. Being honest with my team helped me navigate some of these questions a bit. Working with some of the tools out there also helped me learn how to utilize AI to assist with some of my own web development tasks. It also helped to have some very smart people working beside me, too. We even gave an online event around this where AI didn’t build my more complex component correctly. So that was fun, too! I realized that I am more interested in the “how does this change the human part of work” than I am on the specifics around GPT-4o or GPT-4o mini.
The human part of work is where my passion lies. When you are working in the weeds with people year-after-year whether they are in North Carolina, Florida, or India, you share this common goal of making a successful product. But along that journey you learn to respect those folks for the caring and empathetic human beings that they usually are. They have hobbies that don’t involve coding. They’re parents to kids. They have struggles and accomplishments. Creating relationship and helping people out are reasons why I went into meteorology and it’s one thing I have really enjoyed about working with a lot of different web design and development teams over the years.
Despite Brad Frost and I being a quite a bit different personality-wise, one thing I feel like we can agree on is that we enjoy being around people and helping where we can. Well, that and quoting Adam Sandler movies way too often. One thing we have talked about for a while now is creating a course around some of the stuff that we have been iterating over for a decade. What better way to help as many people out who are struggling with building design systems than by launching a course?
So Brad and I released preorders for an in-depth course on design tokens called Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens. We are incredibly excited to share our knowledge around this with more people than we would with a handful of clients. I think the thing we hope to bring to the table is experience with many clients and being able to speak to some of the gnarlier bits that we come across working in the weeds with our teams. We are trying to make it as accessible as we can for folks of all backgrounds. We are currently in the process of putting the course together and hope to have it out early in 2025.
2024 Life
From a life standpoint, the year was a pretty good one overall. I became a dad late last year and had to learn what work-life balance was in 2024. The days of “burning the midnight oil” had to come to an end, or at least decreased. There’s certainly extra pressure that having a kid puts on you, but man oh man, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Kids add a perspective to life that you tend to forget about as you get older. It has brought out the kid in me again. It has allowed me to be more present. It has taught me to be goofier because, while I may look stupid to an adult, a laugh from my son means more than anything. Life’s too short to not be funny and have fun, especially when everything you’re seeing on a macro level seems like it is falling apart.
Another highlight was Frostapalooza. Thanks to Brad being an old man and wanting to throw a concert, I got to play drums for 3 hours in my first larger gig in 20 years at his show with a bunch of amazing people. It was a ton of fun playing with over 30 family members, friends, and influential web people. Music tends to heal the soul and that weekend felt great from beginning to end! I wrote a blog post about Frostapalooza if you want to take a look.
So what about 2025?
2025 will be a bit of a shift in terms of what my focus is on. The first part of the year will involve focusing on our course and continuing with a client engagement or two. It feels weird being in unchartered territory, but also a bit freeing as well. The content is stuff we know really really well and hope that we can support as many people as possible who are struggling with design systems. Will this turn into more courses? Conferences? Workshops? More client work? We’ll see where it takes us. Most of all, I am excited to meet new people, learn from them, and help each other out.
It is a weird time in the world. I hope that we can bring a little positivity into this bizarre sphere we live on by being kind to other people, sharing what we know, and learning from one another. Whatever shit show you may be dealing with, always remember to be kind to yourselves in addition to being kind to others. Happy New Year and cheers to new adventures! Hope to cross paths with you in 2025!