2024 year sum up

December 24, 2024 - 8 mins read

yearly sum up

Summary of important things that I did in 2024

I opened for myself mindfulness practice.
I reduced my weight from 96 to 86 kg.
I found a new job as SRE Lead at Agoda.
I rearranged my “work from home” office room to have a better working place.
I added more pictures to my yearly review to illustrate what was done.

Most interesting/inspiring people I met during 2024:

This year I met really a lot of interesting people. Mostly because my new workplace - Agoda has a lot of smart, talented and interesting people. I could make this list much longer, but it wouldn’t be practical, so I will limit it to 6 people.

Artavazd Balaian - Senior Lead Software Engineer at Agoda.
- I’m impressed by his ability to challenge the status quo and his ability to think outside the box.
Jamie Lennox - Director of TPM at Agoda.
- He connects people and be a force behind solving company wide problems. That’s really inspiring.
Tzahi Hakikat - Director Of Operations in Agoda
- Always has unorthodox view on ideas and problems. Combined with deeply practical approach - I would like to be able to do the same.
Witchanon Umpriwan - Staff SRE Engineer at Agoda
- I’m impressed by his ability to dig into complex issues and find a solution really fast. I would like to be as fast as he is.
Philipp Wiendl - Senior DevOps Engineering Manager at Agoda
- Great ability to organize and make everything simple and manageable.
- I want to learn and improve my ability in those areas.
Jirapong Wattanatom - SRE Team Lead at Agoda
- He has a lot of cool skills to look up to.
- And the most I’m impressed by his ability to care about team and prioritize what’s important.

New hobby this year:

I started to cook more
- A lot of simple food, like fried eggs, kashas, vegetable salads, cut fruits, baked chicken nuggets and so on.
- I baked a Charlotte cake.
  - Photos
Mindfulness practice

Two might-have-been dream in this year:

Achieve a full compliance with sleep and walk SLO
Move to Australia
- I tried to find a job in Australia, but it appears that it’s very hard to find a job there if you are abroad.
Apply for a Green Card
- I was way too busy with my work for that, it was end of my trial period in Agoda, so I had to focus on work.
I almost stopped drinking coffee for the first 8 months, but then I started to drink it again.
- No coffee was a really good for me. Especially on sleep quality.
- I need to find a way to get back to no coffee routine.

What did not go well

Electronic clutter started to grow again.
I got laid off from my job at PropertyGuru.
- PropertyGuru laid off all engineers in Bangkok office.
- Funny Picture

What went well

I managed to reduce my weight from 96 kg to 86 kg.
I greatly improved my sleep pattern.
I found a new job in Agoda as Lead SRE Engineer.
- That a really great place to work and grow as a (SRE) engineer.
- What’s interesting that I got two job offers from Agoda and another company. I was impressed by me pulling that off.
- In addition to being a great work place, Agoda has nice event for employees and their families. Like a Halloween party.
- Photos
I started to write code again.
- Including exercises from Cracking the Coding Interview book.
I found Sunday coding sessions meet-up
- That contributed to my coding practice.
I rearranged my “work from home” office room to have a better working place.
- standing desk
- split keyboard
- Photos
I read some books. 20 minutes of books reading every day. Books I read:
- “Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems” by Laine Campbell and Charity Majors
- “System Design Interview – An insider’s guide” by Alex Xu, Volumes 1 and 2
We travelled:
- Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur
  - Mainly to get new visas for Thailand.
  - In addition we also went to cool places for kids.
    - Kidzania - kids can try different professions there.
    - Super Park - kids can play there, trampoline, slides, climbing walls and more :)
  - Photos
- Thailand, Khao Kho
  - We visited “Amazing Dinosaurs” and Windmill farms.
  - Kids were quite happy :)
  - Photos
- Thailand, Khao Lak
  - See the sea, beach, kids club, and relax.
- Thailand, Korat
  - Jim Thompson farm
  - We go there every year, and it’s always fun.
  - Every year we see something new. This year there was a lot of information about rice and products from it.
  - Photos
Mindfulness practice was a real game changer for me. I started to be much happier and more productive.
- I use Headspace app for that.
- I realize that being present here and now can make you much happier and more productive.
- I noticed that I can be more calm and less anxious.
Kids are growing
- Kids are smart and cute
- Photos
I continue to organize Ukrainian IT Fridays
- Photos
I do less doom scrolling now
- I found it’s effective to install apps that add delay to opening social media apps.
I moved from emacs back to neovim.
- Now my NeoVIM config is growing :D

Job search story in 2024

In February 2024 PropertyGuru laid off all engineers in Bangkok office.
IT job market is very cold in 2024.
I realized that sending CVs to companies is not effective.
- Before I realized that I spent a lot of time optimizing my CV and sending it to companies.
You need to contact people directly.
So finding a job is now a full time job by itself.
For me it wasn’t very hard to pass the job interviews, but it was hard to get them.
- I mean interviews were challenging and they ask hard questions.
- At the same time I have about 20 years of experience in SysOps, DevOps, SRE.
- So I can answer most of the questions.
PropertyGuru lay off was a wake up call for me.
- I live in Thailand on a work visa.
- Any time I can be laid off. And my visa will be cancelled.
- I need to settle somewhere, I cannot just be on a temporary visas all the time.
- One of the options is to apply for a Green Card in the USA.
- Another option is to move to Australia.
Good parts of the job search - that I wanted to become better:
- More coding and system design practice.
- Mindfullness.
- Experimenting and learning new things.
- Better prioritization and time management.

What I would like to achieve in 2025?

I want to:

I want to reduce doom scrolling to less than 30 minutes per day.
- Doom scrolling is:
  - Facebook
  - Telegram
  - Twitter
  - Reddit
  - Google News
  - Netflix
- I can control it through screen time log on my phone.
I want to be mindful every day.
- That’s hard to measure.
- I can check my mood and what I’m worry about monthly.
I want to keep my performance at work at more than expected or better level
sleep >= 7:30 hours per day for at least 20 days per month.
- Get a better sleeping place for myself.
Have my weight <= 80 kg.
- Do at least 8000 steps monthly average.
- I want to try monthly average, to incentivize me to do more than 8k steps on some days to compensate for less steps on other days.
fix >= 2 of my health problems
write code every day. programming language doesn’t matter.
earn 5000 USD per month after expenses.
- continue to invest in ETF fund(s) and provident fund
- find 3rd source of income.
Get progress in moving to Australia.
- Define plan, milestones, what my progress look like.
- Start to move towards that goal.
Save 100 hours by automating things.
- Personal finance
- Bills
- Tasks logs
- Migrate all my notes to Obsidian
That can sound silly - but I want a better chair :)
I want to limit coffee to 1 cup per week.

Retrospective on 2024 goals.

I wanted:

I want to plan every coming day.
sleep >= 7:30 hours per day for at least 20 days per month.
- Get a better sleeping place for myself.
- 5 months out of 12
Have my weight <= 90 kg.
- Do at least 8000 steps every day
- 2 months out of 12
fix >= 2 of my health problems
write code >= 3 days per week. programming language doesn’t matter.
- Finding sunday coding sessions was a great help.
- I also do programming exercises from Cracking the Coding Interview book every weekend.
earn 5000 USD per month after expenses.
- I continue to invest in ETF fund(s)
- I started to invest in provident fund.
start speaking Thai, even if it will be very simple talks.
- I’m in fully Thai team now, that helps :)