I spent 2024 trying to improve my website while doing some other projects. I’ve definitely learned a lot, but sadly, writing better blog posts wasn’t one of them. This is still something I rarely do because it rarely crosses my mind, but when it does, I tend to write a lot.
The website looks much better now than it did at the beginning of the year, and I got most of what I wanted done. It still looks a bit simple, but I will keep improving on it this year, and that includes finishing the things I wasn’t able to do last year. The goal for last year was to have a clear idea of what the website should look like, but I needed to start with the basics. I needed a foundation that I can experiment with before I start making the website look and function in a way that I actually want it to this year. With that out of the way, I can start doing the things that I wanted to do with the website, and then a little more.
JavaScript is on my list of things to learn and integrate into my website. It probably won’t sit well with people who actively disable JavaScript on their browsers, but I’ll make sure it works for them too.
I took on more projects this year, most of which I haven’t really posted on this website. I just need to push them to GitHub, but for the most part, I’m proud of myself for it. I even got a new laptop so I could do these projects, since a few of them involve AI. I had to make sure my new laptop had an NPU in it so I could actually do them. It might not have been a good idea to buy it in October though, since January is when new laptops come out. As I’m writing this, CES 2025 just wrapped up, where all the new tech is usually announced. I’m missing out on some new hardware as a result, but the improvements that come with it aren’t worth the upgrade because again, I bought a new laptop last October, and that laptop has hardware announced at CES 2024. I’m not far behind, considering before October, my primary laptop was made in 2019.
With that being said, there’s going to be plenty of things that I intend to do for this website, and I’m going to have some fun while I do it. I could just use a different site generator or just start with a template, but that’s not as fun. Plus, it doesn’t necessarily teach me how to make a website that is truly my own. I will look into more CSS packages this year, since I’m still not that good at styling and it’s still a lot faster to use those than trying to do my own styling from scratch.
There will be more projects that I will be doing this year. When I got my new laptop, it was not only so I could keep myself up-to-date on the tech industry, but also because I still have a kernel driver and a userspace application that I want to complete. The kernel driver is the easy part, but the userspace application is a little harder because I want it to be able to use the RGB feature in my keyboard. I’ll have more details on that in another post of some kind.
AI is clearly in everyone’s minds, and people seem to be both happy and terrified about it. It sucks that my laptop is not a Copilot+ PC, but it still has an NPU in it, so it can still handle Copilot. I can have some fun and play with it, although I do have AnythingLLM installed to this machine, so if I’m ever disconnected from the internet, I can just use AnythingLLM instead. I’m learning how to not only use LLMs, but also make my own, along with neural networks and getting these applications to use the NPU and not the NVIDIA GPU that’s in my laptop, so I’m going to have a lot of fun. I really should be using this a lot more, and I encourage anyone who’s reading this to do the same thing. Don’t think of AI as a replacement, but as an assistant. That way, you can complete a lot of your tasks much faster, including writing new code.
2025 will be a great year (at least for me). I just need to take a deep breath and remind myself that no matter how badly I did last time, I can always learn from it and do better this time around. It’s much better than to be pessimistic, and I’m sure there’s plenty of reasons for that. For now, I hope everyone who reads this has a great year.
Just don’t use Twitter. I know it’s called “X” now, but I’m still going to call it “Twitter” because that was a good name. I don’t even use it much anymore, so I’m already making progress on having a good year.