(You may be interested in 2023 as well, which was last year's annual review.)

Family

Haley and I welcomed our first child, a daughter named Lucy, on September 24th. She is perfect in ways both obvious and mystical. Our whole life is hers, now: this is even true of Telemachus, who proudly and rapidly assumed the title of big brother with characteristic gusto. ^[1]

I have more writing — which is to say more thinking, which is to say more doing — about what it means to be a parent, and how to be a good parent. We read the Oster books, we road-tested strollers; we were lucky enough to have a safe and relatively uncomplicated time at the hospital ^[2]; we slept for sixty minutes at a time, then two hours, then four, and now six. Everything is a lovely maelstrom; we have never been so lucky, to have found each other and to have the sibling and parents and extended family of friends and neighbors that we do.

Health

Ha-ha. I mean. I am going to grade myself both harshly and kindly here, which is to say that I'm in my worst shape since... 2018, maybe? I do not feel bad about this; I still try to eat fairly healthy and walk four miles a day ^[3] but there is not much else to counterbalance the "terrible sleep, much more delivery/takeaway, tremendous amounts of caffeine, no dedicated exercise time" melange in which I (just like every new parent) am adrift.

In the start of the new year, I'll be picking back up nSuns (which is quite literally exactly what I said last year before pivoting to a 5/3/1 program because nSuns was too taxing) and starting to do some jogging with hopes of improving my 5K time. We'll see! No plans (or hopes) to get into some hitherto-unseen level of fitness, just to shift back into a default state of discipline and posture now that the first wave of chaos has mostly passed and we have a bit more time and space to breathe.

Buttondown

Ending last year, I wrote:

The question that the industry trains us to ask is: what's next? I think that's obvious from a product perspective but a little less so from an organizational or business one: but my high-level goal for next year is to make a full-time hire, and all of the financial/existential commitments entailed therein.

It took me some time, but I'm ending 2024 with an answer to that question (see Why should a company?) and a full-time hire to boot.

Most of this year was spent in operations and development: I was a practitioner more than a manager, largely because I was interested in pushing Buttondown forward as much as I could before Lucy came. That was successful! Successful here meaning: Buttondown once again basically doubled in all of the metrics that matter, and it did so in a way that I felt honored my own ideals as an engineer, writer, and human.

Third South

Our goal with the first full year of Third South Capital was a diptych of existential questions:

1. Do we enjoy spending time and energy on this thesis, relative to other options?
2. Is this a financially viable thesis, relative to other options?

(And, yes, in that order.)

The answer to both questions proved to be a smashing yes, and in the waning weeks of this year we started to once again fire up our acquisitive flywheel. (Please reach out if you're ever interested in chatting about your company!)

jmduke.com

This was, legitimately, the first "real" year of writing in a long time for me. I think it was largely prompted by the increasing fracture of social networks and continued collapse of Twitter as a respectable, hospitable platform; I wanted to broadcast and no other better option remained than my own blog.

This year's biggest hits, by volume:

• Notes on buttondown.com
• Use weird tests to capture tacit knowledge
• Use Rails

(That being said, my favorite thing I wrote — in a crowded airport, on my way to MicroConf — was Two years as an independent technologist.)

For the first time in a long time, I've had people talk to me about my blog. The two most common remarks I receive are:

1. I love your blog specifically because it is so weird and idiosyncratic.
2. Why and how do you write so much? What are your goals?

I can say with some degree of smugness and honesty that the answer to the latter is the former.

Media

I don't exactly have a rich corpus of art to review from this year: the first nine months were spent being as heads-down as possible, and the last three were spent in a mode, as aforementioned, that offered little opportunity for consumption that wasn't audiobook-based.

That being said, the best things I experienced this year, in no order, were:

1. Austerlitz;
2. Possession (which I am not quite done with as I write this but is already locked in as one of my ten favorite books of all time);
3. Cromartie High School;
4. Le Samourai;
5. Legend of the Galactic Heroes
6. Mr. and Mrs. Smith;
7. Pokerogue;
8. Ripley;
9. Becoming Trader Joe (need to write this up, still!);
10. The Parallax View.

Coda

In retrospect, every cliche about parenthood is true; the one I found myself most surprised by was just how quickly and thoroughly a child seeps her way into every pore of your life, suffusing it with renewed texture and meaning and urgency. There is nothing I do now without Lucy by my side, either literally or figuratively.

In last year's coda, I wrote:

The median day of 2023 looked something like this: eight hours of sleep, a good workout, ten hours of exhausting intellectual work growing a business, some puttering around the house and tending the garden, two dog walks, an evening spent unwinding with my wife, an episode of anime with my brother. There are a lot of things I wish I could fit into that day: more time writing, more time exploring new technologies, more time playing video games, more time exploring Richmond. At the same time: I think I chose wisely.

And now, of course, I look back on that time of my life with not just a sense of detachment — again, to risk cliche every memory before your child is so aggressively The Before Times — but also a sense of irony that I could have ever felt like I didn't have enough time then. All I had was time!

And now, instead of time, I have a daughter for whom I would do anything. It is hard to fret about the things that fall away on the margins — a sourcing call that could have been interesting but certainly couldn't have been vital, a partnership talk that wouldn't work out anyway if the relevant details couldn't be hashed out over email, a great new restaurant with a wait measured in hours, a great new RPG that really hits its stride once you get past the first ten hours or so — when the alternative is this tiny little scientist of yours, bright and beckoning, whose every breath and burp and coo and cough is your charge and triumph.

What I am saying is this: it is hard to care quite as much about craft when fidelity has your eyebrows and your wife's nose — it is hard to care about scale when you have divinity asleep in your arms, sighing softly after three and a half ounces of milk.

(And I do care — and I do fret — and whenever I do too much of either, I peer into Lucy's bassinet and remember just how good we have it.)

Thank you

To my wife Haley, light of my life; to Lucy and Telly, precious and perfect; to everyone who sent us a note or meal or gift or hug for the first few weeks coming back from the hospital; to my grandparents, who I think about every time I see Lucy smile; to everyone who's patiently waiting on a response from me in Q4; to every customer who made it possible for me to step away from my job for two months and still afford Pampers; to you, dear reader, for getting this far.