Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets #41

2024 Recap and Highlights

<Squeaky door creaks> The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open.

2024 flew by, and mostly without any action in the Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets. My apologies to my many faithful readers for that. I will try my best to be more consistent in 2025! This post is a reflection on 2024. I hope you find it useful and that it sends you down some rabbit 🐰 holes. Happy New Year!

AI Takeover

In addition to my failure to prioritize writing publicly in 2024, I struggled to find topics to write about as it often seemed that Generative AI dominated the landscape. A few brief thoughts on that…

• AI seems promising, but it is still very early. A lot of the news has been related to developments in chips (NVDA +190%) and large infrastructure build outs by cloud providers. Most companies I know are investing in Generative AI and are optimistic about the future, but the work in 2024 was yet more infrastructure buildout (albeit internal — legal, compliance, privacy, data, talent, etc.). As those buildouts complete, will the value start flowing?

• I’ve observed some degree of business value in co-pilots and add-ons to SaaS applications, improved chatbot experiences, or AI generated feedback summaries (Amazon), but the overall market still seems to be anticipatory. When will the “killer app” arrive? Or will there be a complete paradigm shift that comes (agents instead of apps?). That remains to be seen.

Regardless of where you stand on AI, at least one thing remains true: The need for business-critical SaaS applications, quality cloud infrastructure services, talented software engineers equipped with best practices, a good organizational architecture, a strong integration capability / API strategy, mutually beneficial partnerships, robust identity management and security services, and strong data management practices has not gone away. It has, perhaps, become even more critical. Will AI change any of this in the future? Maybe. But today, these things remain essential to an organization that wants to thrive in their applications of technology. And I suspect these same things will be necessary for organizations that want to maximize AI as it develops.

2024 Reflection

I like to do some reflection throughout and at the end of the year, so here are a few key items that may be useful / informative.

Key Highlights

2024 was a great year. Our little boy, Jackson, turned One the week of Christmas (12/22). It has been an amazing year to be his dad, to watch him grow physically, to watch him learn about how things work, and to enjoy all the unique little things about him and memories with him. This is the unquestionable highlight of the year.

We made some fun trips this year. In the summer we went to the PacNW to visit Mt. Rainier National Park, Hood River, Crater Lake, and the Oregon coast. In the fall we spent about 10 days in Jackson, WY, Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone, and the Bitterroot Valley in MT. I love getting out west, especially in the fall.

Bonus: I did watch the first third or so of the Harry Potter movies with the kids (parts 1-3). And the Lord of the Rings series (it has been years).

Some favorites and takeaways

Favorite Podcast Episode: I listened to Alex Hormozi on Modern Wisdom while doing a solo 20-mile hike in Grand Teton National Park last fall. I actually started it a second time, and listened to it a third time later. I’ve become a big fan of Alex’s podcast The Game as well. I had so many takeaways from this episode, I won’t write them here. Perhaps that will be my next post, though.

Favorite Quote: From the above podcast episode, “The magic you’re looking for is in the thing you’ve been avoiding”. I’ve applied this in many areas, but the easiest example is in fitness. I had been avoiding carrying heavy sandbags over distance or holding them for extended times because, well… it sucks. Same for stretching / mobility work. It is easy to avoid “deeper work” at work (the kind that requires sitting and thinking vs just responding to urgent matters)… if that’s the thing you’ve avoiding, just go there. The magic is there.

Favorite Book: Comfort Crisis (listened to it on Audible 3 times)

Best Habit: I think I have a tie here between 11) Daily Journaling and 2) working out at lunch. I haven’t written publicly a lot, but I did write about my key priorities, my workouts, and my thoughts on many things in a Google Doc journal every day in 2024. It was fun to read back through them and remember moments from the year, and to be reminded of ideas that were beginning to develop (to see how they’ve grown) or to revisit them again. Working out at lunch breaks the day in half, which is awesome, and ensures I maintain a focus on my fitness goals.

Efforts I really enjoyed: Edge Monsters and Chief Architect Network

Getting out of comfort zone: I try and challenge myself or learn new things so I can maintain a beginner’s mindset often. This helps with staying humble, but also just keeps life interesting. This year I learned a lot about hunting… specifically that it can be HARD. I learned about climbing trees with climbing stands, using saddles to hunt, managing the wind, scouting for places to hunt, and more. Not to mention learning to shoot a bow effectively. I also walked around in the woods a lot and in some new terrain (north-central WY), which was awesome. So far, I haven’t succeeded but hopefully that will change before the end of January.

Most Interesting Tech Trend: The juxtaposition of the continued miniaturization of things (enabling powerful edge applications on small form factors with low energy usage) while also seeing the growth of supercomputing (entire racks with huge form factors and massive energy demands leading to big nuclear power investments).

Things I enjoyed building: 2024 saw the launch of the Chief Architect Network (CAN) and Edge Monsters, and I am thankful to be a co-founder in both. CAN is all about creating the world’s best network of Chief Architects and Enterprise Architecture leaders. Edge Monsters brings together the world’s best Edge Computing practitioners with production experience. As always, I love being the least-smart person in the room.

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I could go on and on. 2024 was an exciting and busy year. Stick with me in 2025 as there is more to come. Future Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets topics are likely to include more thoughts around miniaturization and edge computing, managing technical debt, enterprise architecture, work-life balance, the resurgence of nuclear energy, and more. If there is something else you’d like me to write about, just let me know. I am open to ideas. Until next time…