52 things I enjoyed in 2024

Hello! Last year I wrote a list of 52 things I enjoyed in 2023, shared it at work and people seemed to like it so I thought I’d do it again. Also I liked compiling it as it gave me a chance to reflect on things that had crossed my interest threshold last year and the patterns in my reading and video watching. There were lots of nice moments where I was like “oh yeah I went down that rabbit hole of indie websites in April, that was fun!”.

So here are 52 things I enjoyed in 2024. I hope you find one or two that you enjoy too.

52 things I enjoyed in 2024

  1. The best thing I saw all year is Dua Lipa’s original Tiny Desk Concert from the pandemic. I watched it at least 40 times. I had not consciously listened to a Dua Lipa song until I sat down to watch her set at Glastonbury in August. At the end of the year she was my top played artist, and I was in the top 0.5% of listeners.

  2. I thought and read a lot about blogs and blogging, and having an independent web presence this year. That theme will show up in a few links I expect, including this philosophy for maintaining a digital garden, a personal space on the web.

  3. The hottest restaurant in France is an all you can eat buffet. (Also best title of the year?)

  4. I was a bit obsessed by this user experience prototype where someone experimented with building a single stream of their total digital lift.

  5. It turns out modernity killed Dracula.

  6. It’s fun to watch an accomplished biker ride on everything at the new Adidas campus, or try to do a series of backflips on a moving train.

  7. A lovely breakdown of writing an iOS native app by yourself over many years. All the decision points driven by simplicity, vision, and not setting out for money or size.

  8. How many fucks do you have to give and where should you give them? Here’s one answer: A unified theory of fucks.

  9. Symmetry is boring.

  10. A profile of the Google researchers who wrote “Attention is all you need”, the foundational paper on transformer architectures for AI.

  11. A writer who spent many years teaching English in China catches up with a new generation of Chinese students who moved to America to see how they’ve found it.

  12. The guy who created Panic studios who built things like a historic ftp app, a handheld gaming computer, and the angry goose game, saw a wild mural in a McDonalds and got curious about it.

  13. A playful UX experiment evolving the infinite canvas.

  14. I love running water in the outdoors so I am seriously considering copying this dude who built a waterfall in his backgarden

  15. There’s lots of little homes being built in this “community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs”, and lots of vacant lots.

  16. Someone died and ended up paying a $7m tax bill in the US. But who was it?

  17. In the early 2000s the fashion world was overturned by bloggers of all things. And weirdly I was reading a lot of those blogs at the time, so I felt very nostalgic reading this history of the scene.

  18. A sublime article outlining the provocative thought that the finance industry contributes net zero to our society. I’m 100% here for this view.

  19. In the Punjab in northern India, where my family is from originally, people build ornate water towers on the tops of their houses. As a kid on holiday I always liked looking for ones shaped as animals.

  20. Some people at work are Poets, others are Police. You need both to get shit done. Can you guess which one I identify as?

  21. Are fragile or robust solutions better? Inconclusive but I couldn’t agree with the opening lines of this article more: “I have an almost moral dislike for the four-wheeled suitcase.”

  22. There are annual awards for Tiny Websites, and the shortlist is really lovely.

  23. The Excel World Championships is a thing, it takes place in Vegas, and it was big on ESPN and YouTube last year. Who knew? (Also click that link just to see the page design).

  24. I lost a very enjoyable weekend to going down the rabbit hole of James Hoffman’s coffee YouTube channel and it all started with this breakdown of Nespresso pods. Be careful, you might find yourself buying a £500 coffee grinder after an hour or two on there.

  25. I’d never come across the How to be a hacker handbook before (from the 90s!) but the words resonated a lot with me, “Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.” That’s pretty sound in my book.

  26. I, of course, listened to many episodes of the Oxide and Friends podcast (maybe all of them this year?!). A I enjoyed a lot were the one about the history of GPUs with Raja Koduri and the one about why Oxide uses Cockroach DB

  27. China Analyst Dan Wang has for many years written a brilliant letter with his reflections on China’s economic and political changes over the previous 12 months and his 2023 letter was his last. That’s left a huge hole in my January reading and I expect I will be a little bit dumber as a result.

  28. Another reflection on building an app (and a business), this time from the founder of a iPad app, Muse, a canvas based tool for thinking. Reflecting on how they set out to build something big and ended up as a one person company long term has given me a lot to think about what success means were I ever to start another company.

  29. When we were writing the Core Infra Product Vision, Max, Mårten and I used a few classic technical vision-y texts as inspiration and one of them was this, Design considerations for an anthropophilic computer by Jeff Raskin, an early desinger at Apple. It describes how he wants a computer to be and is full of short opinionated sentences like “Seeing the guts is taboo.” We didn’t manage to do as well with ours but I feel there’s echoes of this.

  30. Here’s a clear and thorough explanation of what a board of directors does (also what good looks like and how you might get on one).

  31. 57 sandwiches that define New York City, with pictures. This one is for Morgy.

  32. I had an ethereal experience with a Taiwanese beef noodle soup in Bao (a restaurant) about halfway through the year. I then spent a few months trying to recreate it and ended up landing on this recipe which gets pretty close.

  33. The puzzling and heartbreaking story about a teenager who jumped to his death from a fancy London towerblock starts peeling back the layers of shady money in the city and the cast of dangerous characters who are moving it around. Also contains one of my favourite descriptions of the year: “London is the capital of pristine façades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash.”

  34. Shigeru Ban is an architect who tests the limits of building in wood and paper.

  35. Reggie is a guy who invites people to sing with him in the street. The results are often surprising and joyous. He always asks people afterwards: “Now that you’ve sung, how do you feel?”

  36. Some thoughts on how calendars could take advantage of layers.

  37. Of course, Wikipedia editors are getting good at finding AI hoax articles (but probably not that good?)

  38. Sally Rooney turned to Wittgenstein when she got stuck writing her latest novel. I knew I liked her.

  39. Maybe you can make yourself more lucky.

  40. You didn’t know that you needed to watch a 4 hour review of a visit to Disney’s Star Wars hotel but trust me you do. The visit didn’t go well, Disney closed the hotel, and we all learned a lot about the economics, passion, and attention to detial needed to satisfy true fans.

  41. How to build a writing habit and how to build a creative practice. Both very practical but one is direct and one is dreamy.

  42. Simple tips on how to make a spreadsheet more accessible.

  43. The best place to find something out is still often a forum.

  44. Given no one likes doing software engineering estimates and also we need some way of doing estimates, what’s the minimal viable method for estimation that we should follow.

  45. This brilliant short story, about a Marine who is waiting to hear whether he’ll have to lead his platoon to the ground invasion of Japan in World War II, made me think a lot about fear, and waiting, and leadership.

  46. An art historian reappraises a 18th Century painting and discovers that its subject, Francis Williams, was actually a distinguished scientist and contemporary of Newton. Williams had been overlooked because he was Black and a colonial rival of his had buried his legacy by using common racist stereotypes of the day.

  47. Contemporary company logos but if they’d been designed in the 80s.

  48. Two services encouraging you to build your owner corner of the internet: mmm.page and micro.blog.

  49. Ask Polly was, as always, a marvel for the whole year. Here’s one that I (somewhat predictably) liked: Tolerating unknowns will make you stronger

  50. I’ve almost read 20 books this year, for the first time since I’ve had 2 children. The best one was All Fours by the magnificent Miranda July (though it elicits strong opinions one way or the other).

  51. People & Blogs interviews people about their blogs. A new person every week. They ask the people to suggest other blogs. It is easy to lose yourself in blogs for a few days.

  52. Wow, well done for getting this far. I find it nice to do this sort of thing so thank you for humouring me. Finish off with New Order’s Blue Monday played on vintage Casio instruments.