2024, Warpped

Is this a lazy header image? Yes, yes it is. Do I care? Nope, sure don’t.

Whale hello there! It's been a hot minute. I hope you all had a good holiday season! Mine definitely had its ups and downs, but on the whole it was a relaxing and much-needed break. I started back at the grind last week, and as is tradition, wanted my first post of the year to recap what happened in ACRL in 2024 and peer ahead to what's coming in 2025. So let's take a look!

2024 by the numbers

• I had 31 official meetings this past year; that's up by 2 from 2023, which maybe seems like not great numbers considering that I only worked half a year in 2023, except that it's kindof a lie. I had a lot more meetings than that with my client, and also a few other meetings where I just forgot to take notes on. If you count all my client meetings and so forth, we're probably pushing into the triple-digit meeting count for 2024. So productive!

• I tried to see how many things I completed on my todo list, but this is actually non-trivial for me to figure out. I spent a while poking through Notion to figure it out, and wasn't getting any numbers that made sense, so I gave up. I will say that I've become less rigorous about tracking my tasks and todos. This is a common pattern for me: when I start something new, I have a hard time keeping it all in my head so I have a more rigorous task tracking habit. Once I settle into some patterns, I give up on the task tracking a bit. Unfortunately I have been forgetting a few things here and there, so I need to get back to a slightly more rigorous habit here in 2025.

• In terms of writing code, I made 578 contributions to GitHub in 2024. If we extrapolate out, this is a little bit less than I did in 2023, but it's a little low since it doesn't include contributions to private client codebases. I also spent most of Q4 doing sales and marketing work, so it's perhaps understandable that I didn't get as much code written.

• On the "lines of code written" front, SimKube has increased to 14k from about 5.5k in the last year. I also wrote approximately 3-4k lines of code for other projects, including a thousand-ish lines for Kompile. This again doesn't count any of the code I wrote for my client's private codebases.

• On the "blog subscriber" front, I'm now up to 190 folks who want to read the words I hand-deliver to your email inboxes! I have 18 paid subscribers, which is also super awesome. I appreciate all of you! I wrote 25 blog posts this last year, which comes out to about one post every two weeks, so I hope you feel like you got your money's worth. I do still have aspirations of publishing a post a week, but I think we all know by this point that isn't super realistic. Lastly, a reminder that this blog is not how I make my money, but paid subscriptions do help me do things like attend conferences, meet potential clients, and convert them to paying customers! So all your support is very much appreciated.

• Speaking of conferences, I again went to two conferences last year: NSDI in the spring and KubeCon in the fall. I didn’t speak at NSDI, but I gave two talks at KubeCon! I also gave a talk at UCSC for their grad student colloquium back in the spring. I'm really liking the two-conferences-per-year cadence, and I'm setting up to match that again this year: I'll be attending the SoCal Linux Expo in March, and am planning to attend KubeCon again in November! And hopefully I’ll get at least one talk in somewhere.

• On the capitalism front: I had a client who paid me money in 2024, and I actually made a small profit! This is very exciting to me, because it means I get to continue existing (as a corporate entity) in 2025! Hooray.

The plan for 2025

My plan for 2025 doesn't actually look that different from my plan for 2024: I'm still trying to grow ACRL to the point that it is long-term sustainable. I have some good news on that front! As of today, I actually have two (2!) signed contracts for work in 2025; I've doubled my number of clients! And I have several more potential leads for work later in the year as well. I think some of my hard work in Q4 on the sales and marketing front last year is starting to show fruit, which is pretty exciting.

I also have another grant submission that I finished up towards the end of last year. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this proposal: I have another year of work under my belt from the last grant submission cycle, and I'm pretty sure my proposal this year is stronger than my proposal last year. I also got scores back on last year's proposal, and I was only a few points away from getting funded! So, while I understand that the whole grant submission thing is a total crapshoot, I do think I've got a good chance of getting that through. We'll find out in a few months, though!

Aside from that, I still do want to hire someone this year, if I can bring in enough income, and—at a time when DEI is kindof a bad word in the corporate world—I still do want to find ways to support these efforts. I was able to make one small donation last year to The Diana Initiative, and I'm hoping this year to be able to make some larger impacts in this area.

Lastly, on the boring legal front: I think I'm planning to convert my LLC from a passthrough entity for tax purposes into being taxed like an S-corp. I've read all the resources I can find on this, as well as had multiple conversations with my accountant and attorney, and I think I now finally understand all the implications of that decision, but the whole system is confusing AF. So, I'm not a lawyer or an accountant and can't provide any real advice in the matter, but if you ever want to commiserate with someone about all this bullshit, feel free to hit me up!

SimKube, SimKube, SimKube!

It wouldn't be a post by me without talking about SimKube, so I'll just close by mentioning some of my goals and aspirations for that project as well. I have three:

1. Support simulations using Prometheus metrics: a bunch of Kubernetes components (for example, the HPA) don't use the declared "YAML" to make their decisions, but instead act in real-time by looking at results from Prometheus or other metrics sources. Unfortunately, SimKube doesn't know about any of these sources right now, so there's a huge swath of Kubernetes controllers that just won't work in SimKube. My main goal for the year is to get SimKube working with these metrics so I can simulate the HPA and other similar components.

2. Continue enhancing skctl xray: I actually haven't blogged about this feature hardly at all, but it's one of the coolest unexpected SimKube developments I built from last year. I'm using ratatui to create a user interface right in your terminal that lets you explore and modify trace files before you submit them for simulation. It's really exciting, and I have a lot of grand plans for how to make xray even more useful in the future: I'd love to make it the single interface for preparing, running, and monitoring your simulations.

3. Build better data generation tools: the data generation project that my HMC Clinic Team has been working on has really taken off. I think we've got a really strong approach for being able to generate new (synthetic) data for SimKube and make it useful. If we're lucky, we may even get a research paper or two out of it! But first we have to actually make it happen.

Of course I do have plans for a lot more SimKube content to come in the new year; I have an article that will be published in a leading magazine sometime in the next couple weeks, I have a website redesign/rebrand in the works, I have a bunch more blog posts coming up, and I'm (still) trying to get myself on a podcast somewhere. I'll keep you all posted as that stuff happens!

But for now, it's back to work for me. As always, thanks for reading¹.

~drmorr

1. You might have been wondering about the lack of footnotes in this post; well, that's easy to explain: I have a New Year's Resolution to use fewer footnotes, and I'm happy to say I'm meeting that goal easil—oh damn.