Year-end wrap

A wrap of this year: personal reflections, the evolution of this newsletter, the best articles, and other stuff.

Hi Friends,

Welcome to the 103rd issue of the Polymathic Engineer newsletter. This is the last article of 2024, and the outline will be as follows:

• End-year reflections

• Evolution of the Polymathic Engineer newsletter

• Best articles of 2024

• Some thoughts on social media

End-year reflections

First of all, I hope this email finds you well. Whether you can take some time off or have to keep working during this time, I hope you can enjoy some quiet, even if it's only for a short time.

I am spending these last days of 2024 with my family in my hometown, recharging my spirit and body after an intense year of work. More and more, I realize that I feel best at the start of a new year when everything is in balance. This is why I take this time to slow down and focus on gentle things.

No matter how your year went, you're now here. Relax your shoulders, pat yourself on the back, and take a deep breath: you did it.

You don't have to rush into all of these goals and ways to become your "best self" or more productive, but use this time to think about what you want more of in your life and how you might be able to start making that happen.

A good way to do this is by answering a couple of questions.

The first one is: what have you learned from 2024? Consider what surprised you this year, what seemed harder, what you liked and didn't like so much as you reflect on the months. What are the most critical lessons learned you want to remember in 2025?

The second question is: what do you want to see happen next year that seems big, maybe even scary, and impossible to reach? Think about the things you might not even think you can do. You don't need a plan, so don't worry about how you might or might not get there.

How do you feel about these things? You might feel scared or excited about them, so try to feel them in your body as you list them.

I’ll try to answer such questions these days and invite you to do the same. It would be great to hear some of your answers in the comments.

Evolution of the Polymathic Engineer newsletter

This holiday season marks the end of the third year I've been writing “The Polymathic Engineer.” In 2024, a total of 51 newsletter issues have been read by subscribers.

This means I wrote an article every week without fail. Sometimes, I’ve stayed up late to complete my weekly post since I have a full-time job and many other commitments.

But I’ve never missed even when I was on vacation or wholly absorbed by work and family. I’m very proud of this consistency.

As of today, this newsletter has an incredible number of 26K subscribers, six times the population of my hometown. I want to thank every reader; I truly value your support.

Special thanks go to paying subscribers, who get access to all deep-dive articles. In the past year, I posted a ratio of 2 free articles to 1 paid deep dive. However, I aim to write more paid, high-quality articles next year.

After the last year, I was unsure how many people would keep be interested in what I write, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive:

• the newsletter doubled the number of subscribers from 12000 in January to 26000 at the end of December

  

• 41 other publications recommend “The Polymathic Engineer” on Substack, and I’m very grateful to all of them. I want to give a special mention to other valuable newsletters that supported us, like Coding Challenges by

  John Crickett
  , Developing Dev by
  Ryan Peterman
  , Craft Better Software by
  Daniel Moka
  , System Design Codex by
  Saurabh Dashora
  , and System Design Classroom by
  Raul Junco
  . Check them out if you have time for other good readings.

• the number of paid subscribers is four times more respect to the past year, and some of them reached out to me to bring suggestions and new topics to discuss

Best Articles of 2024

Here is a list of my favorite articles from this year, grouped by topic.

Algorithms and Data Structures

• Database Indexing Part 1, Part 2

• Redis: A deep dive into Redis.

• Solving Problems by Sorting: How to solve coding problems efficiently by sorting the input data

• Graphs representation: An introduction to graphs. Different types of graphs and how to represent them.

• Tries: How to efficiently store and represent strings using a trie data structure

Distributed Systems and System Design

• Consistency: What are consistency models in distributed systems, and why should you care about them?

• Messaging in Distributed Systems - Part I, Part 2, Part 3

• API Gateways: A deep dive into API gateways. What they do, their use cases, real implementations, advantages, and disadvantages.

• Availability: How to design highly available systems and measure a system's availability.

• Google File System: A distributed storage case study

Software Engineering and Programming

• Writing as software engineer: How to become a better writer as a software engineer.

• Synchronization Part 1, Part 2: An intro to processes and thread synchronization. Why it is critical and how to do it

• Containerization: How to deploy and ship applications with containers. Plus a deep dive into the Docker technology.

• Seniority: How to behave as a senior software engineer: 7 behaviors every senior software should have.

• HTTP: A deep dive into the HTTP protocol: request, responses, caching, and protocol evolution.

Some thoughts on Social Media

In the past year, I have invested more time and effort in the newsletter and limited my social media activity. I don’t regret this, as I enjoy writing long-form content here.

However, two interesting things happened. First, I created an account on X for our newsletter, which has already reached 1500+ followers. I mainly used it to advertise the Polymathic Engineer posts. Thank you all for your support.

Second, I also created a Bluesky account. I still use the X account as my main point of reference on social media. Lately, however, having good technical conversations there has become harder, so I decided to try Bluesy. I like that you can use a domain name as a handle, and I find it is a good place to put out random thoughts and ideas. I plan to use Bluesky more, so feel free to follow and support me there.

Thank you

Writing The Polymathic Engineer is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career.

Thanks so much for making this possible by reading the articles and supporting me here and on social media.

I wish you all season’s greetings and a Happy New Year. We’re taking a break until the start of January, but we’ll be back with even more energy in 2025!