The site is officially more than one year old, as evidenced by the humble reflection post I wrote a year ago. With over a year under its belt, my website finally feels alive! The use metrics suggest otherwise, though.. Just kidding! I don’t know what the user metrics suggest, because I turned them off.
But yeah, let’s talk about 2024
Goals I set for last year
In my 2023 reflection, I laid out a list of goals for the year:
- ✅ Build a website for someone else
- ❌ Build a 3D project with Three.js
- ✅ Build a project involving GLSL shaders
- ✅ Build an iOS app
I touched most of these, but my goals changed throughout the year, and I ended up doing a lot of other things. Let’s talk about some technical highlights!
I built another fullstack web application
I built a Dungeons & Dragons character manager. It’s a full-stack application that gave me plenty of experience working with both the frontend and backend. This project really deepened my understanding of how web apps function. I wrote a short post about it, and you can check out the deployed version here.
I built a small iOS app
I created a minimal runner tracker that does just one thing: nothing—because I never published it. It was worth the effort though, because it exposed me to mobile development, a field I’m not particularly interested in, but I wouldn’t know that if I didn’t try it out, would I?
I built a fully interactive Figma prototype
I designed a fully interactive iOS UI prototype for a vehicle tracking app with Figma and the iOS UI kit. And I mean fully interactive—every visible element leads somewhere. You can check it out here.
It was a very tedious process, linking 300+ screens between each other. I wouldn’t do it again at that level of fidelity, but I pretty much mastered Figma in this project.
I built a Tetris clone with Godot
It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll eventually publish it to my web desktop. My what now? Just hold on, it’s coming!
I built a web desktop
I built a desktop environment that runs in the browser, and it’s my baby. It’s probably the most complex project I’ve ever built, spanning about 10k lines of code at the time of writing. It’s not great code, but it runs smooth enough. I wrote a small post about it, but you can also check out the repo and the live version.
Honorable Mentions
- NES Emulator: Not all projects come with flashy frontends. One of my ongoing efforts this year has been an NES emulator written in C++. It’s not complete yet, so it didn’t make the cut for the showcase, but progress has been steady. Once it’s finished, I’ll host it on my web desktop
- Android Treasure Hunt App: As part of a mobile development course, I built a prototype treasure hunt app for Android. While I’ve since deleted Android Studio (and hope never to need it again), the experience was worth at least a casual head nod.
- WordPress Blog: This year, I switched the backend of this site to WordPress while keeping my Next.js frontend intact. I also built a small WordPress blog for my Turkish mother-in-law, who writes beautiful Turkish stories.
Conclusion and Goals for 2025
This year has been fantastic, and I’m proud of everything I’ve accomplished. That said, it came at the cost of nearly all my free time. In 2025, I’m aiming for a bit more balance. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but here’s what I hope to achieve in the coming year:
- Finish and publish my Tetris clone
- Complete my NES emulator
- Build a rich text editor for my web desktop. Everyone says it’s incredibly difficult (source), but I need to learn the hard way.
- Create a terminal emulator for my web desktop
- Launch my tech career! I’m graduating this year and have a summer internship lined up with Oracle. I’ll do my best to secure a return offer for full-time!
That’s a solid list to start with, and I hope that a year from now, I’ll be able to look back and say I crushed these goals. Here’s to another productive and fulfilling year ahead!