Today is the last day of 2024, and here’s my review of how the year went. To sum it up, 2024 was a pretty straightforward year. I made several contributions to the open-source projects I use regularly.

Contributions to Some Common Lisp Packages

I’ve been using cl-str since last year’s Advent of Code (AoC). This year, I contributed some improvements to it. Here’s a list of my PRs.

One of my favorites is this PR, which I’m particularly proud of.

Later in the year, I stumbled upon ciel — a project that felt like a dream come true. It allowed me to use Common Lisp for scripting instead of Python. I can’t describe how exciting that discovery was.

Maintaining Some Emacs Packages

2024 has been the breakout year for AI. With tools and models like Google Bard, Ollama,OpenAI, Claude, and others making waves, I wanted to use them in Emacs rather than relying on my Telegram bot. That led me back to the chatgpt-shell mode, which I hadn’t touched for a while. The tool has improved significantly since I last used it, and I decided to contribute my own improvements.

In addition to that, I also contributed to lsp-mode with this PR. Specifically, I replaced the previous Python LSP backend with ruff, as I found it more efficient.

Contributions to Some Rust Packages

Rust has also been on my radar for a while now. This year, I contributed to Bat, a rust-based modern replacement for cat. It’s always fun working with tools that I actively use in my daily workflow.

Some Interesting Learning Experiences

I encountered a few fascinating problems this year that taught me a lot. Here’s a glimpse of what stood out:

Why the Vec Grid in My Rust Tool Was So Slow

I ran into memory usage issues while warming up for AoC and recorded that journey in this blog post. It turned into an interesting exploration of memory tricks in Rust!

Unsafe Implementation in Iterator

This was a follow-up learning experience after solving the previous problem. I wrote about it in this blog post. Debugging and optimizing iterators can be a deep rabbit hole, but it was rewarding to figure out.

Advent of Code (AoC) Fun

AoC 2015

For fun, I tackled AoC 2015 back in March. It was a refreshing way to revisit older challenges.

AoC 2024

I also completed this year’s AoC. Once again, it was a great way to learn and polish my problem-solving skills.

Wrap-Up

• I’ve always wanted to contribute to open-source projects. Without open source,I wouldn’t even be a programmer, to be honest. This year, I realized that it’s easier (and more impactful) to contribute to packages and tools I actually use, rather than ones I just know about but haven’t worked with much.
• Moving forward, I hope to continue contributing to open source — and maybe even more.

Here’s to another enriching year ahead!