2024 Year in Review: My Greatest Achievement

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In 2023, I decided to stop operating in survival mode. After years of fixating on financial security and proving my worth, working at GitHub shifted my perspective. Speaking at GitHub Universe and receiving recognition from colleagues and community members showed me that my value was already evident. For years, I had to prioritize stability. Now, with my basic needs secured, I could finally pursue what I deserved: buying a house, advancing my career, and setting firm boundaries. The shift from surviving to thriving remains an ongoing journey. In 2024, I felt comfortable enough to embraced a new challenge: motherhood.

While I've documented most of 2024, including my achievements, challenges, and the experience of balancing pregnancy with work, I want to share a few new lessons about my year.

Lessons Learned

I learned the following lessons:

Early in 2024, many Developer Advocates declared "livestreaming is dead," particularly for interview-style content, citing low replay value. But low-effort livestreaming was the real issue. I enhanced audience engagement with interactive quizzes and commercial breaks, branding the series as tbdTV. A highlight was hosting Dan Abramov - even after TBD's wind-down, that episode reached 4.8k views on our modest 427-subscriber channel. This success proved livestreaming is valuable for community building, developer education, and company partnerships.
I rediscovered joy in coding. Previously, I saw it only as a source of stress and anxiety—something I did just for a paycheck. Production issues heightened my anxiety. I just knew someone would say, “Rizel broke production.” My newfound joy for coding started at GitHub when I had fun building buggy projects with AI. In 2024, I learned new concepts like Verifiable Credentials and new languages like Kotlin and Swift in an environment of constructive feedback rather than harsh judgment.This gave me the mental space to think more about edge cases and feel confident forming technical opinions. My highlight was implementing a Decentralized Web Node Server for our company's hackathon with the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Though I kept waiting for someone to point out flaws, participants completed the hackathon without a hiccup.
Leadership is about impact and enablement. I learned to lead without having direct reports. At the beginning of the year, I told my manager, Angie Jones, that while I excel at execution and content creation, I wanted to grow in strategy and team enablement. Angie encouraged me to practice during Hacktoberfest. Working behind the scenes to empower my teammates and seeing the initiative succeed was deeply satisfying.
My "doing too much" gene comes in handy sometimes. Yes, I occasionally work above and beyond when I don't need to - it's how I was raised. My dad used to wake me up in 2nd grade to redo homework if I did the bare minimum. Anyways, business at TBD came to a halt, so my teammates and I transitioned to new projects within Block. At night, I created a potential content plan for our team. After posting it in Slack, I worried I was overstepping. Would my coworkers wonder, "why is she doing all this?" But the plan proved helpful, and Angie's feedback shifted my perspective -- she saw it as a reflection of my character.
Going to conferences while pregnant is not for me. First-trimester fatigue made it impossible to bring my usual energy -- my talks weren't as polished, and networking felt overwhelming. Instead of my typical enthusiastic self, I was quiet and withdrawn. Next time, I'll be more selective about conference timing.

My Greatest Achievement

This year I deployed my biggest project: a child. Okay, that was corny. But seriously, my greatest achievement this year is my daughter. The bond I feel with her is incredible -- as if I've known her forever. Choosing a home birth for my labor and delivery was an empowering experience.

The Dichotomy of Maternity Leave

My company offers generous parental leave: two weeks pre-birth, six weeks of pregnancy disability, and 16 weeks for bonding. And let me tell you – I need every bit of it.

As the due date crept closer, I was so fatigued but couldn't sleep because of discomfort. When I finally went on leave, I experienced false labor multiple times. False labor means painful contractions that feel very real, but they're too far apart to indicate that your baby is coming. Your body is just preparing. I didn't go to the hospital since I knew they would send me back home. I just spent those days watching TV and peeking at Slack (when I should've been offline) – that's all I could do through the pain.

Now the baby is here, and I cherish every moment with her. My days follow a constant cycle of feeding, soothing cries, changing diapers, and eventually holding her for hours because she prefers sleeping on me (even if my feet fall asleep in a criss-cross position). This repeats every 2-3 hours, all day and night. She's also cluster feeding often, which means she'll finish eating only to want more five minutes later, for an hour straight. Then in between, I have to pump. When I do get free time to eat or sleep, new mom anxiety hits:

If she sleeps in a weird position, I start googling Torticollis (basically swollen neck muscles)
If I accidentally tap her head, I stress about causing a brain injury or damaging her soft spot
I keep waking up to check on her when she's sleeping.

I've tried to do other things like take her on walks, but it's pretty cold out and even when she's super bundled, she doesn't enjoy it.

The mix of mundane moments and constant worry is tough on my mental health. I miss the intellectual stimulation of my work. (I also kinda miss getting positive feedback from coworkers. And I miss interacting with the developer community). Let me be clear: I don't miss work itself – work means deadlines, and there's no way I could meet them with so little sleep. However, many work activities are also my personal passions. Some of my other hobbies, like weightlifting, need to wait while my body heals. I've found a middle ground by reading white papers, contributing to open source projects, and writing this blog post during our long holding sessions.

Some people recharge by going out with friends, but my nerdy [behind] wants to code and talk about it. This approach keeps me distracted from irrational worries and keeps my brain stimulated without feeling stressed that I owe work to someone as I care for my child. I think this is what the first half of 2025 will look like.

My baby crashed a livestream about using AI to write prod code

Looking Ahead to 2025

Here are my goals:

My priority is being a present mom. I want my child to grow up feeling confident and secure. And I want to be there for all her milestones.
I want to dive deep into tech. As a developer advocate, learning is part of the job, but you're often too busy focusing on company goals to learn beyond their products. Now, I have a chance to explore anything that interests me—whether it's AI, DevOps, Bluesky's AT Protocol, or Model Context Protocol. I'm not committing to any specific technology or task; instead, I'll follow my curiosity. Since coding and learning in public are therapeutic for me, I'll share these explorations in my LinkedIn newsletter, The MAT Leave Changelog.
Last year, I succeeded in my goal of keeping a clean house at all times. This year, I want to redo my hair care routine. Caring for natural hair is sometimes challenging for me. — I used to have a staple style but lost track of the routine and neglected my hair.
I want to learn how to golf. I’m pretty good at Top Golf, so I feel like I should learn how to do the real thing. I always thought I was non-athletic because I disliked gym class, but I've realized I just don't enjoy team sports. In adulthood, I found out that solo sports and strength training are more my speed.
Whenever I fully recover and as my baby matures, I'll take more time to do things I find fun like baking, hanging out with friends, and physical activity. But I don't know what that's going to look like yet.

Here's to growing into a version of adulthood where I'm comfortable choosing my own path—unconventional as it may be.

This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.