Looking Backwards at 2024

It is impossible to write anything about 20241 without addressing how traumatically 2023 ended. During November 2023, I underwent an allogenic bone marrow transplant to treat a very aggressive case of leukemia. I was released from the hospital two days before Christmas and, quite frankly, started 2024 living one day at a time.

I owe my second lease on life to the scientific advancements2 in treating leukemia. I told myself that I had to live, and while I didn’t get to decide if I lived or died, I do get to decide what to do with today.

Staring My Mortality in the Face

At the start of 2024, it took all of my energy to exist and keep the most basic routines in place. But I promised myself that if I made it through this ordeal, there were some endeavors, big and small, I was going to undertake. Things that I wanted to accomplish if given the chance to live.

Reviewing Goals from 2024

This December, I’m fortunate that I get to look ahead and set goals for 2025. Last December, my only goal was to survive and recover from treatment. Once I achieved roughly four months post-transplant, I set some goals3 for myself to accomplish in 2024.

Self

  • 💖 “Live” was my first goal. So far so good. One small gallows-humor project that I completed to poke fun at my situation was creating a personal status page4 to track my uptime like a liveness probe.
  • 🔨 Create more. So much of life is in the service of others or consumption of other’s creations. Consumption can be great—reading a great book, listening to music, appreciating a piece of art, or watching a thrilling show. But what about my creations? What about what I can build? What can I make for others to enjoy?
  • 📈 Recover my strength to be an active father again. After four rounds of chemo and the bone marrow transplant, I could barely go up a flight of stairs without feeling like passing out. Now, at one year in recovery, I am working out again and can walk for almost 90 minutes. I no longer worry about stairs. Having survived, the quote “The greatest wealth is health” really hits home.
  • 🏠 Bring together all my previously published thoughts under one roof. I’ve tried publishing on Wordpress, LinkedIn Articles, and Goodreads, but none of those were “mine”; none were home. Hence this site jsrowe.com, which will be my primary vehicle of publication5.
  • 📝 Write and publish at least two posts a month to https://jsrowe.com. This post makes 22 posts since March of this year, plus the book content I wrote. I would consider this a resounding success and proof that I enjoy doing this.
  • 📚 Start reading again. Before COVID, I commuted ~1.5 hours a day, which afforded me ample time to listen to audiobooks, finishing 20-30 of them in a year. When I started working remotely, I dropped this habit completely. My goal was to read two books a month; I don’t think I got much past three books this year. I’m working on it!6
  • 🍞 Bake a fresh loaf of bread. For years I’ve had a copy of Beard on Bread and the only recipe I’d baked was banana bread. I’ll concede this is a small goal for the year, but I ended up making two wonderful hearty white bread loaves from chapter one of Beard’s book. I won’t say I’m a born-again baker, but just like that one 5k I ran, I am very happy to be able to say I’ve at least tried it once…

Family

While I have shared many details about my personal life online, I am protective of my children’s private lives. So, I’ll summarize that after being in the hospital almost 3 months, one goal for 2024 was to spend meaningful time with my family and friends to let them know I love them.7

There are three projects I started this year that I have found tremendous joy in, intend to continue for years to come, and wish to share here:

  • 📷 Print Pictures and Make Albums: Using the mobile app Shutterfly for free 4×6 pictures,8 I went through many years of family photos, printing and writing short notes on the back of each before filing them in picture albums. These now sit in my living room, and the kids have fun just looking at them from time to time. I will often order multiples of one photo as my kids like to have “real” photos in their rooms. Doing this 3-4 times a year seems to yield a manageable 30-ish photos to file away.
  • 📝 Journal of Letters: In addition to this public website, I keep personal written journals for myself. In the spirit of a “letter to my unborn child,” when something special, meaningful, or impactful happens on any given day, I write a letter to the future. These letters aren’t long or meant to be read anytime soon, but one day when I’m gone, I hope they are a way to reflect and remember the time we spent together. When I was in the hospital, I realized I had said “I love you” every day, but my voice might’ve been silenced by cancer. This project is a memento for the future.
  • 🖼 Art Portfolio: This was probably easiest with my little kids, but all of them are creators and I try to find a piece of work to include in an art portfolio, often with a note of context. I also created three “galleries” in my house to celebrate my kids’ creations and accomplishments. My encounter with cancer really shattered my belief that I would be around to raise my kids until they no longer needed me.

Ambition

While I’ve been fortunate to apply my collegiate training in relevant employment, I’ve tried my hand at various self-employment ventures since high school and always felt a desire to formally organize as a business. I’d previously operated as a county-level Doing-Business-As (DBA); this evolved into the formation of Rowe Innovations, LLC in New York State to support some of my personal ambitions and projects I completed in 2024 and have planned for 2025.

In addition to the blog posts, I thought I would write two books, one technical and one about my cancer treatment. The former ended up being AI Primer for Business Leaders; the latter was too emotionally heavy to complete this year. To read more about my experience self-publishing, click here.

With the formation of my LLC, I also filed trademarks and DBAs on two additional concepts I’ve been incubating for a while: Wiglaf Software9 and OMT Studios. I formed these brands to better organize and market my work on various projects; having clear “company” boundaries allows me to wear many hats while completing work. For example, one of my goals this year was to learn more about AWS cloud infrastructure and GitHub actions; I was able to accomplish this goal by doing all of the work for this site as an “engineer” of Wiglaf Software.

I also had on my list to participate in vendor contract negotiations and learn more about running a software engineering organization from a fiscal perspective. I’ve had several opportunities to do this, both with my employer and my newly formed LLC, and count this as accomplished.

Goals for 2025

The maths of cancer survival say that by having made it one year, I’m much more likely to make it another. So in the spirit of positivity, here are some goals for 2025 that I share with you to hold myself accountable.10

Self

  • Complete writing and publish my memoir about my cancer diagnosis and treatment, working title Blasted: A Life Turned Upside Down by Leukemia.11
  • Continue the above detailed projects for my family and publish writings online.
  • Continue to improve my health both with physical and cardiovascular fitness as well as putting all of the trauma around cancer treatment behind me.

Family

  • Recover my strength to take my family on a small weekend trip. This is my biggest family goal. We are fortunate to have many great state parks nearby in NY, and several amusement parks. If we take just two or three trips in the summer of 2025, I’ll consider that a success.
  • Build a better shoe system for my back door. This has plagued me since I bought my house—too many shoes and not enough storage. I don’t like the various benches/racks I’ve purchased, so it’s time to make something myself. Before cancer, I enjoyed many a DIY project, but in the past 18 months, I just didn’t have the strength to do such things.

Ambition

  • Successfully launch some major initiatives at the startup I work at into the marketplace and ideally participate in an IPO event. This is my primary BHAG.12 While so much of this is very much out of my control, as an engineer, I believe that if I can build it, good things will follow.
  • Continue to learn more about running a software engineering organization, both with my employer and with my LLC. My kids are always bugging me to buy iPad games, so I fancy that with the help of Anthropic/OpenAI, I can build apps for my kids in the same spirit as a father 50 years ago would make toys from blocks of wood. My goal here is to publish one or two apps on the Apple App Store via Wiglaf Software™ and evaluate this experience.
  • I’d like to figure out what I’m going to do (if anything) with OMT Studios™ as a brand. I did complete one YouTube video last year; I have ideas for one or two more, so we’ll see if that strikes a chord.

A Final Reflection

With everything that’s happened this past 18 months, I reflect on a moral I took from Man’s Search for Meaning that a person with a sufficient “why” can endure much trauma to live for tomorrow. At our core, our most inalienable freedom is to choose our response to external stimuli.

Here’s to choosing the future. Onward!

Significant Revisions

  • Dec 24th, 2024 Originally published on https://www.jsrowe.com with uid AA4B5BBF-8F0D-4F80-B68A-7C80B92317A8
  • Dec 16th, 2024 Draft Created

Footnotes

  1. The year 2024 also marks 20 years since I graduated from high school and enrolled at RIT, which would set my life on the course it is now. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have much of a plan after graduating high school. I believe it was to “study computers” and “write software.” It’s really mind-boggling to think that I have circled the sun 20 years since then and experienced many ups and downs of life in that time. ↩

  2. Time of death: Postponed. At this point, I’m living life with gifted time. Based on the genetic sub-type of my leukemia and the treatment I received, even five years ago I wouldn’t have had the options I did. Twenty years ago, my diagnosis would’ve most likely been death within months. So the question remains: What to do with the gift of time? ↩

  3. Perhaps not “SMART” goals per se, they were themes I wished to pursue. The details would come later with every day I lived. ↩

  4. This also is mirrored as a public GitHub repository here https://github.com/jsr6720/jsrowe-status-static-website ↩

  5. This just in: James yells at the sky, “Websites used to mean something.” Which The Oatmeal beautifully captures with this comic https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021. ↩

  6. See habit stacking; to read more, I need to incorporate a new routine. For the books I’ve read so far, I’ve used Libby for audiobooks and combined it with my walks and the driving I still do for errands. ↩

  7. The fact is, no one is promised tomorrow, which I suppose is classically quoted as Proverbs 27:1: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring”—but I like The Old Man Lost His Horse. ↩

  8. Shutterfly still charges for shipping, but I can usually ship about 200 4×6 prints for $30. Other product promotions I like are the $1 magnets and the Unlimited Photobook Pages. Not affiliated or sponsored. ↩

  9. Wiglaf Software was originally a personal DBA but it didn’t quite accomplish everything I was trying to accomplish across my projects, especially Apple’s developer name on the App Store. Wiglaf of Beowulf fame deserves its own future post of how I came to incorporate that into my branding. ↩

  10. There is lots of anecdotal evidence that goals written, shared, and checked in on are accomplished with higher frequency that those merely thought. This post really checks all three. See https://scholar.dominican.edu/psychology-faculty-conference-presentations/3. ↩

  11. I purchased a ten-pack of ISBNs, so they are a sunk cost, ready for my next publication project. ↩

  12. Jim Collins’s big hairy audacious goal (BHAG). ↩