Observer Bias: A Look Back at 2024
Summary
Leon Adato takes a lighthearted and personal look back at 2024, reflecting on the standout moments and trends that caught his eye throughout the year. In his signature off-the-cuff style, Leon shares his unique perspective on the past year’s highlights.
It’s December, which means it’s time for (if you’re American) the overwhelming glut of holiday cheer, Hallmark Channel movies, heavy food, Mariah Carey singing that song, and end-of-year retrospectives.
The good news is that in this blog, I will not tell you how to make my grandmother’s baklavah, nor at any time will I state that all I want is Hugh. No, not him, either.
Nope, it’s time for me to sign down in front of a crackling menorah, open a bottle of Manischewitz, slather some apple sauce on my latkes, and wax nostalgic for the things that stand out for me during good old 2024.
This is going to be nothing like my colleague Doug Madory’s The Year in Internet Analysis: 2024. Meaning it’s going to be an off-the-cuff and from-the-gut list, rather than a carefully researched and deeply meaningful report.
Look, I aim to please, but some days I’m a lousy shot.
Kentik in 2024
I’m going to start with the things from Kentik that shine brightly in my memory – at the top of my list are ten amazing episodes of What’s New at Kentik.
Next, and staying on the theme of Kentik videos, we added four new entries to our “just for fun” series that are worth a look (and maybe even a chuckle) if you’re stuck at your desk during a slow December code freeze:
- The Cloud Cost Slasher
- Kentik (Observabilium) Daily
- The Kentik Eclipse
- Answer Any Question About Your Network
We also launched a new podcast series, Telemetry News Now, which is technically a sub-series under the Telemetry Now umbrella. Still, in my mind, it stands apart in tone and topic.
In March, Kentik launched NMS, one of the first new network monitoring solutions to hit the market in years.
It’s no small thing for anyone – an individual or company of any size – to launch a new product, application, or solution. It’s even more noteworthy for a group that already has a solid application in the market to launch something new – not just a new module or feature update but a wholly new product. Finally, it’s especially significant when that completely new product moves into a market space that is seen as congested, if not archaic.
It’s important to understand why Kentik took the time, effort, money, and engineering cycles to build and release NMS. Admittedly, this is a question for a different blog, but it’s an important question nonetheless. For this retrospective, it’s important to note that it happened and was necessary for a variety of reasons.
The (IT) world beyond the (Kentik) window
I’m not going to sugar coat it: 2024 saw more than its fair share of hacks, outages, and even shot-ourselves-in-the-foot “oopsies” that immediately hit the top of our news feed.
But I’m not going to dwell on them because, if you’ve worked in IT for more than 15 minutes, you know those things can happen to anybody (and sometimes everybody), at any moment, and not always for the reasons people and pundits are swift to speculate about. Instead, I’m going to mention moments that had a special or personal impact on me, my friends, and my colleagues in tech:
One of the promotions for Kentik NMS was a video that promoted the idea of “eclipsing” other tools. OK, that’s cute, but why? Well, I know it was eight months ago (at the time I’m writing this), but there was, in fact, an eclipse – a big one, right over my house.
Certainly, one of the unignorable trends of the year was AI’s steady progression. While I make no secret of my skepticism to much of the hype surrounding LLMs and AI, it’s an unimpeachable truth that this moment and movement within tech is influencing and even reshaping how we work and think about that work.
However, the best moments of 2024 were those when we as a community stepped back from the hype, breathless (and uncritical) excitement, and, unrestrained, pushed forward and began to build the systems, controls, and boundaries that are the hallmarks of every mature and truly useful technology—ways to monitor and manage everything from heat and energy to access and trust.
It’s hard to review 2024 without also mentioning the tectonic changes within social media and their impact on our communities. I’m not going to name specific platforms or attempt to detail the full litany of changes. It’s enough to say that the landscape of when, where, and how we share ourselves online looks very different in the waning days of the year, and that has, in turn, changed our experience of community.
One of the things I do over on my personal website is share jobs that come across my desk, slacks, discords, emails, and more. This gives me a window into the job market, which I also blog about fairly frequently over there. And let’s face it: the job market was a big part of the 2024 news cycle. But overall, what I can say is that the job market wasn’t “bad” (I was posting between 75 and 200 new jobs every week, all year long), but rather that it was “slow.” This means that finding new jobs has taken everyone – from newbies fresh out of boot camp to grizzled veterans with years of experience and piles of privilege – much longer than they expected to land their next role.
While my heart goes out to everyone who is currently looking, my advice is “stick with it.” The jobs are there; they just require a bit more persistence to land.
Which leads to one of the sweetest moments of 2024 – Sesame Street’s Elmo checking in on everyone.
This one post racked up millions of views and tens of thousands of reposts, quotes, likes, and bookmarks. It was a case of the right person (or Muppet) asking the right question at the right time.
The view from inside
Over the last two days, as I’ve sat writing the bulk of this post, I’ve come back to the question of which moments of 2024 resonated most for me, personally. Here are two that stand out:
While it was satisfying to see the subscriber count to my weekly email listing triple, it was truly rewarding every time a person asked to be removed from the email because they’d landed a job and no longer needed it.
Traveling to (and speaking at) CodeMash Sandusky, OHNUG Toledo, NANOG 90 Charlotte, MINUG Detroit, NYNUG Saratoga Springs, DevOpsDays Seattle, DevOpsDays Montreal, DevOpsDays Houston, PyOhio Cleveland, SRE Day London and getting to be part of all those amazing communities.
With those final thoughts, I invite you to reflect on 2024 and see what moments shine brightest in your personal rearview mirror.
