Year 2024 Review! 📹

A beautiful house in Tromso, Norway

OK, I have finally got the time to write this one, just like the year 2022 review, this one is also about an year late. This is the 8th consecutive year I am following the tradition of writing the yearly review blog and one thing that has been constant throughout these years is my ability to procrastinate on this. The more I procrastinate about it, the more difficult to write it becomes as less I remember what happened over an year ago. I am going to try again this year to pen the next one before the onset of the next year. 2024 was an exciting year from personal life and work point of view, here are the highlights of some of the things I did last year:

Work

I did consulting for Quansight and worked on several projects, here are few of the notable ones.

Nebari

I spent a lot of time this year on the Nebari ecosystem. Nebari is an opinionated distribution of JupyterHub on Kubernetes. It’s an open source data science and research platform. I worked on implementing fine-grained permissions so that users can only access things across various nebari services, for which they have explicit permissions for.

Nebari Slurm

I worked a bit on Nebari Slurm as well, its a distribution of Nebari for HPC. At the time of writing this blog post, this project is being superseded by nebari k3s, which is a light weight deployment of Nebari on k3s cluster.

JHub App Launcher

JHub Apps was one of my major projects for the year, I made several releases of the project adding several useful functionality such as app sharing, deploying an app from a git repository right from jhub-apps interface, JupyterLab 5.0 support, security improvements, etc.

Latex report generation

This was a client project from a billion dollar financial firm that had acquired another organization and were looking to automate generation of portfolio contruction and investment strategy reports from dynamic data sources with cross linking. The challenge on this project was more of finding the right information from gazillion sources than the technical aspect.

TensorFlow

This was with Google, improving the build systems, development experience and CI/CD infrastructure of TensorFlow and related libraries, ensuring compatibility across different systems. A lot of time was spent on fighting with bazel on this project.

Cirun

Cirun saw lots of improvements in the year 2024, here are a few of them, that I can recall now:

• Rebuilt architecture for API-based runner provisioning, so that users can do init steps, when provisioning runners on cirun and then call cirun API to get the provisioning script and continue provisioning after init.
• Enterprise team & user management with role-based access
• Improved retry mechanisms for better reliability
• Several UI improvements for runner data representation
• Joined the NVIDIA Inception Program

cirun is financially sustainable and highly profitable, without relying on external funding or investors, giving maximum freedom to focus on user’s pain points instead of chasing numbers for investors.

Homelab

I spent a lot of time this year in improving my homelab setup, by upgrading from a Raspberry Pi to a full system build.

I am running a variety of services on it via Proxmox like AdGuard, Jellyfin, WireGuard, Home Assistant, Immich, Excalidraw, Frigate, etc. It also serves as a portal for creating quick disposable VMs for development on projects and for testing in an isolated environment.

All the components for my homelab system build

This included setting up home automation with Home Assistant, which now sends notifications to Slack for various home events.

Home Assistant sending notifications to Slack

Personal Life

It was an exciting year with lots of ups and downs, by the very definition of life. From my wife getting hospitalized for urgent treatment to me making a cameo on a BBC show, it was a full rollercoaster.

Theatre / TV

I didn’t participate in any theatre this year but I made a few seconds cameo on a popular BBC show called “The Apprentice”, season 18. It’s a business reality show where aspiring entrepreneurs compete for Lord Alan Sugar’s investment. It was a nice detour from looking at a dark screen all day and was exciting to see how TV production works. I had not seen this show previously, so I didn’t even recognise famous people while filming for this show.

On TV on BBC's The Apprentice

Misc

• Got this beautiful Pi Fractal case shipped to me by the awesome Pierre.

Raspberry Pi 5 in fractal case, with cirun logo ;)

• Drove from London to Edinburgh and back
• Finally went to PyDelhi Meetup after a long time.

Travel

I travelled to a few places this year:

• Athens, Greece
• Lugo, Spain
• Paris, France
• Dublin, Ireland
• Berlin, Germany
• Delhi, India
• Tromso, Norway

Events:

Here are some of the interesting events I went to this year

• Vir Das
• Lords Eng vs SL
• Middlesex v Surrey Vitality Blast
• PyData London 2024 (being an organizer)
• Voted in UK elections for the first time

Places I traveled in 2024