[2024 Recap] Speaking 📢, Traveling ✈️, Driving 🚗, and more

Life

3 Jan 2025 • 9 min read

1. Content Creation

Medhat Dawoud speaking in a crowded room

I gave only 7 talks this year: I was a guest at the PodRocket famous podcast by LogRocket speaking about performance budgets. I traveled to speak in 4 different locations (🇳🇱 Netherlands, 🇬🇧 UK, 🇵🇱 Poland, 🇲🇦 Morocco) and others online, big conferences and small ones, I am so happy with this small number of contributions this year as I was too busy at work already, feel free to check all recordings in my talks page.

Yallacode in Ramadan Series: I was able to start a series during the month of Ramadan to teach junior developers some tips in foundational work including stacking context, different ways to center a div, CSS Box model, and much more, I enjoyed recording these episodes and enjoyed the feedback on them 🥹

My recognition in “Success at scale” book: I was so honored to have one of my articles here got curated along with a great list of articles in a book by the one and only Addy Osmani, such a great recognition for the effort I am trying to put on each article I author on this blog, the book has tons of other stories from web field leaders.

My Youtube channels: Yallacode reached ~25k subscribers 🚀 on Youtube and ~7.8k followers on X (@yallacode_), maybe worth mentioning as well that my personal X (@med7atdawoud) account reached more than +18k followers 🎉 and growing, my bluesky also has some growth and reached ~600 friends, feel free to join me there, most of the tech community are already there, also worth mentioned that I stopped my premium subscription for my Twitter, as I am not gaining much out of it any more.

My talk at React Advanced was recognized: I gave a talk this year in London for the first time at a big conf called React Advanced, and that talk about adaptive performance tips was recognized in one of the famous performance newsletters called WebPerformance Report

Less written content: I was able only to write 5 blogs this year, I hope they were helpful for some of you, I also constantly update the design of the website, updates the /uses page with my latest, and keep my talks page updated all the time

2. Career & Side Projects

Walima project: I started a side project to help us (my fantastic wife and I) at home when we have guests prepare food and organize hosting, Well, I know it might be a trivial thing and intuitive for some of you but truly we use a paper and a pen every time we have a relatively big feast at home (sometime whatsapp chat), it takes time and mental capacity to plan it well, then usually our guests say good things about our way of hosting, which means that it worths it, this project is not fully ready yet, hopefully I will spend some time in 2025 to finalize it and announce it after beta trials

I am still a GDE for web technologies: I keep creating content and give talks about performance whenever possible, attended Google IO in berlin this year and was fantastic experience, also, attended PerfDays at Google’s office in Amsterdam in November for the 2nd year (Unconference that is collecting all performance experts from all over the world to discuss latest perf tech and challenges), and through them I met a lot of experts and had a lot of fun

Mentorship: One of the goals for last year was to start an official mentorship program, I did some relatively official program and accepted some candidates, and got great feedback from them after that, they said that they enjoyed and learned a lot from the mentorship, hopefully I will have time in 2025 to continue with mentoring others (Learn how to apply from my contact page)

Office hours: thinking about having some office hours open for people to book and ask their questions, it would be easier to have that without the long commitment of a mentorship and would be mostly FREE

3. New Learnings

No doubt, 2024 was the boom year for LLMs and AI, I decided to give it a try, I am using Copilot as my work provided it to us, also tried Cursor and was great, then I tried other more advanced AI developers like Bolt and Lovable, and WOW 🤯 they can really automate quite a lot of work for us especially in the initial phase, definitely they are Not going to replace developers completely but will indeed change the way we work and our responsibilities.

You don’t have to finish a long/boring book: I used to have a bad habit which is when I started reading a book and get bored of it, I either push myself to finish it 🤮 which is usually not useful or to stop reading completely as long as this book is not done, this is completely wrong, and I decided to stop doing that and just read the part that benefit me from any book and doesn’t have to be the whole book, and guess what? it worked.

I started reading The Software Engineering’s Guidebook by Gergely Orasz (author of the pragmatic engineer newsletter) and it is a great guide book for anyone in programming career (not finished yet but recommended)
I started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport (almost by the end) I read for him before “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” and was great as well
I started reading some other books that I didn’t feel to finish them so I wouldn’t mention them.

Sources to learn from other than books: I am learning a lot as I am working as well, I read daily a lot of articles and documentations just to make myself updated or resolve a problem in code or architecture, also read newsletters weekly, follow the right people on social media filters your timeline automatically, it used to be on X (Twitter) and now more on BlueSky

Tinkering: I learned through out the year to fix my bike myself (believe me eBikes are hard to fix), fix some plumbing issues at home, and of course some carpentry skills that I will share soon in a separate post, I am not professional in any of them, but I would say I am tinkering and it works with me, I also gain some fun and fresh mind out of doing these kind of stuff

4. Life Updates

I run 3 races this year: one in January 10km, in June 10km as well, and finally in October 5km because I was injured however I made the best timing there, skipped Amsterdam half marathon for the second year because of the injury.

I got a driving license in The Netherlands: for who doesn’t know, having driving exams in the Netherlands is extremely hard, there are a lot discussions about that on reddit if you are interested to learn more, I struggled a lot to get that license and be able to drive in europe, I am so happy I could make it in the end 🎉🚗

1040 days streak on Doulingo: well, I feel proud not to cut the streak for this 3rd year in a row, I would recommend this application just for collecting more vocabularies than grammar (not so good in this part).

Travelled to UK: I visited London for the second time this year after my first time in 2017 to speak at React Advanced conference, I also met great Egyptian friends for the first time that we know each others from the online community and they were very generous in hospitality and showing me the city, weather in London is not any better comparing to the Netherlands though 🥶🌧️

First time in Poland: it was my first time to travel to Poland, I got invited to speak at a conference in a city called Gdansk, never been there but it was really gorgeous, people there are go nice and welcoming, and for a person living in the Netherlands, I just felt the same vibes of canals and even structures are pretty similar to Amsterdam.

Second time in Morocco: I ended the speaking trips with my talk at React Africa conference that was held at Casablanca in morocco, I have been there in a talk before in 2022, so when I got invited I didn’t hesitate to go, I am from Egypt which makes me “African” and I have always thought about having a tech conf in Egypt or Africa, it was a great experience, I visited Hassan II mosque (3rd largest mosque in the world), met old friends and made new ones, we enjoyed a speakers trip also to Rabat the next day and cannot express how great the Moroccan food is, you have to try yourself.

Visiting Paris 🗼: we visited Paris as a family, weather was cold in December however we were lucky not to have it rainy, enjoyed the stay, eating fresh parisian pastry was top notch experience

Syria is Free 🇸🇾: I am happy that the regime is Syria has been taken down, people won their freedom finally and hoping for Palestinian the same soon.

I would like to express my gratitude for the amount of connections and friends I made in 2024, people from different culture and different timezones in the world, I really hope to meet everyone again soon.

5. Plans for 2025

For 2025, Here are some goals/hopes that I will try to commit to:

🏃‍♂️ Back to running and get fit

📢 Continue public speaking (some planned talks already),

✍️ Writing more articles on this blog

👨‍🎨 Help organising a big tech event in Egypt (plans in progress)

🪵 Finish my carpentry project and write a blog about it

🇳🇱 Reach B1 level in Dutch

🕊️ Hope for the war in Gaza to be over 🇵🇸

Tot ziens 👋