I’m reflecting on my personal time during 2024. A lot of my time was spent working on things with my family that I won’t share here, but nontheless I did make some progress with my personal goals.

Farsi #

This year, I think my Farsi has gotten quite a bit better:

  • Conversationally I can express most things.
  • I can watch some Farsi TV and news and get the general idea.

The only video game with a Farsi translation I found is Children of Morta: I guess one of the developers is Iranian and wanted to get a Farsi translation in. I’m super thankful for that, so I can watch those cutscenes a few times and learn the Farsi from there.

The big thing I did is start listening to TV in the car regularly: it’s a good way to reinforce my listening abilities.

I still take Farsi lessons weekly. For 2025, I think I’ll continue at this pace, and loosely target being able to listen and understand Farsi TV.

Fitness and Health #

I’ve continued working on fitness this year. Primarily lowering body fat, building muscle, and lowering my apob.

I haven’t taken a Dexa scan since July, but my body fat actually went up at the time compared to January: I think it was due to a two-week long trip I took to Japan in June. I was not able to work out at all, and also walked a significant amount of time so I was still, somewhat, in a caloric deficit.

That said, my weight at the end of the year is about 174 pounds. Losing roughly 4 pounds in the first half of the year to 176, and 2 pounds in the last half. I’m not sure where my body fat is at, but likely 13% where it stood in July.

Interestingly I lost muscle mass across the board except for my stomach in July. I still need to check to see if I was able to regain it or not.

I’ve found a good routine for a caloric deficit and overall weight loss, which is:

  • 400 calories daily burned at the treadmill (walking 30 minutes at 3.5mph, at a 12 degree incline).
  • A 30 minute weightlifting workout, mixing in some crossfit-style workouts from time to time to do some interval training.
  • Maintaining ~1400 calories a day.

I cheat on the calories regularly, so my weight is yo-yoing for now, but I’m able to keep it between 171 and 175, and able to lose a pound a week with the above. Given the holidays, I think this is invitable, but hoping to get back on the wagon next year.

I upped my protein to 1.6g protein / kg, which I’ve read is about where the benefits to hypertrophy level off.

For 2025, with a consistent technique to lose weight, I’m shifting my focus to figure out how to build more muscle. I think there’s a lot of optimization I’m missing out on there.

Japanese #

For this year, my Japanese took a back burner. I stopped taking regular Japanese lessons. Honestly I think to maximize those lessons, I would have to start doing some pretty complex assignments like writing of papers and whatnot. It’s not something I’m that interested in investing time into.

For now, I’ll just play video games in Japanese when I can. I have Witcher 3 and the Tactics Ogre remake, which will be dozens of hours and are already challenging me with new vocabulary.

OSS: aep.dev #

aep.dev made a ton of progress! Don’t just take my word for it - check out our public blog post on the topic.

I’m very proud of the fact that we finally moved from just theoretical benefits to the client tooling, to real UIs and clients. If you author an AEP-compliant specification, you can get a command line for free. We’re working on a web UI, and have some prototyping of a Terraform/OpenTofu provider as well.

With the progress we’ve made this year, I’m very excited about using that as a foundation for continued progress in aep.dev in 2025. This could be the year we really build out a full offering, and provide something compelling to adopters of our API specification!

Goals for 2025 #

For 2025, my goals are still to primarily have ample time to do impromptu things with my family. But I do have a few goals:

  • Get a roadmap for aep.dev
  • Play piano 10 minutes a day. Last year, I did not learn new 5 piano pieces. Darn! But I’ll make this my new goal for the year. My goal this year is to be able to play piano pieces from just reading sheet music.
  • Be able to understand persian news.
  • Achieve 11% body fat, without losing muscle mass.