A few things that made my 2024 interesting..

2024 is my best year so far, followed by 2023, 2019, and 2017. This post lists 30 things that made my 2024 interesting.

1. A new template for many years to come.

2024 felt unique, but I feel many future years will closely resemble this year.

2. New continents and new horizons.

Mega inter-continental trips. Reaching Country #50 and Continent #5.

3. Meeting new and old friends.

The frequent conference travels helped with that!

4. Designing and Teaching Distributed Computing course.

It brought back memories from my own time as an MSc student in distributed computing.

5. Alaska as a Google Summer of Code organization. 

The mentor summit gave deja vu, like a repeat of the last year's experience!

6. A quick trip to UNLV for an NSF workshop.

It was my second time in Las Vegas, again very briefly, with just one night in a hotel.

7. Anchorage Ganesh Temple.

The temple itself is tiny. But nice to know the community.

8. Four papers at the IEEE CCECE conference in Kingston, ON, Canada.

I presented two and two of my students presented another two.

9. Huge malls of Shenzhen, China.

We used to alternate between China and Sri Lanka each year: Sri Lanka (2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019) and China (2014, 2016, and 2018). But that pattern broke with the pandemic. Returning after almost seven years felt historic.

10. Food and cocktails in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Had three dinners in three different restaurants on a single day. That sounds extreme. 

11. Sunset view and the view of moving ice in Kotzebue lagoon from the hotel room. 

This Arctic town reminded me of Utqiagvik in so many ways. 

12. Crossing the International Date Line.

That made our Christmas day disappear in the sky!

13. A train journey to Seward, AK.

We have now covered the entire Alaska railroad. From Anchorage to Fairbanks in the north and Seward in the south.

14. Tavira Portuguese Restaurant in Chevy Chase, MD.

Made me feel connected to my times in Portugal (i.e., the Season 2).

15. Sharks Cove near Pupukea Beach in Oahu, HI.

Loved the weather in Hawaii. Reminded me of Sri Lanka in many ways.

16. La Jolla Cove, San Diego, CA.

Those noisy sea lions and seals looked adorable in the night!

17. Johnny Cay from San Andres, Colombia

Traveling with a family of a friend I made in the conference.

18. Crowded buses in Bogota, Colombia.

Reminded me of my Sri Lanka days. I manage to get around without even having Internet access while in the road.

19. PAEE-ALE conference experience in San Andres, Colombia

Probably my best conference experience so far. 

20. Bogota Airport, Colombia.

The capsule hostel "Wait N' Rest" experience in the airport and the always-open restaurants/cafes that let us add whiskey or a cream liqueur (as common across Colombia) to coffee as an extra! 

21. Luau in Waipahu, HI.

My first exposure to the Polynesian culture and the indigenous people of Oceania. 

22. Extremely hot Abu Dhabi, UAE.

But at least my hotel room was comfy and fancy-looking.

23. Whale watching in Seward, AK.

It is a touristy cute little town.

24. Airport meetups and emotional goodbyes.

Airports in three continents - Toronto, Melbourne, and Shenzhen... with many family reunions - some after almost two decades.

25. Night walks in Little Tokyo, CA.

Staying in a hotel in this cute neighborhood has its perks!

26. Diverse cuisines of Los Angeles, CA.

Been to LA several times. But this time tried cuisines of several origins.

27. The 4-flight trip to San Andres, with a recently sprained ankle, canceled flights, and sleeping in airports.

Anchorage → Minneapolis → Toronto → Bogota → San Andres. A tiresome trip. Discomfort. But a story to share.

28. Christmas decorations and New Year lights in Shenzhen, China

A very crowded new year's eve in OCT!

29. Early mornings at work.

6:15 am - 6:15 pm, as a perfect morning person.

30. Cocktails in the beach in San Andres, Colombia.

The island had a great cocktail scene, many nice beaches, and cocktails in the beaches!

Every year, I have only one new year's resolution - to outperform my previous years. :) 2025 appears special. We are 25% into the 21st century. I wish you a happy new year. Thanks for reading my list until the end. You may read the blog posts of all the previous years as well.

Patterns across the years...

The familiar ANC Airport

Life is full of deja vu, and I like to see patterns across the years. I see patterns in days, weeks, and more importantly, years. As the first year fully based in Alaska, with spring and fall semesters and largely free summer, this year is unique. However, I can already see this could become a template for many years to come. I will likely say in 2025 and in the future years, "this year largely felt like 2024." This was my first 9-month work year! That allowed me to travel extensively in the summer for conferences and personal trips.

Conferences and friends

Presenting at the CCGrid QUICK workshop

This was a year filled with conferences. It was a perfect year as an extrovert. Now that I am in the season 3 of my life, meeting friends have become very rare. So, this was special. (Season 1 was when I was in Sri Lanka. Season 2 was my grad school and postdoc days - 2012 - 2023). CCGrid 2024 was remarkable. This was me attending a distributed computing conference after quite some time. It signified my return to my comfortable territories. This was also my second time in Philadelphia. But having a group of friends made this time feel more interesting. We dined with music and climbed the Rocky Steps. I walked and dined with CCGrid conference mates in Philadelphia, PA.

Country #50, Continent #5

This year, I visited South America (Bogota, Colombia) in July and Australia (Melbourne) in August. Now, I have to visit Africa and Antarctica to claim that I have been to all the continents.

Cute views of Melbourne

This year also brought the Los Angeles - Shenzhen - Los Angeles (2025), Kingston, ON - Melbourne - Toronto, ON, and Bogota - San Andres - Minneapolis trips that exceeded weeks in length and crossed continents. This year was also the first time long flights since the pandemic era. My last intercontinental long flight was in 2020 February to Qatar, Singapore, and Indonesia. In someway, this year made me feel like truly out of the pandemic era.

Melbourne was nice with its bathing boxes in Brighton beach and kangaroo meat. But hitting the magic number 50 in visited countries made it feel like an achievement on its own. Now, waiting for the country #51. This was also the year where I visited most continents in a single year: North America, South America, Asia, and Australia.

Nunaliit on Ubuntu 24.04

CouchDB configured on Ubuntu 24.04

We have been evaluating Nunaliit to use it to visualize the database entries of our project. It was working smoothly on our old Ubuntu 18.04 laptop. However, when we got a new Lenovo, the Internet (both wired and Wireless) did not work in Ubuntu 18.04 as the drivers are outdated now. So we had to install Ubuntu 24.04 instead, as we obviously need an Internet connection.

Nunaliit on Ubuntu 24.04

That brought additional challenges to configure CouchDB (the database that Nunaliit uses as its datastore) and then install Nunaliit and create an Atlas on it. We followed the Nunaliit tutorial, but had to make certain changes to make it work on Ubuntu 24.04, as listed in this document. There could be better or easier approaches to get Nunaliit working on Ubuntu 24.04 that we did not test yet.