2024 Retrospective

By David Buchanan, 5^th January 2025

This is a new-yearsy post, but a few days late. Just in time for everyone to be sick of them!

On December 31^th[sic]* 2023, I declared that 2024 would be the "year of the blog". I listed a bunch of things I might do in 2024, and guess what, I didn't do any of them. Except for one!

*yeah that's a bug in my blog renderer. I might keep it because it's kinda funny.

The Numbers

$ cat articles/2023/*.md | wc -w
19379
$ cat articles/2024/*.md | wc -w
20379

I did technically do more blogging in 2024, by raw word count, but these counts also include drafts.

By article count, I published 9 articles in 2023, with 2 unpublished drafts.

In 2024 I published 5 articles with 8 drafts. Is that bad? I don't know. Writing helps me to think, and I still benefited from those half-finished articles, even if you the reader will not.

(by the way, I might've moved some 2023 drafts into my 2024 folder at some point, I can't remember...)

There are varying schools of thought on how polished a blog post should be before you publish it, and mine is "it depends". Some topics (like this one) are better being more off-the-cuff, but others deserve more care.

Things I Did Write About

Of the articles I actually published in 2024, I'm particularly proud of three of them:

• SIMD in Pure Python
• Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering Secret Logs, and GPL Violations
• Can You Get Root With Only a Cigarette Lighter?

The latter is about DRAM bus fault injection, and I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be a relevant attack method for the as-yet-unannounced Nintendo Switch 2. Even if it isn't, I hope I write about my findings.

It's not a blog post per se, but another big piece of writing I did is MPEG-CENC: Defective by Specification, which I wrote for the Phrack zine. It's very cool to see my writing printed out on paper (by the way, you can grab a physical copy here). Getting published in a zine has been a long-term goal of mine, and Phrack is as good as it gets.

I must say I'm a little disappointed by the lack of online discussion about it, but the feedback I have received has been entirely positive. I think the plain-text format of Phrack may be a little un-engaging for Modern Audiences™, and so the only people reading it are those with a prior interest in the topic. The writing itself, I hope, ought to be digestible by any technically-inclined reader.

It did get written about in The Register though! I like their final line:

ISO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®

Maybe I'll write a more engaging overview of it, in blog format - or maybe even video?

Other Projects

Outside of the blogosphere, I've been working on a lot of other projects.

The most significant to me is millipds, which is, per the github description, "A from-scratch atproto PDS implementation in Python".

It's not yet at the point where I'd consider it "daily drivable", but I hope to reach that point in 2025, and migrate my main atproto presence there.

I'd succinctly describe myself as a "hacker", but millipds has been my first software project I'd actually classify as "software engineering", due to its scope. It's been an interesting exercise in managing complexity - maybe I'll write about that at some point.

Microblogging Meta

In last year's end-of-year article, "year of the blog", I attributed the 2019-2022 decline of my blogging activity to the allure of microblogging as an alternative - i.e. Twitter.

Now I have a larger microblogging audience than ever before, via Bluesky, but it's not a very focused audience. My old-twitter audience was mostly people in the broader infosec/hacking sphere, but my bluesky audience is more general. They mostly follow me because I said something funny once, or maybe just because I have a lot of followers, and not because of my security research.

Despite the larger microblogging audience, I still kept up the "macroblogging". I'm not sure if it's because of my deliberate attempt to prioritise long-form writing, or because I know it's still the best way to reach a more focused technical audience. Maybe both.

I shouldn't forget my ActivityPub audience either, equivalent to a sizable chunk of my previous twitter audience. I will admit though, Bluesky has largely replaced it for me, in mind-share. That said, I feel reluctant to post this article on Bluesky - it feels too personal. But maybe I will anyway.

Predictions for 2025

I'm not falling for that one again! Let's see.