Wow, that’s quite a headline for a 30-something to write, right? But the very real side effect of being a weird kid and starting freelancing when I was on 8th grade is that it’s now just over 20 years since I finished my first paid website projects.
This year everything lined up nicely and I could publish an article on Christmas Eve, and this one on New Year’s Eve (in Finland, we do love celebrating everything in advance, and then being hungover on the actual occasion).
Anyway. 2024 is coming to an end. Time for a year review – as is traditional at this point.
So read on, as I brag about my dumb decisions and rant about the smart ones!
A short history lesson
I got my first website development gigs in 2004 through a local 4H association. It wasn’t a lot of money, nor were the projects that complicated. But it was a different world back then, and it was still nice pocket money for a teenager who lived in rural Finland, where getting a summer job wasn’t really a possibility.
A lot has changed in 20 years. And then again, many things haven’t changed at all.
First few websites I made were static sites with just CSS and HTML. Performance and adherence to standards – just like what you get with Static Site Generators now.
But sometimes you want more features. More dynamism. Interactivity. Better editor experience.
You want a CMS.
And while WordPress had just been released when I started making websites, it was very “Bloggy” at the beginning. It didn’t feel like a proper CMS.
So I made my own with all the eagerness of a 14-year-old.
Using PHP, I wrote a CMS, that would read from .txt files (because I didn’t know how to use databases yet). And a couple of years later, I added support from reading from word-files because one customer asked for that.
Yeah. I made a Content Management System, that used .docx files as a database. What’re you going to do, sue me?
And then some people dare to complain about using SharePoint Lists as a database! I consider that actually pretty kosher, all things considered.
Anyway. I’ve been finding thoughtful workarounds ever since and started blogging about them in 2015, a few years after starting in my first day job as a SharePoint developer. That’s also about 9 years of writing a blog!
That said – what’s up with the blog in 2024?
Koskila.net in 2024
2024 was not the worst year to be blogging about tech stuff. Surprisingly, ChatGPT/Copilot didn’t make a dent bigger than last year. By which I mean the overall audience size was further down, but the trend is now stagnant. Maybe the effect, while significant, isn’t as profound as some expected. We’ll see.
I’ll try to find some time to move the website to a new platform before the site turns 10. 9+ years on the same WordPress instance is a long time – I’ve moved between hosts at least 6 times, but rarely voluntarily. And fixing WordPress and cPanel issues has hardly been a fun exercise – if I need to find new workarounds, I’d rather use some technology I actually like. I.e., not PHP.
I added new “AI-powered summaries” on the website as an experimental way to use AI for good – but I’m not sure how useful they have been at the end of the day. Maybe I should include one for every article as a description field… But in all honesty, so far, it’s been all manual work.
What’s next for koskila.net?
Not just business as usual, I guess.
With my previous web hosting provider ceasing operations, I was going to change the site engine away from WordPress. The site HAS become an almost unmaintainable mess of plug-ins, hacks, workarounds and fixes. Multiple levels of caching makes everything even more weird. Only the editor side of things I’ve found reasonably nice.
But I haven’t found the time to make a proper migration. So I just made another WordPress hosting provider change. And due to performance issues, yet another one, and I’m now back with Krystal (a UK provider), whom I actually like a lot.
But back to the site upgrade!
I did decide that whatever I’ll end up with should be an SSG (Static Site Generator) based on markdown files this time around. Yeah, 5 years later I woke up the newest hotness. And even then I didn’t have time to actually finish the work!
But I did test-drive 2 platforms/tech stacks that I found promising:
- VitePress on Vue (which I use at work), and
- StaticBlazor on .NET (which I’m vaguely familiar with otherwise)
The site is not trivial in size, performance and feature requirements, so I started with a smaller challenge first: I migrated my small consulting company’s website, magpie.fi to StaticBlazor, which seemed like the obvious choice.
And that went… Fine. It was actually quite easy, despite myself running into some quirks of GitHub Pages along the way… One of them being HTTPS issues.
Not a fan of having to figure out SSL issues again.
Most popular content on the website
The visitor counts have been trending down still in 2024, going below 300 000 for the first time in years. But after the total fall of a cliff last year, the trend hasn’t at least worsened, so that’s something.
But what kind of content have y’all been consuming this year? Let’s see…
Most popular articles in 2024
So what were the most read articles on the website in 2024? The first one surprised me when I drilled into the analytics!
The most read article was a pretty old one about a DLL architecture mismatch – namely, a local 32-bit IIS being unable to load your 64-bit DLLs – was the most popular article last year. It’s sometimes really tough to know what other devs struggle with, but I’m happy to have posted about it when I first ran into this issue!
I’ve been using winget to restore my apps any time I have to reinstall my laptop from the scratch – which has happened many times in the last 1½ years, mind you – but it’s a tool that seems to randomly break sometimes. This one happened with my previous laptop which had a Windows Update brick it (yes – that has happened to me with both Windows 11 AND Windows 10 in the last 18 months!) and restoring it with System Restore broke winget multiple different ways.
And apparently I’m NOT the only to whom that has happened!
This article was an instant classic! I ran into a weird issue with Excel (well, in reality it was all OneDrive’s fault – because of course it was!) in November, and it immediately became the most popular article
Most popular new articles in 2024
The article about Excel and OneDrive messing up was also the most popular new article by far. Nothing could match it even closely – but the next most popular ones were:
About a TypeScript build error. Go figure, an actual article about dev issues for a change!
And about a nifty Azure DevOps YAML pipeline hack for outputting all available environment variables. DevOps stuff remains popular. But the last one…
A weird issue where SharePoint refused to let you share documents on a SharePoint Site you are the Owner of. Yeah, I still write about SharePoint – it’s what started this blog 9 years ago.
So the most popular new articles were about OneDrive, Excel, TypeScript, Azure DevOps, PowerShell and SharePoint. That’s quite a range!
My least popular article in 2024
I guess this one is worth sharing as well – any article where I mention Ukraine (or donating money to fight the Fascist Imperium) is downvoted almost immediately. Goes to show I still have an audience in Russia.
So let me address y’all for a bit – if you’re Russian, and you’re spending your time downvoting blog posts online instead of working to overthrow Putler or donating rubles (or toilet paper, same effect) to Russian Legion or something, you’re on the wrong side of history.
Although, there’s ONE article that scores even lower than my posts about Ukraine… This article about fixing Copilot login. I don’t know if it’s because of my repeated jabs at the way Microsoft ships and prioritizes new features to their popular apps, or if there’s something actually wrong with the solution (it does work on my machine!), so I have chosen to believe the Edge in Copilot for Edge Business Pro product team at Microsoft found the article and didn’t like it.
Anyway. Talking more about Ukraine…
Ukraine is still fighting
There’s still a war raging in Europe – now with troops from North Korea participating.
Just like the last few years, I kept supporting Ukraine. For tax reasons, I’m not just donating money – I buy products or services that support Ukraine. And boycott companies like Tikkurila or Jimm’s, that could easily cease actively supporting Russia, but have chosen not to do that.
I use hundreds of euros each year on paints, and thousands on electronics – so while it’s not much, I’m happy to spend that money elsewhere.
Besides, I can afford to use much more money from my in company account by purchasing services and products, than I can simply donate (which is not tax deductible). Figuring out what useful things to buy for my company is of course a bit of a drag, but this year I did the following:
- 1000 € on marketing collaboration with Your Finnish Friends Ry
- 60 € on the Christmas gifts for board of directors from a Ukrainian producer
… and then I ran out of ideas. I could always advertise more, but in order to make tax deductions, the purchases need to be connected to the business efforts.
And to be fair, I don’t have unlimited money. Finland has always been a high-tax country, but next year’s tax hikes are hitting my household for north of 6000 € (annually).
Highs and lows
Last few years I’ve spent at least a paragraph or two to bitch about my personal life.
I don’t feel like bitching about that anymore. Overall I’m at a much better place than I was last year. Or the year before. I’ve been happy to find so many people around me being so supportive. But I just wish I would’ve gotten here faster and with fewer people getting hurt.
Sort of a low point of the year was yet another Covid infection. I would’ve thought we, as a society, should’ve learned something about dealing with Pestilence in the past few years. But it turns out it’s really difficult to overestimate the humankinds collective wisdom, or the ways it gets practiced when the smallest about of power immediately goes to the head of a petty bureaucrat.
What am I talking about? Well – my wife is studying Cybersecurity alongside her work, and her university – which I’m embarrassed to say is also the alma mater of mine – decided to force it upon all students to travel from all across the country to a 2-day seminar.
Spending Friday and Saturday with your classmates doesn’t sound unreasonable.
But to organize a mandatory no-exemptions seminar in poorly ventilated classrooms in the middle of a combined Covid & Flu wave…
Sick? No excuse.
Coughing? No excuse.
Covid? No excuse.
Stomach flu? No excuse.
You can of course just choose not to go. But you, alongside with your whole study group of 3-4 people, will fail the course then.
Not just your seminar work. The whole course.
No worries! You’re welcome to try again next year, but of course you’ve thrown away all the hard work for the course this semester. And of course you’ve made 2-3 of your peers angry at you.
Using this sort of peer pressure and “management by perkele” is what the Finnish Defense Force used to get bad rep for. They’ve come a long way – hopefully the academic world would some day get there, too.
So great job, University of Jyväskylä. Sometimes I feel like the universities should require some sort of qualification from their teaching staff, but alas.
Anyway.
2025 is going to be a tough year financially – the Finnish government is raising taxes across the board, and our household is going to lose around 6000 euros just on higher income taxes and worse tax deductions. That means about 500 euros less per month, after taxes, compared to this year.
I don’t think we’ll be able to afford an au pair in 2025, which is a shame – having people from different countries join us in our day-to-day has been one of the coolest experiences over the last 3 years, and it’s been a great learning opportunity for the kids, too.
On the other hand, the relative inability to pay for help at home (we’ve paid for childcare, renovation and occasional cleaning services) will – for a 2-income upper middle class family – just mean working less and doing more ourselves.
Not all bad, then.
2024 was the year of useless gadgets
In 2024 I’ve spent more money (both my own and my employer’s) on tools than I’ve done in quite a few years. And that approach has been a resounding failure so far.
Why? Let me explain how I’ve messed up both my software and hardware purchases in 2024.
To improve the wifi coverage in my home and office, I purchased NetSpot. It’s not a bad tool – but turns out it stores all project files under AppData folder in Windows. A folder, that isn’t covered under any normal cloud backup storage setup one might plan to have. A folder, that’s wiped when you perform a something like “Refresh Windows without losing any of your files”. A folder, that is absolutely nuked when you need to reinstall your machine.
I was writing an article about how nice it is to be able to build heatmaps of your wifi coverage, but I didn’t grab the screenshots before I had to “reset my pc without losing any files”.
Well, I didn’t lose any files that were stored properly. But I don’t have the heatmaps to screenshot anymore, and I’m sure as hell not going to redo them.
The wifi refresh itself was pretty successful. I replaced my aging (and horribly unstable) ASUS AiMesh devices (it’s kind of sad how 6-year old networking equipment is now completely end-of-life) with cutting edge Decos from TP-Link. I was quite happy with them for a couple of months. Only to then read a national safety PSA that these devices are an infosec nightmare and should be retired from use immediately.
Well, if the CCP plans to use them to spy on me, I hope they at least make sure they can maintain a stable wifi.
In other news, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with Android – especially my new-ish OnePlus. I can’t understand how a 1-year-old, 800-euro device can’t really run more than 1 app at a time, maintain Bluetooth connectivity over 50 cm distance adequately, or even give over 12 hours of battery life.
And don’t even get me started on the state of Windows PCs in 2024! Or at least my luck with them.
Oh, right – this does tie nicely into the NetSpot wipe, too.
My previous, highly productive Dell XPS 15 was bricked by a Windows update, and never recovered completely. I don’t know why – using system restore just made things worse, resetting the OS did nothing, and even reinstalling the whole thing only improved things temporarily – the machine was still practically unusable with constant CPU spikes and UI freezing.
So I upgraded to the new generation, hottest new hardware! The first time in my life that I’ve really done that.
For about 4000 USD, I got the brand new Dell XPS 14, an AI-PC (read “AI minus”, as opposed to Copilot+).
Right, Copilot+PCs… They were announced after I ordered the laptop, but before I got it. Made me feel a bit dumb, really. Cheaper machines with comparable specs but 10 times the battery life? Count me in!
But the worse was yet to come.
The new machine ended up stuck in a reboot loop almost immediately. System restore didn’t work because I didn’t have a local admin account (I thought having an unmonitored administrator account was bad for security, but apparently it’s a requirement when you have a Windows system), so I ended up having to reinstall the machine.
Of course, that’s an operation you need to be prepared to do, if you are a Windows user. But I’d prefer to do this operation maybe on an annual basis, not monthly!
And after this, the machine never really has shined in any way. Just feels like the hardware doesn’t work well together or something.
In the process of writing this, my laptop suddenly lost the ability to play music. That’s because, apparently, no audio devices are installed anymore. Somehow, this is so on point I feel like I’m in an Apple commercial!
And this laptop gives me that feeling often: I’ve taken the device to a meeting room, only to run out of battery in 30 minutes, run out of stamina due to the machine making the tiny room so hot in an hour-long meeting, to force me to hastily exit the room and go back to my desk only to open my laptop’s lid to a Blue Screen of Death.
A surprise to be sure, but not a welcome one. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable when I expect a 4000 USD device to make me a bit more productive than this.
Some people smile or grin every time they open their laptop’s lid. I grimace, as if I’m not welcomed by a BSOD, I’ll get to see a failed Windows Hello auth screen, frozen screen because of driver issues or something, or just the black screen because the machine ran out of battery while sleeping.
On a good day, I get about 1½ hours of actual usage out of the battery. Slightly more if the machine pretends to sleep.
More and more in the last year I’ve been getting the feeling that the platform I’m supposed to be using – Windows – is not a seriously Operating System anymore, but closer to a weird collection of hacks, one-off features to satisfy someone’s scorecard, spaghetti and a lot of superglue to hold it all together.
It works fairly well for roughly 4 days out of 5. But then there’s one day, every week, when the machine uninstall its audio devices, refuses to use more than 6 cores (out of 22!), Windows Update bricks the machine or it simply doesn’t even start.
Every single day I’d knock on wood, but on this throne of lies there’s nothing solid enough to classify as such. So it can’t even run on pure luck anymore, and my goodwill is running thin.
Anyway. I’ve given the “AI-” machines a go and that was an utter and expensive failure. So what’s next?
This New Year, I’ve made the resolution to finally give a Mac (maybe a Mac Mini) a go to see if it’s as flimsy as Windows. Probably should give iPhone a go, too.
If I can get my hands on a Snapdragon laptop, I’d love to see if they’re more stable than the rest of the Windows PC options.
Oh – and I have one more sad software story to share! In anticipation of the Android to iOS move, I migrated from Google’s Password Manager to Bitwarden. And holy cow did I not understand how much convenience I’m ditching by making that move! Somehow, Google just “gets” which password to use where (I mean, they did save it in the first place, so maybe it makes sense), where as Bitwarden definitely doesn’t, and often refuses to learn, too.
Tell it to always autofill a certain credential? Got it! It’ll add the URL into the autofill list.
On which it already was. And it didn’t auto-fill anything, or suggest using that credential, or anything of that sort. And it won’t. Ever.
Quite often you learn to appreciate the magic only after it’s gone. Maybe after becoming disillusioned with Apple products, too, I’ll just migrate back to using Chrome’s built-in Password Manager…😂
Now – for my last disappointment in hardware.
I did have to replace my Microsoft Surface Headphones this year, since they suddenly snapped in half. It was a shame, since I actually liked them – despite the headphones being the physical manifestation of Dunning-Kruger effect in product form: smart enough to think highly of themselves (highly enough to not have a switch to turn off the “smart” features), and dumb enough to be infuriating to use.
The Sony headphones I got to replace them are humbler – you can actually disable the features they have. I immediately liked them, even if Surface Headphones somehow felt better on my ears. But my warm feelings were distinguished somewhat when the Sony headphones went on sale a full 100 euros cheaper less than 2 weeks after I got mine.
I’ve slowly grown to accept that whatever I end up buying will always disappoint me one way or another.
(Not) ranting about business for a change
Workwise, this has been my third year with Omnia, and it’s been an intense year of dealing with the middle management stuff I never had to bother about before joining Omnia as a, well, middle manager.
My team has doubled in size as the business has grown, and pretty much for the whole year I’ve felt like I’m the bottleneck (if there is one).
I guess that’s a kind of a positive problem to have. Plenty of work to do.
Happy New Year 2025!
(Hope it’s better than the last few 😁)
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
- 2024 Year Review – and 20 years in business! - December 31, 2024
- Merging on GitHub Actions fails with “could not read Username for ‘https://github.com’: No such device or address”? - December 24, 2024
- How to close the Sidebar in Microsoft Edge - December 17, 2024
![new-year-2022-memes-collection-2022-is-just-2020-too-1-1024×683[1]](https://www.koskila.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/new-year-2022-memes-collection-2022-is-just-2020-too-1-1024x6831-1-125x125.jpg "2021 - Year Review!")
