2024 in Review
Published on
2024 is the year I became a meme and a mom. And it’s a primary example of how life is a swinging pendulum.
Last year, when I sat down to write this year-in-review, I was recovering from my second surgery to resolve some complications from a pretty traumatizing miscarriage. Today, I’m sitting and writing this next to my 2-month-old baby girl who is mischievously resisting sleep, and cooing at me when I look over to give her a pacifier as I try to get her down.
This post marks the 10th edition of my year-in-reviews, which feels like solid milestone to note. While I may not always achieve all of my goals, it’s nice to reflect on the year and make plans for the next one.
Highlights
- 🐣 I grew and birthed a whole human (my primary project of the year)
- 🏠 I renovated and decorated a house
- 🇮🇹 I went back to Italy on a babymoon
- 🌹 I grew a flower and vegetable garden
- I tried a new craft medium (felt)
- 🎤 I traveled and spoke at 6 conferences, all while pregnant
Career
This year was a continuation of work in my role as lead for the CSS & UI DevRel team at Google. I’ve been primarily involved in shipping native UI control features like anchor positioning and a customizable select element. While this process has been lengthy, with much back and forth that often feels like “one step forward, two steps back,” it is extremely rewarding to see these much-needed features start to land in browsers and really garner the support they need to become a reality.
I happily was able to organize another year of Google sponsoring CSS Day and bring the team together to meet the community and connect in-person.
Before I left to go on maternity leave, I was also involved in organizing CSS-Next Community group, which worked on CSS levels and the new CSS logo, and organized another edition of CSS Wrapped. Definitely check that out for a review of what’s new this year.
Content Production
Speaking
This year I continued to speak about the evolution of CSS and HTML, and things I’ve been working on in browser land including progress on components like customizable drop down menus, anchor positioning, and updates on modern UI features like animating from height 0 to auto to name a few. It’s so great to see continued cross-browser interest and to see these UI features landing at such a rapid pace.
I did a compressed conference tour in the spring, speaking at 6 events total, and attending a few more.
It’s always an honor to speak at Google I/O and make space on the stage for UI capabilities to shine. This is the second year in a row I’ve done a talk highlighting what’s new in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript as they pertain to web UI, and what Chrome is working on next.
The CSS Podcast
The CSS Podcast was back for its 5th season in 2024! Adam Argyle and I (with Bramus Van Damme joining us for two of the episodes) recorded 13 episodes about new CSS features this year, receiving a total of 740k downloads for all episodes. We did not upload the podcast to Youtube this year based on user feedback (folks expected visual feedback there but we just don’t have the bandwidth right now to turn our podcast into a video series).
The top episodes were:
- 091: Season 5 Wrap-up
- 087: Anchor positioning
- 084: Text Wrap
Other podcast appearances
I love to join folks on their podcasts/videocasts and this year I was lucky enough to be a part of a few of those again! I definitely want to do more of this next year, especially as traveling will likely be a little bit more limited for me.
- Kevin Powell: A conversation with Una Kravets: The rapid evolution of CSS and hobbies outside of work
- DevToolsFM: Panel at Epic Web Conf w/Scott Hanselman, Una Kravets, Michael Chan
- The Design Systems Podcast
- SyntaxFM: CSS 4, 5, and 6! With Google’s Una and Adam
- JS Party #308: Frontend Feud: CSS Podcast vs CompressedFM
Writing
This year, I wrote 5 blog posts, which is less than previous years (but keep in mind I started maternity leave in September). Aligning with my other work, I wrote about the anchor positioning API, new CSS features, and the upcoming customizable select element, to list a few.
One thing I am now realizing is that I didn’t write any additional blog posts on my personal blog! That is something I hope to rectify in 2025 because I really like having this space for more experimental posts.
Life Things
Family
It takes a lot of energy to grow and raise a baby, so family building was definitely a huge focus of the year. Since January, my body was hard at work literally building a human. And we hard launched that human, Zena, into the world on October 15th.
I am so excited to see this little nugget grow and learn and become her own person with a unique personality and interests. I’m also coming to terms with this new identity which is no longer centered around myself. 2025 will certainly be a year of growth and adjustment for me as much as it will be for Zena.
Crafting & Making
While I did not sew as much as I had planned to this year, I did learn a new craft: working with felt! I made a few felt play foods as testers and I plan to make more to gift friends.
I also did grow a garden with cucumber, tomato, peppers, and a variety of flowers: daisies, dahlias, zinnias, cala lily, cosmos, and lots of roses which came with the property. While my dahlias and cosmos were a fail, my zinnias turned out wonderfully! I even learned how to save seeds which I now have for the coming year.
Working on a watercolor for the nursery.
Garden bounty in July.
The only dress I made all year, for baby.
Reading
I read 14 books this year, which is weirdly the exact same number of books I read last year. I definitely did a lot of leisure reading, going down a rabbit hole for ACOTAR (if you know, you know).
There were some great books I read this year outside of guilty-pleasure romantasy. In particular, I read The Women this year by Kristin Hannah, who is quickly becoming my favorite author. If you haven’t read her work yet, I would highly recommend starting with The Nightingale, which I read a few years ago. I have also heard good things about her other writing and plan on reading more next year.
Some of my favorite reads this year include:
Travel
This is the first year I didn’t have a chance to visit a new country in a long time. However, I did have some great trips to places I absolutely love including Amsterdam, Berlin, Bologna, and Paris.
I also visited some new places like northern Spain (A Coruña) and northern Italy (Lake Como). This is the first year I went back to Florence after I did a study abroad program there 12 years ago. It was pretty epic to show my husband the city I lived in for a short time and love so much.
2024 Resolutions Review
Now to review my 2024 resolutions:
-
✅ Launch a travel blog. — I did indeed launch a travel blog but I unfortunately haven’t spent the time on it that it needs to flourish. I was hoping to really focus on this a lot more in 2024, but with everything else going on, I didn’t really get to. I’m not sure how much time I plan to spend on this next year.
-
⚠️ Build community. — I do feel like I’ve built a stronger community base near me this past year, specifically through mom connections, but I feel like there is a lot more I could have done in this space. I definitely have a few events I want to host to bolster community even more in 2025.
-
❌ Sew something I design from scratch. — I did not get to explore the sewing skills I had hoped to work on in 2024, but I hope to still pick this one up next year!
-
✅ Start a flower garden. — With varying degrees of success, I did indeed start a flower garden. One issue with my backyard, however, is lack of sunlight and overpopulation of wildlife 😅. It’s not exactly an ideal spot, but I do plan on at least growing some flowers next year again like zinnias.
-
❌ Visit somewhere on my bucket list. — I did not get to visit a bucket list country this year, for various reasons. I suppose this one will also have to move to 2025/26!
2025 Goals
A neat idea I saw online was to make a bingo card with big and small resolutions, goals, and things you want to do in the coming year. So I plan on making that bingo card this year and putting it on my fridge.
Some of the things going on the bingo card:
- Improve my video setup: Since moving, I love my office. It has a beautiful view of the garden, but with the setup that made the most sense, the backdrop just really isn’t conducive to making video or other content. I’d love to get this dialed in (if anyone has any recommendations).
- Exhibit at a craft fair: There is a really cute, perfectly sized local holiday craft fair that I went to a few weeks ago and I thought it would be a great goal to actually brand my candle making and exhibit/sell them at this fair.
- Write 12 blog posts: I definitely want to be writing more blog posts, especially shorter ones that go through problem solving UI components using CSS and HTML!
- Learn new sewing skills: I have never sewn a zipper, button holes, or lettuce hem, and these are all some concrete skills I plan to learn and explore in 2025.
- Visit a new country: It might be challenging with the baby but I still want to keep it going and visit a new country next year!
- Speak at 4 conferences: In-person events are definitely going to be more challenging with a new baby, but I do have at least one event already lined up and I’m hoping to get back into it as I ramp back up after maternity leave.
- Read 16 books: I want to keep up my reading habit and read even more books next year.
- Create regular video content: I don’t have a specific goal around video content but I think it would be nice to pick it back up, making short clips to accompany blog posts or other content. This is an area I’d like to think through more and have a plan.
- Consume more tech content: I want to be more intentional next year about not just making content but also consuming it. I don’t have a great system for this, but I’d like to make more time for this to learn and share what folks are experimenting with and working on.
- Check into my goals monthly: One big goal I have is to do a monthly check-in on my resolutions to stay consistent. I plan to do this on the last day of every month, and hopefully it will help me revisit and plan to make sure I’m on track.
I know this is a lot of goals, but bingo cards do have 24 spots to fill. I don’t expect to hit every single thing, but it’s something new to try to we’ll see how it goes with this new approach!
Conclusion
2024 has definitely the most consequential year of my life so far, and I’m looking forward to everything that 2025 brings.
Wishing you a happy new year full of new energy, joy, challenges, learning and growth.
- Una