2024: That's a Wrap

Another year, another exhausted reflection post typed at 11pm before the Christmas break. But it was a good one.

After everything 2023 threw at me (the redundancy, the job market grind, the mental health wobbles) I went into 2024 quietly desperate for it to be boring. Stable, anyway. A year where you get to do the work instead of just surviving it.

It was mostly that. Which, given where I’d been twelve months earlier, felt enormous.

The new role

The biggest thing this year was moving from AND Digital to Royal London as Lead Front-End Design Engineer. AND Digital was a decent landing pad when I needed one, but Royal London is where I actually wanted to be: the kind of role that had been on my radar for a while. Design system architecture for a big organisation, and accessibility as a quality baseline instead of a compliance checkbox.

The first six months were slow on purpose. Understanding how things work before trying to change them. Earning some trust before I built anything. Working out what was there: the existing token structure, the component library, the gap between what the design system claimed to be and what teams were actually using day to day. That gap, as ever, told me plenty.

The second half of the year started to feel like it had some momentum to it. The token architecture work in particular (working through the naming conventions, the semantic layer, the Figma-to-code pipeline) is the kind of problem I’ll happily spend a lot of time on. It’s where design decisions become engineering decisions, and vice versa, and getting that boundary right matters a lot.

I won’t pretend it’s been without its moments of imposter syndrome. Joining a bigger organisation, in a more senior position, after a year that knocked my confidence around a fair bit: there were days where the gap between what I knew I could do and what I felt capable of doing was properly uncomfortable. I’m not after sympathy. I think it’s more common than people admit, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

It settled. It usually does.

Community & speaking

I spoke at a couple of events this year. Still terrifying every time. Still absolutely worth it. If you’re sitting on something worth saying and talking yourself out of sharing it, don’t. The web could do with more people willing to think out loud.

What I’m taking into 2025

The Royal London work is the main thread. The foundations are in: now it’s about shipping, and about making sure the system gets used, not just built. Adoption is a harder problem than architecture, and I’m increasingly interested in it.

I want to write more. I keep saying this. I mean it with varying degrees of commitment depending on the week. But the writing I’ve managed this year (the handful of proper pieces that got published) reminded me why I do it. Writing is how I figure out what I actually think, and I’d like to do more of it.

Here’s to a 2025 with fewer divs and more <main> elements.