Another year has passed, and here I am with my annual year-in-review post. This is actually only my second post of 2024 - I had lots of ideas for blog posts but between finishing my dissertation and diving into RA work, time just slipped away. I’ll probably write more about my master’s journey and dissertation later, but for now, let’s dive into the data analysis of 2024 (with some help from Claude).
As always, here are links to my previous year-in-review posts:
Technical Learnings
2024 was a significant year for academic and technical growth, primarily split between my master’s dissertation and my role at PLSE Lab, which I joined in August 2024. I plan to write a detailed post about my dissertation experience later, but overall, this year brought valuable insights into the research world.
One of the biggest learnings was understanding how research actually works - from the initial approach to setting realistic project boundaries, even though research by nature is open-ended. I got to explore languages like Rust and Zig, which was particularly interesting given my previous experience. Back in 2022, I attempted to rewrite Slicer in Rust and found it quite frustrating, mainly due to confusion with Rust packages and implementation challenges. However, this time around, whether due to my evolved perspective or improvements in the Rust ecosystem (and perhaps some help from LLMs in debugging), working with Rust felt much more manageable. This growth even led to me making some contributions to LibAFL - my first involvement with a major open source project in quite a while.
The RA work brought its own unique challenges, particularly when dealing with older projects. One recurring issue was setting up previous tools on newer systems for comparison experiments. It’s surprisingly difficult to work with projects from even just a few years ago due to their specific version requirements. I remember joking with colleagues that someone could start a successful startup just by providing students with environments to run their experiments! This led to interesting discussions about whether PhD students should be responsible for ensuring their tools work under their stated conditions, or if that falls outside the scope of academic research given time constraints and the industrial nature of such maintenance.
Towards the end of 2024, I finally got to pursue my long-standing interest in hardware and side-channel attacks by investing in some actual equipment. After years of theoretical study, I could finally get hands-on experience - tinkering with microcontrollers and PCBs of 40% keyboards, and exploring router firmware using UART and CH341A. While I’ve always felt confident in my theoretical understanding of these concepts, having the actual hardware to experiment with has shown me I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to practical implementation.
Overall, this year was tremendously valuable for both technical and academic learning. I gained insights into how research projects evolve from conception to completion (even when it feels like there’s always more to explore).
Sleep & Fitness
On the fitness front, 2024 turned out to be quite successful - I managed to complete a marathon without any major incidents, which I consider a significant achievement. You can read more about my marathon experience here.
Now, let’s dive into the sleep data from this year.
Comparing this year’s sleep patterns with last year’s, the averages remained fairly consistent. What’s fascinating is how clearly the sleep data reflects different periods of my academic life - you can easily spot when I was on vacation versus when the semester was in full swing. January’s data is missing because I didn’t have my tracker then, but given it was a vacation period, it likely would have mirrored the patterns seen in July and December.
The data tells an interesting story throughout the year. As the second semester of my master’s program wrapped up, my sleep average increased noticeably (May-July). However, once the third semester kicked in, those numbers took a nosedive and stayed low until December when the semester finally ended. April and November stand out as particularly challenging months, showing the lowest averages. This makes sense since these were our deadline months - April was packed with semester-end projects and assignments, while November was dominated by my dissertation work and the CS6223 project.
Looking at the monthly averages, July and December were my best months for sleep, with averages of 7.57 and 7.22 hours respectively. This makes sense since these were post-semester periods when I was back home, enjoying good food and relaxing without academic pressures. In contrast, April was particularly challenging with an average of just 6.07 hours per night - clearly showing the impact of academic deadlines. For the rest of the year, I averaged around 6.5 hours of sleep per night. While this isn’t the healthiest sleep schedule, it seems to have become my standard routine during the academic year.
Movies & TV Shows
2024 was a relatively quieter year for my watching habits compared to 2023. I spent around 90 hours watching movies and 815 hours on TV shows - significantly less than the previous year.
The viewing heatmap reveals something interesting - there were surprisingly many days where I didn’t watch anything at all. What’s more intriguing is that even during periods of high activity, most shows served as background noise while I worked. I’d often start an episode, switch to my terminal to run experiments or fix bugs, and only check back when something particularly loud caught my attention.
There were several notable gaps in my viewing patterns throughout the year. The first break in January coincided with a trip with friends, followed by another pause as the semester started - a time spent figuring out courses and figuring out dissertation topic. Late May shows another gap, marking another trip with friends. Curiously, there’s a significant break in late July despite being on vacation - though I suspect that time went into playing ONI instead.
October and November show consistent viewing patterns, but these were mostly shows running in the background while I worked. The dark patches in late December reflect my vacation time, split between watching Utopia on one screen and playing Rocket League on another.
Looking at genre trends over the years, some patterns remain consistent. Drama consistently tops the chart, with comedy and crime alternating for second place. It’s interesting to note that drama seems to be tagged in almost every show - perhaps because at its core, every show has elements of drama?
This year, particularly thanks to Apple TV+, the quality of TV shows seemed to surpass that of movies. Several shows stood out as genuine engagements rather than background noise:
Top Shows of 2024:
- Silo
- The Day of the Jackal
- The Agency
- The Diplomat
- Slow Horses
- The Bear
- Shogun
- Masters of Air
Among these, my top three would be Shogun, Silo, and Masters of Air, with either Shogun or Masters of Air taking the top spot.
As for movies, 2024 felt somewhat underwhelming. Besides Deadpool & Wolverine, I struggle to recall any truly outstanding films from this year.
For documentaries, my standout favorite (though not necessarily from 2024) was “Touch the Gate - The 2023 Barkley Marathons Documentary.” It really stood out during a year when most content served as background noise. Watching this documentary actually became one of my motivations for committing to running a marathon - I figured if people could complete something as intense as the Barkley Marathons, I should be able to handle a regular marathon.As I write this, I realize calling a marathon “regular” or simple really doesn’t do justice to the challenge
Music & Podcasts
2024 turned out to be one of my most active years for music listening, with a total of 21,822 minutes (about 363 hours) spent with my favorite tunes.
My top 5 songs this year were:
- “SHIKWA” by Talhah Yunus (147 plays)
- “Tu hai kahan” by AUR (133 plays)
- “Melancholy” by Talha Anjum (130 plays)
- “Bematlab” by Asim Azhar (124 plays)
- “Phir Milenge” by faisal kapadia (123 plays)
Talha Anjum’s music really dominated my playlist this year, and I found myself enjoying pretty much everything he released.
What’s particularly interesting this year is how my listening patterns have evolved. The data shows early mornings as my peak listening time, which aligns perfectly with my marathon training sessions and commutes to the lab. The second most active period was between 3-5 PM, which I attribute to a few factors: increased activity in the lab, people getting restless at their desks, general meetings, and my need for good noise cancellation. Plus, that’s usually when the afternoon slump hits, and music helps keep me alert and focused.
This afternoon pattern actually mirrors my 2023 habits, where 3-5 PM was also my prime listening time. It’s interesting to compare this with my COVID and immediate post-COVID years, where my peak listening hours were at night - a time typically spent gaming with friends. Those were both fun and challenging times.
Other things
I decided to skip the detailed PC & Phone usage analysis this year due to some technical issues - Activitywatch encountered a bug on my laptop that resulted in about a month of missing data. However, from the partial data I do have, some patterns remain consistent: Firefox and Terminal still dominated my usage, followed by VLC and Oxygen Not Included. As for websites, YouTube maintained its top position, though with a notable decrease of almost 100 hours compared to last year. Reddit and GitHub rounded out my top three most visited sites.
This year had an interesting twist when it came to reading. While I only managed to read about 5 novels, my overall reading volume was actually quite substantial - it just happened to be focused on academic papers and articles instead. It all started with researching automated test case reduction papers for my dissertation, which then led me down various rabbit holes of academic literature (though I deliberately stayed away from LLM papers). So while the novel-reading society might not approve, I’d say my reading habits were quite robust, just in a different direction.
Travel-wise, 2024 was relatively quiet, though I did get to explore Vietnam with my family, which was a wonderful experience. As for more travel adventures… maybe 2025 will be the year?
Year Wrap
Looking back at 2024, it feels more like a transitional year than one of major milestones. While running a marathon and completing my dissertation are significant achievements, much of the year was spent navigating uncertainty about the future. The “what” of my career path seems clearer, but the “where” and “with whom” remain open questions that I’m still working through.
Let’s wrap up this year’s highlights:
- A memorable family trip to Vietnam
- Joining PLSE as a Research Assistant
- Completing my master’s dissertation
- More on the ups and downs of this journey in an upcoming blog post
- (Almost) finishing my master’s degree
- Running and completing my first marathon
In keeping with tradition, I’ll end this by saying - So all in all this was a pretty good year.