2024 in review: boring systems, quietly compounding

No big migrations in 2024, and that was the point. The year went into hardening: backup verification, documented runbooks, and deleting things I did not use.

Runs and misses

Restic migration landed in spring and has been invisible since, which is the highest praise infrastructure can earn. The used-SSD experiment worked so well that the cache tier doubled in autumn.

Misses: I planned to write a small status dashboard and never did. The JSON status endpoints exist; the pretty page does not. On the list for next year, or the year after.

Numbers

Twenty-one posts this year, up from thirteen. Unplanned downtime: about ninety minutes, all of it self-inflicted during a weekend config change. Restore drills: four for four successful.

The compounding is the story. Every procedure written down in 2024 is a 3am decision that 2025 me will not have to improvise.