2024 Review - Technical Management Attempts and Beginning of Australian Immigration

My 2024 was primarily focused on exploring technical management and starting immigration.

2024 was a year full of changes and rich experiences for me. During this year, I led a functional team for the first time, spent most of my time in Shanghai, left ThoughtWorks after 5.5 years, sold my apartment in Wuhan, and arrived in Melbourne on Christmas Eve, feeling optimistic about my new life.

As usual, I learned and used new tools almost every week, tinkering with various things on my self-hosted cluster. However, due to being extremely busy with work in 2024, I had little time to write articles and summarize my experiences. Combined with the numerous changes throughout the year and being in a constant state of motion, it's now a month and a half into 2025 before I started writing my 2024 review.

Career

Role and Transition

First, let's talk about my career. The main change in 2024 was transitioning from security consulting to becoming a Function Owner, leading the IAM team in China to plan roadmaps, improve maturity, implement various improvements, and support other teams in better and faster integration with IAM infrastructure. Through Standard Operation Process (SOP), we supported the integration of dozens of applications while introducing SCIM for efficient cross-site data synchronization. We also implemented some automation work in Jira to make the entire integration process visible and ensure smooth communication between team members for timely problem-solving and strategy adjustment.

Compared to my previous work experiences, this role required creating various SOPs and dealing with different vendors, making comparisons, and proposing technical selection solutions. Unlike before, I couldn't personally handle every task and had to focus on high-priority and important deliverables, leaving little time for other matters. While some things didn't go as expected, each module still worked very well. I plan to write an article later sharing the solutions and experiences in Enterprise Identity Management System (EIAM).

Communication and Collaboration

The biggest challenge in my new role was communication. As an internal IAM provider, since most B2B products in China have low integration with IAM or none at all, many business or technical stakeholders don't understand the significance and value of integrating IAM.

The role transition brought new responsibilities where I needed to constantly approach from the perspective of other departments' existing or new products, providing suitable, easy, and stable integration methods to help various applications quickly and steadily integrate with the IAM platform.

The most valuable points in cross-team communication were:

• Thinking from the application's perspective, saving integration costs for application teams while providing consistent experiences to reduce learning and usage costs for non-technical staff
• Providing successful cases from other teams/similar applications and explaining their benefits
• Active communication, timely feedback on issues, and providing sufficient solutions with pros and cons for application teams to choose from
• For applications that truly cannot integrate, finding ways to provide grace periods, such as developing/preparing features that will make future integration into the project easier

Professional Skills

Although most of my energy in 2024 was focused on IAM-related work, I didn't neglect AppSec and DevOps. I provided many valuable suggestions to vendors regarding IAM-related application security and DevOps, while also participating in numerous open source projects with the help of AI.

My architectural capabilities improved; in communications with different vendors, I could easily understand the underlying mechanisms of their applications and help them fix issues.

I learned how to make trade-offs and choose the most beneficial paths, avoiding the engineering mindset of automating first before considering value. Simply put, if something has value, do it manually first, then automate it once it stabilizes.

The technology I experimented with most in 2024 was AI-related, though mostly limited to configuration and usage without delving into AI fundamentals - essentially using AI as infrastructure. I created an automated flow using AI to analyze articles in my read-later list and tag them after searching my knowledge base.

Projects

Open Source Projects

The only new project in 2024 was Kobo Hoarder Read-it-later, a tool that modifies the read-later feature on Kobo e-readers to work with Wallabag. Recently, I migrated from Wallabag to Hoarder, so I also modified this project into a Kobo Hoarder tool. The Hook part is directly inherited from KoboOmnivoreConverter.

Blog and Website

I updated the Logseq-Copilot official website using vuepress, and traffic increased dramatically - almost 10 times that of my blog site. I might optimize it further when I have time.

For my personal blog, I simply migrated to Ghost. There were frequent downtimes throughout the past year, and I didn't have much time to fix them. The most encouraging thing is that I received some sponsors, which is my main motivation for continuing to maintain Logseq Copilot.

Finance

Due to moving to Melbourne and spending half a year in Shanghai for work, I barely traveled. Considering future expenses, I first predicted my spending patterns in Beancount, calculating that my savings would last for over two happy years at my current consumption level.

Meanwhile, Australia's basic interest rate of 5% is higher than China's 2%, so my after-tax income in Australia is slightly higher than in China. However, the cost of living is also higher than in China, so my current funds are still quite far from FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).

Lessons Learned

The biggest failure of 2024 was letting my girlfriend come to Australia mid-year, resulting in us living apart. Against the backdrop of a poor economy, I trusted the company's relocation plan too much, and we only managed to reunite after six months. If you need to relocate internationally, it's best to move together - when one person is in a foreign country, the other can only offer limited help.

Looking Forward to 2025

The primary goal this year is to find a job that can support myself and my family in Australia; I also want to get an Australian driver's license and own a car.

Technically, I will explore both information security and development fields while maximizing the use of AI to improve efficiency. I'll continue to explore new areas and knowledge.

I hope to maintain a healthy body and mind, go skiing in Australia, and travel to Japan with my girlfriend.

I will try to maintain regular article updates and publish more newsletters.

Conclusion

2024 was a very fulfilling year. With the support of friends and colleagues, 2024 was full of achievements and experiences.
I hope to find a job soon and settle down in Australia in 2025.