Rohit Nalluri

A Year of Growth, Travel and Transformation

As 2024 draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on a transformative year that brought me from familiar shores to new horizons. Moving to Europe, embracing new professional challenges, maintaining old passions while discovering new ones – here’s my year through numbers and stories.

The biggest personal difference for me this year can be stated in a single line: I have rediscovered my hunger for life and curiosity.

📚 Reading Journey

This year, reading became more than a hobby – it transformed into a cornerstone habit. Twenty-five books might seem like just a number, but behind it lies a story of consistency: a 67-day streak of daily reading and an ongoing weekly streak of 58 weeks. What’s interesting is how my reading habits evolved beyond traditional books. Through Substack and QiReader, I dove into 196 articles, consuming 1,236,661 words of thought-provoking content.

The combination of Kindle for immersive book reading, Substack for curated articles, and QiReader for RSS feeds created a perfect ecosystem for continuous learning. This digital trinity has become my window to diverse perspectives and ideas.

✍️ Writing & Creation

2024 marked a significant shift in my creative expression. The launch of AIthropocene, my LinkedIn newsletter focusing on the impact of AI on our lives, has been an unexpected joy. Watching it grow to 187 subscribers has been both humbling and motivating. Alongside this, I published three articles on this blog, with the piece on MakeSunset resonating particularly well with readers.

However, this year also marks a pause in my poetry journey. Since 2009, I’ve written 163 poems – an average of 11 per year. 2024 is the first year where poetry took a backseat. The absence of poetry this year feels particularly significant because writing a poem is not merely an act of creation, but a state of being. One writes a poem alone, but also in the company of words, emotions, and vivid imagery, in a state of ‘other-thought-lessness’ – a vacuum where the unborn poem resides in its full but untapped potential.

The process is almost alchemical: one enters with an idea, a seed, and emerges with something that has its own gravity, that can move the world. Sometimes, in those rare perfect moments, you don’t write the poem – the poem writes itself into existence through you. But this magical transformation requires great inner solitude, a specific kind of spiritual aloneness that this year of constant motion and change perhaps couldn’t accommodate.

💰 Financial Growth

This year’s financial journey has been about balancing goals with reality. While we fell slightly short of our mortgage repayment target (11% achieved vs 13.5% planned), our investment portfolio showed promising results. The Indian mutual funds performed exceptionally well with a 21.49% return, while our carefully researched stock investments (9.1%) and US stock portfolio (11.85%) provided solid diversification.

Looking ahead to 2025, I’m carrying forward plans to diversify into Gold/Silver ETFs and art via Masterworks. The journey has been supported by a robust toolkit: TickerTape, Trading212, Zerodha, Sharekhan, and valuable insights from Shankar Nath’s newsletter and YouTube channel.

💼 Career & Professional Growth

My 18th year in IT was marked by a significant milestone as I joined Danske Bank as a Product Owner. The role has been a perfect blend of technical leadership and business strategy, bringing it with a sharp learning curve as I adapted to the realities and requirements of Financial Crime Prevention.

Attending AWS ReInvent 2024 in Las Vegas was a highlight, complementing my newly acquired AWS Data Engineering skills through Udemy courses.

🏢 Business Ventures

Physible, our venture into 3D printed physical products, achieved 11,000 Kr in sales with 4 B2B customers. As we move into 2025, we’re pivoting towards a focused strategy, potentially serving a single large customer in Copenhagen.

Late in the year, I launched bitpoet – an ambitious project to build and manage multiple SaaS offerings, starting with two: BabelBridge and SentimentAI.

✈️ Travel

This year took me across 5 countries and 14 cities, covering 19,229 miles in 38 days of travel. From the serene lakes of Como to the vibrant streets of New York, from the historic charm of Rome to the enormously tall and mist-covered trees of Redwood National Forest, each destination added its own chapter to this year’s story.

🎭 Side Quests & Personal Impact

Moving to Europe brought unexpected challenges and opportunities. Conscious of the increased carbon footprint from this lifestyle change, I’ve been actively offsetting through MakeSunset subscriptions, helping to erase the effects of 120 tons of CO2 this year.

2024 also brought some unique experiences: appearing as an extra in “Chestnut Man 2” (keep an eye out for a glimpse of me when it releases in 2026!) and experiencing the thrill of GoKart racing at the Roskilde race track.

Writing and Singing are two activities that most easily trigger a state of flow in me. I hope to pursue that state more in the coming year, and these activities will take precedence over others.

Resources: This year, I migrated my project and finance tracking from Excel to Notion, and habit tracking from Habit Builder to HabitKit. You can’t go wrong with Habit Builder, a free and open source app for Android, but if you are looking for an even better UI experience, checkout HabitKit.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As I step into 2025, I carry forward not just goals but lessons and experiences from a transformative year. While 2024 was about professional growth and adaptation, 2025 promises to be a year of profound personal transformation and new beginnings. Some visible goals include:

• Growing bitpoet’s SaaS offerings: BabelBridge and SentimentAI
• Expanding investment horizons into Masterworks and Gold/Silver ETFs.
• Finding that sacred space for poetry again, and continue to submit meaningful articles to this blog and AIthropocene (I have some very interesting topics planned).
• Continuing to balance growth with sustainability.
• Creating an atmosphere of luck, by saying ‘yes’ to things I have historically avoided.

I am also making a list of things not to do. I aim to

• Reduce the time spent on reading so I can spend more time writing and singing. The idea is to choose creating over consuming.
• Be less afraid of putting myself out there.

But perhaps the most exciting chapters of 2025 are still being written, with life-changing adventures on the horizon that will redefine what “growth” means entirely. Some journeys are too precious to put into words just yet, but they promise to make 2025 the most meaningful year of all.

2024 has been a year of profound change and adaptation. Here’s to 2025 – may it bring new adventures, deeper insights, and the kind of joy that can’t be captured in metrics and dashboards.

Thank you for reading!

Technical Note: This year-in-review visualization was built using Next.js and deployed on Vercel, combining data visualization with personal storytelling.