📈 #57 2024 year in review
The year of the revolution 🌀
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This will be the last issue of Feasible...
This year!
I didn’t want to give you a heart attack. Feasible will exist for 2025 (and beyond).
With the end of 2024 here, it’s time to recap:
🔢 Less is more: why I grew my social media presence doing the right thing
🎓 Lessons learned this year from launching products and connecting with people
🌱 2 things I won and 2 things I lost in my personal life, and my plan to improve the lost ones
Before going into the post… I’d love some 🔄 feedback to improve Feasible. If you have 87 seconds to fill this form, it’d be great hearing from you.
I’m ready. And you? Let’s go for it… 🪂
🔢 Less is more: some numbers
At the start of 2024, I only thought about doing more.
I wanted to grow on X/Twitter by writing in English and Spanish.
I created a newsletter for Spanish speakers because I wanted to grow on LinkedIn, but I never used it.
I wanted to launch a lot of things, including a free course, improve it, and create my first digital paid product with an extension of that course.
But there’s a Spanish saying:
El que mucho abarca, poco aprieta.
I don’t know if that saying exists in English, but Googling it gives this translation:
She who grabs too much loses all.
Does it make sense to you?
By June this year, I realized I couldn’t do everything I wanted. I wasn’t growing on X/Twitter, LinkedIn growth was steady, and digital products weren’t there.
I stopped writing on X/Twitter (both accounts), didn’t write in the LinkedIn newsletter, and focused on what I wanted: launching products.
All this contributed to:
🪴 Growing my Feasible subscribers from 48 to 1377.
🔗 Growing my LinkedIn followers from 1605 to 4022.
🧑🏻🏫 Growing my launched products from 1 to 5.
I don’t know if those numbers are good or bad; they just are.
They’re confirming my hypothesis that there’s a need for a better understanding of Operations Research. I received good feedback; here are some examples:
Let’s see what drove people to write those messages to me.
🪴 Feasible, the newsletter for Operations Research practitioners
I started the year discussing The OR Revolution, divided into 3 parts:
1️⃣ The promise of Quantum Computing
2️⃣ 3 AI breakthroughs reshaping Operations Research
3️⃣ The Renaissance
I started a new section, OR news, to share Operations Research news. I need to show you that the OR field is constantly moving!
The most read posts have been practical and directly impact an OR practitioner’s life, like:
The final part of the year has focused on solvers and a new approach to Operations Research:
Why NVIDIA’s solvers might be the future vs. Why software drives faster solvers
The announcement of PDLP, Google’s new Linear Programming solver, expanded on why it’s crucial and provided a comparison between PDLP and Gurobi with SolverArena
OR reimagined and its negative cycle, commoditization, changing our mindset, marketing improvements (including changes in the field’s name), and making it more practical
I invite you to check the archive for other posts!
This year served one purpose: to test writing ideas. I changed my writing to a more structured one, invited Javier to write a great post and see if sponsorships are worth it. Thanks to Nextmv and Timefold for their support and trust in these early steps: thank you! It means a lot 🙂
🔗 My LinkedIn profile, an alternative to cover OR topics
A few months ago, I posted that I surpassed 3k followers. Now I have over 4k! So… 4000 thanks!
Thanks to you, my posts got a lot of impressions:
I just wrote, but you:
❤️ Liked posts
💬 Comment on those posts
💭 Reshared with meaningful thoughts
Every like, comment, reshare, and private message fuels my motivation to continue.
This year, I posted about shifting my focus from algorithms to business value, what we could do to build the Kaggle of OR (with cool comments), and how to build a routing optimization app with Google OR-Tools and Streamlit to delight stakeholders.
The same objective is to build awareness about the field, but there are different topics and writing styles. 2025 will bring me more ideas to continue that.
As I write this post, I saw a cool app for an easy LinkedIn review. Do you agree? I’ll post the suggested text on LinkedIn in a few days:
→ Wait a moment… What did I launch in 2024?
🎓 Learnings from launching products
What products did I launch this year:
None, right? I did nothing.
But I realized I did a lot...
🆓 A 7-day free email course about OR
I launched it in early March. It covered how to start with Operations Research by playing interactive games and solving them easily with Google Sheets and its solver.
Almost 347 students have taken it, giving me feedback, positive comments, and confirming it’s a great starting point for learning Operations Research.
Almost half (168) took it during July and August, which impressed me since those are rest months.
I learned a lot about email marketing, course structuring, and turning ideas into actions. I treated the free product as a paid product, so it has its own landing page, course description, and learning outcomes.
I hope to see more students recognize the power of Operations Research in 2025.
Here’s the OR From 0 to 1 course!
💽 A database of OR companies
I created a database of OR-related companies with two others.
It’s not exhaustive and can be improved by adding companies through a form. If yours or any company you know isn’t listed, let me know!
This is a place to see when looking for a new job. I use it as a reference when someone asks about companies to work for.
Ah, the link. You can see it here.
🦾 A 5-day challenge with partners in crime
After writing about building the Kaggle of OR on LinkedIn, I partnered with 2 more people to build The Optimization Challenge, which had almost 500 participants!
We didn’t know beforehand what would resonate with you, so we tested different ways of discussing OR. Then, we built:
A leaderboard to track your points from participation.
A partnership with Gurobi to serve The Burrito Game and include it in the points system, giving goodies to participants.
A video interview with Rubén Ruiz about managing optimization projects for customer success.
A Practical Operations Research playbook to provide a robust toolkit of strategies, methodologies, and best practices.
Two live sessions about end-to-end optimization projects and a career panel.
A partnership with Nextmv hosted two live sessions and provided goodies for participants.
A partnership with Bluecrux provided money and goodies for participants.
I actively contributed to generating the content. Since I had experience with email marketing tools like MailerLite (thanks to the free email course), I built and managed all the backend:
Setting up all automations in MailerLite.
Designing email templates and workflows in MailerLite.
Configuring Make to award points to participants upon subscription.
Establishing data relationships in Airtable to create the leaderboard.
Automating point calculations in Airtable minimizes manual work.
I don’t regret my actions, but I would have done things differently. This is a ton of effort.
📅 An Advent of Operations Research challenge
Yes, another challenge. It wasn’t for 5 days, but for 24.
Remember the Christmas advent calendars? This is the same, but for OR problems. I took inspiration from the advent of code and another deleted one.
The idea is simple: 24 problems to solve in 24 days.
You’d think that’s a lot of work. Yes, it’s super demanding. So I decided to change the challenge formulation and, instead of solving them:
Participants receive one problem in plain English and one instance of the problem.
They document their ideas for solving them in their preferred format (mathematical model, algorithms, pictures, plain English descriptions, or code).
Then they share those ideas within the community for feedback.
If they paid 24€ (1€ per problem), they got 3 open mic live sessions + a bonus (a real-life optimization problem solved with Google OR-Tools + Streamlit for stakeholder acceptance).
It’s a ton of work. Finding 24 problems with their descriptions and instances is not easy, especially when you need a PhD to understand some instances.
I solved some past problems to know the effort required, and for the rest, I assessed the difficulty by reading their descriptions.
125 participants remind me why I wanted to do this a year ago: there’s a need to improve solving optimization problems.
I’ll try to repeat this Advent of OR in a different way.
→ In 2024, I learned that:
People want to learn OR.
Companies are willing to help you.
Competitions are a good way to mix and match both parties (learners and companies) for good.
🌱 2 things I won, 2 things I lost (and my plan to get them back)
I admit that what I won this year is much better than what I lost.
I’d like to take this chance to self-reflect and see if I can improve in the coming year.
🏆 Things I won
1️⃣ Remember last year I told you we (my wife and I) bought a house? It needed renovation.
The process took longer than expected. The Pareto rule applies: 80% of the work was done in 20% of the time, and the renovation started very fast.
Over time, the process became lengthy due to missing 2 details (the kitchen door and sink) that were improved 3 weeks ago. The renovation started in February!
The flat is not just a flat; it’s a home for us.
2️⃣ It’s a home not just because of the renovation.
We needed to rent or buy a new flat because we were going to be parents! 🐣 We lived in 38 m2 and needed more space.
Our 7-month-old daughter is the joy of our house.
She’s now laughing, trying to talk, eating solid food, and playing on the rug.
I couldn’t be happier, despite the challenges of parenting.
Not sleeping properly, prioritizing her well-being, and being concerned about her problems (like her dermatitis, breastfeeding issues due to her tongue, or a common cold) are nothing compared to looking at her eyes first thing in the morning and playing for a few minutes in bed.
I love her.
🏳️ Things I lost
1️⃣ The first thing I lost this year was the chance to continue living in Madrid.
It is not a big deal, but we loved it (and miss it) so much! You can walk freely, go to restaurants, try new ice creams or pastries in the new local that opened yesterday, forget about your car…
But it comes with a harsh reality: it’s getting more expensive over time. For a 3-bedroom rent, expect to pay 1800€/month. To buy that house, prepare 400-500k€. Those numbers are rising.
It’s crazy, and we couldn’t afford it.
We want to build side hustles to be better positioned when prices drop again. Let’s see if we can go back home soon.
2️⃣ For over 2 years, I was in good shape.
6 years ago, I lost 11 kg by removing added sugar and practicing intermittent fasting.
After the pandemic, we started to workout seriously. We had a daily exercise plan and added nutrition knowledge to control our intakes.
I got fit and felt energetic, better than ever.
But now that’s gone. I did nothing in the last half of 2023 and all of 2024. Now I feel tired, low energy, and weak.
I want to regain my previous spirit. I don’t want to grow old in a bad state.
The first 3 months of 2025 will be to create a habit. I’m working on a Notion page to annotate everything. I like plans and prefer to have it ready for the new year.
🏁 Final remarks
I know this has been one of the largest Feasible posts. It’s been a year of work!
Thanks again for reading this until the end and for being here during 2024.
Every time I see a new Feasible subscriber, reader, commenter, liker, email sender, challenge signup, or LinkedIn comment, I smile.
Thanks, and have a great 2025! 🥂
Let’s keep optimizing,
Borja.
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