2025 End Of Year Post
On this day every year I usually sit down to reflect on the events and achievements of the year, but since 2017 I’ve not published those thoughts, mostly because I usually spend the last day of the year with my family. But this year I decided to try to resume my end-of-year posts here, but as a quick rundown instead. In short, while this year was full of signficant events, overall I’ve felt that things were pretty stagnant personally and professionally.
2025 Rundown
March
April
- My post on a 2FA technique for verifying people in the world of AI.
July
- Finally reached Platinum level in ranked Apex Legends solo.
August
- Finally paid off my Tesla Model 3
- Ashley had her major double-jaw joint replacement surgery, hopefully marking the beginning of the end for a decade long battle in which she has been suffering with pain once-and-for-all.
September
- Took some time off to help Ashley as she recovered from her major surgery.
- Both Ashley and I watched the end of Dandadan Season 2 and thought it was absolutely amazing.
November
- Changes at work saw a major sweeping shift away from SAFe, forming smaller teams to allow us all to be more agile. With this change, I became a Team Lead for the product lane that I have been working with. I have some hope that my team will be able to be more agile with this change, but I’m a little upset that they made the change just before Thanksgiving, leading to a lot of confusion.
- In keeping with my Apex Legends acheivements, I finally got my 20-kill badge in Wildcard.
- Launched isthisbugfixed.com
Social Media
Mastodon
I’ve been a member of Mastodon for a long time, but I had been using Twitter more at the time and did not use it much. But since Twitter began to make a number of changes (even before it was acquired), and because it started to devolve into chaos, I have been using Mastodon much more, especially in the past year. However, this past year saw a lot more reposts/boosts on my Mastodon instead of original content. I’m hoping to change that behavior in 2026.
I’ve been a user of Instagram for a while, but in late September I decided to finally walk away from the platform. I found that I was doomscrolling more and more, and the platform did not help my mental state. Also, with hostile changes at Meta with regard to content ownership, AI use, and privacy intrusions, I felt that it was better to not give the platform any more of myself. Given that, I decided that the best thing for me would be to put it away for a while (if not indefinitely). While I did not close my account, I decided to archive the Instagram app on my phone.
Blog
This year has seen a number of changes to my blog, and I hope that I will be able to continue to improve things here over the course of the next year. I have plans to bring back commenting, but in a way that reduces reliance on external vendors while still maintaining the ability to host this blog using Jekyll. In terms of content, I want to try to spend more time writing out some things I’ve learned at work and other thoughts in more long-form, especially since I would like to start learning new programming languages again.
In conclusion, while there is a fair amount here, things were pretty stagnant for me personally in 2025. I do look forward to 2026 where there are a number of signficant events planned, so we’ll see how things go.
