I think this is the first time I’ve done this although I’m not really sure, for reasons I didn’t do it last year. So this will be an attempt to summarise 2025 into something that makes sense.
Onwards from the PE#
2025 was mostly a recovery year, it’s safe to say that things got better as the year on, they started rough in New Year with phased return to work and a promotion at work. I was lucky enough to be having therapy while going through this but it highlighted just how traumatic the whole experience was, I’m suffering from PTSD from the event but my physical health is mostly back to normal now. Looking back at my posts from 2024 and 2025 on this it’s crazy what I went through and amazing I’m where I am now. I’m so grateful for everyone that helped me get through this and supported me when I needed it.
Homelab Posts#
I’ve done sporadic posts on my homelab over the past year, I think I managed it quite regularly and was quite impressed at how much interaction it got on Mastodon. Frequency of my posts has dropped towards the end of the year because I’m not really doing much with it, it’s stable and just works. It’s pretty boring right now! And that’s a good thing, everything is working as it should and I’ve not had any major issues with it (I did have to RMA a drive though). I’ve also stopped chasing the latest and greatest in Homelab “stuff”, if it works I’m happy, most importantly my primary user is happy as well.
Kubernetes at Home#
I do have a really nice k8s lab but it’s unplugged and sat on my dining room table at the moment. I haven’t felt enthused about running k8s at home for a while, I have enough of it at work. I really like k8s but it’s far too complicated, my homelab isn’t anything special it’s a mixture of docker compose files. The main thing that’s stopping me from migrating everything to k8s is the boring setup of the cluster, the time it takes to get from cluster to usable cluster isn’t fun for me. My day job means I spend most of my time in those spaces so spending it outside of work isn’t ideal. I may go back to it later this year but for the time being my k8s lab is an expensive paperweight.
AI#
Fuck AI
AI Really#
2025 saw it infringing on both work and personal life more than I’d like, it’s now impossible to ignore. I have friends with unhealthy relationships with AI and engineers using AI to badly solve problems. It seems to be taking over the discourse online and the amount of slop content polluting search engine results now is crazy. I can only see this getting worse in 2026, I feel we’re losing the ability to think properly and understand the importance of questioning what we read. I’m disturbed by how much people now swear by it. I pride myself in being a self taught engineer and I value the experience of learning and that moment when something just clicks and the code you hand wrote runs and you get the result you want. AI circumvents that by giving you lines of code that might work and often made up context. It also gives the impression that it “knows” but it really doesn’t.
On the flip side I’m a hypocrite, I’ve been slowly (glacially!) experimenting with local LLMs, I refuse to use the big online ones. When I say slowly I mean it, in the past 2 months I’ve used a grand total of 1 prompt, I’m more interested in the setup of it and how to run it as ethically as possible. I’m also interested in MCPs and the idea of having an LLM that is super contextualised to my own code bases, I manage around 30 different personal terraform/opentofu setups and having all those digested into an easily queryable search engine type thing sounds quite appealing. Will I adopt AI fully in 2026 - maybe, I still have a lot of investigation to do and internal thinking on whether I want to use it for moral and ethical reasons.
Job#
I was pretty happy with things for the most of 2025, they supported me back into work and I was promoted to Senior Engineer. Towards the end of 2025 things have become more stressful and less rewarding. We do amazing things and I’m proud of the platform we’ve built but with it come a number of challenges that engineers shouldn’t have to solve. This year I’ll probably start looking for a new role, it’s really sad to type that. I want more tech and less politics, I relish working with smart engineers who I can learn from, we saw a large amount of talent leave over the past few years which has lowered moral in general. I’m currently doing recruitment which is really interesting but very hard and time consuming, it’s been eye opening! Hopefully I’ll get back to engineering by February.
Turning 40#
In 2026 I turn 40, it’s scary. I spent quite a lot of time in 2025 looking back at my life and where I’ve come from and where I want to go. I’d always assumed I’d have kids by now but that hasn’t happened and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t upset me. I’m very lucky to have quite young parents and always wanted that for my own kids but it’s slowly slipping away now. I’d also like to move house in 2026, we need a bigger place in a nicer area. Our town has served us for a decade now but it’s not going anywhere and if anything it’s getting worse. The number of union jacks on lamp posts around us should give you and idea on why I’d like to leave.
For my 40th we’re going to Prague for the week, I’ve fallen in love with Prague, it’s such a lovely city and feels very much like home. I’d really like to move there, even if just for a few months to see what living abroad is like. I’ll also be having a few different parties with friends around the time which I’m really looking forward to.
Holidays#
We we’re lucky enough to have had the most holidays we’ve ever had this year. We went to:
- Rhodes
- Prague
- Budapest
- Majorca
All those trips were amazing and we were so lucky to have been able to do them, we’re looking forward to continuing this trend this year going back to Prague and a few others places we have to book. I’d love to go back to Budapest at some point, our weekend there was when it hit 38c which was far too hot and made exploring very difficult. We brought back the city break, we’ve not done a proper one for a long time after sort of getting burnt out by them. We’ve fallen back in love with them with a few caveats:
- 4 night minimum - this gives us time to explore and not feel like we’re rushing
- Flights need to be decent, no late night on the way out, no early morning on the way back
With those rules we’ve found a happy medium to city breaks.
The Blog#
I made some small changes to the blog which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. First was making blog posts full width, second was changing the font to Hack. I spent a lot of the year trying to figure out whether or not I was happy or not with the blogging process. There are still a few issues that need to be worked out, for example my watch page isn’t a full page and I’m not sure why. I’ve been pretty happy with the frequency of blogging last year, I came to the conclusion that it’s ok to not blog as much and just focus on what I want to write not what I think others want to read. I still really appreciate it when people reach out to say they’ve found something I’ve written useful though it really does make my day.
Sober#
My wifes doing dry January and I decided to start a bit earlier so classifying this as a 2025 thing. A lot of my socialising surrounds alcohol, whether it’s an evening in the pub or a beer festival and towards the end of 2025 I started noticing things around me that made me really uncomfortable. Our friends sold our local and it’s been taken over by a friend of theirs, it’s not what it used to be both in good and bad ways. I’ve started noticing that these places are surrounded by people I don’t really want to be around. Alcohol became a bit of a coping mechanism after the PE which wasn’t healthy. I’ve not given up beer forever but I’m taking a long break to see how I feel and hopefully lose a bit more weight and become healthier. I’m 6 days in writing this and it’s quite nice so far. We went out last night and I drank non alcoholic beers (they don’t beat the real thing!), they’ve come a long way and it was a nice change. I’m looking forward to catching up with friends and trying new and interesting drinks, Kombucha is quite nice and I hope it becomes a bit more popular in bars in the future.
Migrating from Github#
I finally migrated the rest of my repos from Github into my won code forge (ForgeJo). It’s refreshing to have my own setup and all the challenges that come with it. I still have to use Github for work but if you take a look at my profile there’s nothing personal there apart from a pointer to my forge. ForgeJo is a really interesting project, their work on adding support for activitypub is really interesting, I can’t wait to see where they go with it and how it’s going to interact with other ForgeJo instances.
That’s it for my wrap up of 2025 I’m sure I’ve missed loads of things!