2025 Recap

This sure was a long year.

Work stuff

January began with bad news - the product I worked on was about to be closed. We weren’t sure how things would go, and a lot of people started to worry about their job security. And rightfully so, a few months later, the decision was made to reduce staff, and our team was on the list. A lot of people got laid off, only a few remain to support the project in a dormant state.

I was transferred to a different project, thankfully, but the company I was working for experienced a lot of management-related issues and transformations, so ultimately, I decided to leave this company in July. Not that I’m complaining, though, I worked there for five whole years, and was thinking about it for some time already - the events just motivated me to do so. I think five years is a lot of time, and I’ve achieved enough and learned a lot during that time. It was still kinda sad to leave, as there are still a lot of amazing people working there, but I needed a change.

So now I’m working at Health Samurai! Happy to continue my growth as a Clojure developer, and tap into other technologies I wasn’t able to on my previous job.

Music

In March, I released my very first original music:

I have never written music before, and I don’t have any musical training (besides two months in a music school when I was about ten years old), so I’m excited to dive deeper into this art field. I’ve also recorded two more covers.

Vicarious by TOOL:

CRAWL by VELTPUNCH:

Looking back, I think my music output this year wasn’t really that great - only three recordings, compared to five in 2024, but I was busy most of the time. Still a lot more than in 2023 (zero output that year, and any year before 2024 to be honest).

I’ve pretty much completed my pedalboard setup and started using it in place of digital effects when recording. This somewhat limits my sound, compared to the endless variety of effects available in the DAW, but I like to work with limitations. Here’s a video on that:

Gaming

I got a Game Boy Advance as a birthday gift this year! I have a vivid memory, how one of my classmates back in 2003 said that I’ll never get one - well well well, how the turntables…?

Played and completed on GBA:

• Kirby: Nightmare in the Dream Land
• Kirby and the Amazing Mirror
• Rayman Advance
• Final Fantasy VI (in progress)

Anyhow, I like retro gaming - I’ve played a bunch of games on my 3DS in the past, and they were great. Now I can play even older games, and let me tell you - playing them on original hardware is a completely different experience. Stripped of the convenience of emulation, like save-states and ergonomic controllers, these games do feel different.

I’m also thinking about trying game development for GBA. No plans on this yet, but this style and format of games is probably my favorite.

This year, I also played a lot of Switch games, namely Tunic, Moonscars, World of Goo 2, Dark Souls, Astral Chain, completed Kirby and the Forgotten Land with my now fiancée, and the Crypt of the Necrodancer. Also played Fire Emblem: Awakening and Super Mario World on my 3DS. Tunic is probably my game of the year this time, it’s purely amazing.

New hobbies

I’ve always said that programming is my hobby. However, this year was weird - I had almost no output as a programmer outside of my day job.

Sure, I worked on deps.fnl a bit, but that’s it. Looking at the list of published posts, the only other programming-related ones are about fennel-mode and string interpolation in Lua. Most of the others are just random thoughts and yapping.

Well, music is my other hobby, but I already talked about it here.

However, this year was interesting in that I started attending various workshops. Last year I tried forging, this year I tried pottery, mosaic, and Tiffany glass making:

I hope to see myself attending more such workshops in the next year!

Trips

Managed to take two trips this year. One to Thailand at the start of the year, and one to Dubai this month.

Both trips went smoothly, although we were fearing that we would have trouble leaving Dubai, because a flood occurred a day before our flight. But we’ve managed to fly back home with no major issues.

Thailand was fun, since it’s a first trip in a long time where we flew as a company of four people, and accidentally met a few more people who were in Thailand at the same time, as a pure coincidence. We’ve rented a car and gone to different places on our own. It was a blast.

My usual vacation routine is: sleep, eat, swim, eat, swim, eat, sleep. After seven days or so, I begin to feel extremely bored, so I start to want to return home. This Dubai trip was not like that at all. It’s already a bit too cold to swim in December, so instead we were going to different places, similar to how we did in Thailand.

Dubai is an interesting country. They have a lot of money and ambition, and manage to pull off a lot of interesting ideas regarding their infrastructure. Sadly, not all is great, as mentioned, there are occasional floods when heavy rain comes, rooftops are leaking, and traffic jams are a major problem even when it’s not raining. The weather is nice, the sites are amazing, and it was, in general, an interesting experience to visit a country with such high ambitions. The feats they managed to pull off with the construction of their human-made islands are nothing but astonishing.

Plans for 2026

I plan to continue my music journey, already have a few more covers planned, so stay tuned! I also want to write more original music, so I’m looking forward to experimenting with it.

As for this blog - I’m not really sure. Each year, as it seems, I have less and less to write about here.

This year was particularly slow for me because I didn’t work on that many projects, and thus, I don’t have any material to write about. I don’t see this as a problem, though - this blog is mainly for collecting my thoughts, and since I don’t have that many right now, I’m not feeling like forcing myself. However, if this trend continues, I may stop paying for my own domain and go back to using the GitLab pages domain directly. No concrete thoughts on this yet, but maybe something like that would happen eventually.

As for long-term projects, I continue experimenting with Fennel and Lua, so maybe there will be more posts on these topics. Currently, I’m trying to work out a better model for immutable tables in Lua, given that my current implementation has poor performance characteristics. Maybe, I’ll rework my fennel-cljlib project to be a bit more robust.

That’s all from me, I wish you a happy new year, and hope to see you here in 2026!