2025 Summary

It's not really a summary, but I couldn't think of a better term off the top of my head. Sign off? I really just want to make a post while we're still in 2025 to smooth the transition from "nothing much happening" to "flurry of well-intentioned activity" that's bound to happen in the new year.

Blogging performance

It's not been a bad year by my standards! Looks like I had a few bursts of posts that broadly correspond to the beginning, middle and end of the year. My game dev log is a pretty accurate portayal of my game dev efforts, which are my best game dev efforts to date.

The larger realities of life rather threw me off course in the latter part of the year: family illness, work stress, the demands of domestic life etc.

I have logged a lot of work-related notes over the course of this year — I have a log template in Obsidian that I fill out daily — but where I've failed is in reading through these each week and distilling them into a weeknotes format like I used to. I'm going to try and get back to that in 2026.

Work

It's been a challenging year, especially towards the end when personal stresses lowered my resiliance for work stress. But you what, in a way I think that's had a silver lining for me and my organisation, because frankly the resiliance of the workforce has not been doing any of us any favours. Hopefully the new year will present meaningful opportunities to identify and address the systematic issues we're facing.

Having said that, I'm increasingly convinced that I need to seek pastures new. Based on my experience over the last half decade, I don't believe that I'll be able to get the kind of job satisfaction I need in what I'd consider to be a reasonable timeframe.

Learning aspirations

Both at work and in my own time I want to cast my net wider in terms of learning new things. I simply don't get the chances I need in my BAU to lean into the newer aspects of frontend development, but that's also too close to my dayjob to pursue in my (extremely limited) leisure time.

I haven't thought about this in a very focused way, but I'm toying with the idea of diving into the backend in a much more intentional way. At work we're about to replatform the flagship product to a new stack that uses a REST API and Nuxt app as opposed to whatever you'd call the Java build and Freemarker templating we currently use in production. That should present a much more coherent "full stack" development environment to investigate.

I'm also, finally, seeing some situations emerge from this that justify the use of Typescript, so that might be a good entry point for me to segue from what I'm expecting to receive to what the API is delivering. The lack of interface documentation is bizarre to me.

Next steps

Writing this post is the fist next step — tick.

Then I want to replicate a system I've enjoyed in previous blogs in which I can flag markdown files for compilation into a single, collected weeknote. Maybe that'll be my task for the merineum.

Beyond that I'll try to settle into a rhythm of making short posts about specific work observations, books I'm reading, side projects, technical breakthroughs and so on. Hopefully some longer form articles will come out of that. I have several topics that have been percolating away, but they're dense and interconnected and I've not been able to find the right demarcation points to split them out and make them digestible:

Well, that's all for now.

END