2025 Year in Review

This is my first year in review. I hope that writing this will help me reflect more deeply on what happened over the last year and what I aspire to in the next. If it becomes too personal, who knows, I may take it down in the future.

Professionally

  • I left the first tech company I worked for (again).
  • Started a new full-time job.
  • I went to two conferences this year, one of which was my first:
  • I tried to learn Elixir again, but with the advancement of AI and a lack of time, I decided to stick with what I knew, which also aligned better with my goals.
  • Learned more about deployments and Docker in general.
  • Changed my mind about AI and how I use it for coding (I was a skeptic).

Projects

  • Landed a contract gig with Fund The Nations, which helps people fund mission trips.
    • This came through a referral after doing some short-term contract work for JobBoardly. This was the first time I earned a significant amount of money outside of my day job.
  • Started building my own starter kit (why didn’t I do this sooner?).
    • To build fun or for-profit projects faster, and to use for client work as well.
  • Shut down an open-source project, Bible Reading Log. Maybe I’ll relaunch this at some point, who knows.

Personal Life

I always felt like something was off with my focus. I’m constantly distracted, but I can also focus really well at times. That made me curious, so I saw a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with ADHD. I decided not to take any medication for now and to revisit that decision at a later point.

My wife and I were trying for our second child. We were grateful that we got pregnant so quickly, but at 16 weeks, around Father’s Day, our baby no longer had a heartbeat, likely due to complications with Trisomy 21. We were ready to love and adjust our lives to care for this child. To add to that, my wife recently had an ectopic pregnancy.

Around the same time, I developed a cyst on my neck, had fungal rashes, and got a finger infection. This was a wake-up call to take better care of myself, though some of this was out of my control. On the plus side, because of the finger infection, I tried a lot of dictation tools, and now they’re part of my workflow.

Regarding AI

I held off for as long as possible on using AI for coding. Up until April, I only used ChatGPT outside of the editor and didn’t even use autocomplete. That slowly started to change once I began using Cursor at work after we got a team license.

After that, I went through a four-month gap without trying Cursor again. When I came back to it, I was surprised by how much better it had become in such a short time. I could do so much with just $20 a month, and now I can’t imagine not using it. Going back feels impossible.

Just last week, I also tried Claude Code. I was initially scared by the idea of not seeing or manually editing my code, but I was genuinely impressed by how good the models were and how accurately the agent implemented features. In the hands of an experienced developer, these tools perform incredibly well.

So now I’m either using Claude Code or Cursor (for now).

Thankful

A lot happened in 2025. I am most of all thankful to God for all that I have, and to my wife and daughter, who motivate me every day to work harder.

Looking ahead to 2026

  • I want to be more intentional with my family and faith.
  • Learn to be offline.
  • Read more.
  • Get better at design.
  • Make some sweet MRR.
  • Land one or two contract gigs to help ramp up savings (I hate medical bills).
  • Get healthier.