Merry Christmas!
2025 Retrospective
What a year it has been! I got my second kid early this year and was plenty busy with child-rearing as my number one priority, but I somehow managed to put some stuff out. Let’s get through it.
The good
Blogging
28 posts in 2025. I managed to keep the blog alive, with around two new posts per month. I enjoy the process — it’s a nice outlet for venting and also sharing my projects. It even sometimes forced me to work on something new just to have something to write about!
Personal projects
I’ve released four projects: Prosettr.com — a crossword generation app; Goxy — a budget limiter proxy for the OpenAI API; Gopilotty — a TTY-enabled Copilot; and Podpocket — a podcast player. I actually use Podpocket daily, as it fits my needs exactly! Also, everything was written in Go — still enjoying the language a lot!
Notably, I built Podpocket on top of PocketBase, and it was such an enjoyable development experience. I can’t wait to start a new project with it again soon.
I’ve also worked on minor stuff in between: The Password Game agent — an agent that plays Neal.fun’s Password Game; Pillmish — training a small LLM from scratch; etc. Given the time limitations, I’m happy with this year’s output.
Tech stuff
In November I switched to Omarchy as my main distro. I found Hyprland intuitive from the get-go, especially with a dual-screen setup. It’s a pleasure to switch screens and apps just with the keyboard, and it’s super fast. I’ve made good progress de-Googling: switched to DuckDuckGo; replaced Google Photos with a self-hosted Immich instance; replaced Google Drive with a daily Backblaze backup; switched from Chrome to Chromium; and mostly stopped watching YouTube.
Hobby
I recently took up Chinese Chess (Xiangqi), as it seems more popular in Vietnam than Western chess. It’s interesting to learn the new pieces, especially the Cannon, and what new strategies they offer. I’ve only been playing bots so far, as I fear I wouldn’t be a fun challenge yet. I’m trying to take it seriously, though — I acquired a bunch of Xiangqi books. I even started a Twitch channel, Paostorm, where I go through some theory and stream some games live.
Focus for 2026
There are some areas I want to improve in 2026. Mostly, I have almost no online presence except for this blog (no idea about the readership as I don’t track metrics, but I assume zero readers), which makes sharing projects a bit difficult and demotivating. For Podpocket it was okay, as I personally needed the app as a way to replace YouTube, but for Prosettr or Goxy it feels like a shame that I didn’t manage to get more users, and I quickly lost interest.
I guess the lesson is to work on my own needs first, but still it would be nice if my work could be useful to others. So, for 2026 I want to put myself a bit more out there.
I’m not sure how yet; I don’t find X.com or Reddit fun, but I do enjoy streaming. I might put together a YouTube channel, or even try out TikTok. I’m neutral about Discord, might give it a try.
Like most people, I could do with less doomscrolling on the phone. I have plenty of screen-free playtime with my kids, but I should reach for my Kindle rather than my phone during downtime.
Lastly, and without going too much into detail, I feel like it’s time to move on to a new job. I’ve been working at the same company for the past six years, and it has kind of stopped being fun. My Japan visa is also almost up, so I might just not renew it and call it quits. But it means I need to find another position somehow (I’m not going to live off streaming!), which also means putting myself out on LinkedIn. Dreary.
On a similar note, I’ve recently been dialing back my use of coding agents in favor of a somewhat slower and more thoughtful development process. I even turned off Copilot completely and wrote some functions (a throttle function in Go) entirely by hand — like it’s 2022 again! It obviously took longer than ChatGPT, but the end result was mine and did just what I wanted and nothing more — and I understood it. I found I enjoyed the process, which means I do still like programming, luckily :)
Merry Christmas
Today I’m starting a two-week vacation! I want to find out whether being off work will trigger my creativity because I often daydream about working solo on my own projects, but I fall short on actual ideas. Looking forward to an interesting 2026!