2025 in Review

I’m writing this year’s look-back a bit early, I usually like to do such things on New Year’s Eve as a habit of (usually) positive reflection on the year. However, I’m currently planning on being in the hospital on NYE…

The family is getting bigger

We’re about to have baby #2, and it could honestly be at any moment now. As you can imagine, this has taken a lot of my focus and attention the past few months as it’s even more chaotic to plan for a newborn when you’ve got a toddler running about doing toddler things. This will be the highlight of next year, and I’m sure she’ll be every bit as amazing as her brother.

Speaking of family, I continue to be amazed by our son who I can hardly believe is still just 2 years old (he turns 3 in April). He picked up biking this year and it quickly became his all-consuming favourite thing (last year was soccer, so he may go a whole other direction again next year). His progress has been remarkable, and he seems to have a natural talent for biking that he certainly didn’t inherit from either of his parents. Santa brought him a BMX racing bike for Christmas, it’s a bit too big for him but he’s still inseparable from it and he’s able to do laps on the big side of the local pump track and I’m curious if he’ll be able to do the same at the local BMX track when it opens back up in a few weeks (his previous bike was holding him back a bit, and made it difficult/impossible for him to get over the biggest crests of the BMX track). Nevertheless, watching a 2 year-old bike down a full-sized BMX race track is pretty surreal (he’s by far the youngest person doing so, and I’m extremely thankful for the community at Manz BMX for being so supportive and encouraging him).

I can’t wait to see what the two of them can achieve together!

Professional development

I’ve been closely tracking developments in AI since about 2017 (and to a lesser degree since AlexNet, my interest long preceeds LLMs), and even watching actively I’ve been amazed at how quickly quickly the technology was adopted everywhere. It certainly feels like an investment bubble, but it also feels like the capital markets going cold wouldn’t stop the technology from continuing to change everything. This feels very different, and far more consequential than any other tech wave of my lifetime.

There has been a lot of skepticism about using AI to generate code but I really think these tools became indespensible for creating software about 6 months ago, and in just the second half of this year I have seen substantial (albeit anecdotal) improvements in their capabilities. I’ve really embraced Codex CLI to experiment with building big non-trivial greenfield projects (I’ve also tried Claude Code and Antigravity but with less success than I’ve had with Codex). I plan to write more about my experience with Codex, but I think 2026 may see me move back into a quasi-IC role where I can leverage tools like this to take my career in a different direction… maybe, we’ll see!

2025

That’s about it, I could write about a dozen other things but the two big themes this year were family and AI. Honestly, it’ll probably be the same next year and that would be just fine by me!

Happy New Year, and Happy Birthday.