2025 In Review

December 29, 2025

Everyone is probably tired of “wrapped” style posts — myself included. I’ve always struggled with self-reflection and celebrating my accomplishments. Let’s see what I can remember from the past year.

Work

Work has been challenging this year. IBM Consulting experienced major disruption, particularly for an organization that does a lot of contract work for the U.S. government. Government restructuring reduced new project signing and spending, and then the wave of AI arrived. Beyond AI-generated work replacing tasks previously done by entirely human teams, the bigger impact for consulting was clients’ uncertainty about whether to commit to contracts or wait for AI tools to mature.

This especially affects front-end developers, because many routine interface tasks can now be handled by people with less experience. Ultimately I think the market will settle where more experienced people maintain their value; if the tools become widely available, they could raise the baseline for everyone.

Work Projects

Some of the outcomes I contributed to:

Connecting victims of the California wildfires to available resources.
Updating how organizations create and process needs requests for victims of domestic violence who may not have an address on record and who want to remain anonymous while getting help.
Building a proof of concept used to bid on a contract, using the Carbon Design System and watsonx.ai Assistant to create a document-retrieval/troubleshooting chatbot. It was my first chat interface and my first time consuming and displaying output from watsonx.

Work Training

While not on assignment, I’m expected to fill my time by looking for a new assignment and learning new skills to better match incoming work. For IBM Consulting clients, I spent considerable time learning about partnerships and integrations, primarily hosting and architecture in Azure and web component development on Salesforce.

To meet the prerequisites for many of these courses, I learned Python, which felt familiar compared with languages I’ve used over the past three decades. I also focused on design and UX tooling: I took many courses on Figma and now feel comfortable with project organization and auto-layout.

Ultimately, I logged more than 200 hours of formal training and received six digital credentials for completing official certifications.

Personal

This year included unexpected personal health challenges that affected my work and home life, but the time I spent on personal projects was still impactful.

Personal Projects

Things I did this year:

Migrated my website hosting to Coolify; I currently host 16 websites on that platform.
Migrated my personal blog from shared hosting to Coolify, which required setting up additional Docker containers for MySQL. Someday I might move it off WordPress.
Created a website to track my reading.
Built a website for my son’s gamer persona that retrieves and displays his latest YouTube videos — this taught me how to use the Google/YouTube APIs.
Launched a tool to generate QR codes.
Created a site for my kids and my projects at wplace.live.
Built an early-beta visualization for the band members of blink-182.
Made a tool that calculates the number of days between today and an arbitrary past date, then projects the same interval beyond that to the (distant) past.
Moved my work/business email from Google Workspace to Fastmail and added several domains I’d owned for years.
Set up a Docker server in my basement to host:
- Pi-hole for local DNS and ad-blocking
- Home Assistant for IoT-driven lights and automations
- AirPlay to speakers connected to the server
Updated my old site with a message about selling it and worked on divesting that domain.
Decided to set up a new storefront for my long-ago sticker business and soft-launched it in this post: shop.sqd.co

I accomplished more in 2025 than I expected, and multiples more than I’ve done in previous years. My hope for 2026 is to keep up this momentum, even though I also hope to land a long-running and interesting assignment at work. Stay Tuned!