End of Year Recap 2025

This is the second year of my 'end of year recaps', this time for 2025.

As a high-level summary of the year, I didn't make the progress I'd hoped for in my 2025 goals, owing to a combination of increased professional workload and some health issues.

The increased professional workload was 'ok', in the sense that a lot of it involved building interesting things and learning new technologies. In particular:

• I was involved in setting up a new 'platform engineering' team - which has involved a lot of mentoring, process development and design and build of some foundational tooling.
• My main work project involves building a collaboration portal including elements for project proposal review and data sharing. We didn't have a template for building something like this at my employer so a lot of things have had to be set up from scratch
• I tried to continue tipping along with several smaller work projects, including in quantum computing, environmental science and machine learning

Of course, I had some new goals and toys to add to my existing 2024 ones, in particular Linux mobile, I picked up a OnePlus 6 and am running PostmarketOs on it.

My goals for 2025 still carry over many of my unfinished ones from 2024, but there is a gradual convergence toward a coherent set of projects I want to take on. Namely building my own tooling for:

• blogging (like every developer on the planet)
• music and video cataloging and playing - Navidrome is nice but doesn't do everything I want as a single service
• photo cataloging - again, Immich is great but the rate of change and feature addition is getting a bit overwhelming for me. I like to have control!
• family tree (building the tech and collecting the data) - this is a new project and one I'd really like to make a dent in
• Contact and calendar management - including learning CalDav - Nextcloud is just too complex and enterprise focused for what I want
• File management - including WebDav. Again, Nextcloud is great for something enterprisey but I'd like to really understand and control my stack.

So - this is a lot of new projects, some of which also need clients if I want to consume them on my Linux phone. One silver lining is that I've been building up a 'reusable' set of components on my work projects - which are open-source. So my plan is to focus on getting core functionality for these projects together using Django and Angular. Really I'd like something lighter and more exotic than these frameworks in the long term - but to make progress I need to reuse the stack I've invested a lot of time in in the last year.

The next big question is around infrastructure. Next year I'm going to need to upskill in Kubernetes and Ansible at work. I could, and probably should, use them for my side projects. However I still really want to play with more niche and maybe forward-looking tooling in my side-projects - particularly Guix and the LISP ecosystem. So I'll probably try to define and run the infrastructure and services I'm using in Guix at some point during the year, maybe not exactly at the start. This has the added bonus of having a clear impetus to learn Emacs LISP and really get my IDE set up the way I want, which isn't something I've achieved so far.

On the non-technical side I hope to make more progress in the veggie-patch. I grew some veggies in 2025 but my mobility limited what could be done. I'm hoping to add a couple of new raised boxes in 2026 and grow a bit more.

So here's my technical stack and roadmap plans for 2026:

• Blogging platform - Django and Angular
• Switch from Navidrome to a custom built multi-media tool
• Switch from Immich to a custom photo management tool
• Switch from Nextcloud to custom contact, calendar and file management tools
• Build a family tree tool - Django and Angular
• Auth central auth with Keycloak
• Add GotoSocial, or maybe learn enough Activity Pub to do something myself and move my Mastodon account there
• Keep chugging along with Forgejo
• Set up a proper monitoring stack
• Set up wireguard properly - so I can host from my Pi through a light VPS
• Move toward a coherent infrastructure management approach - hopefully with Guix
• Write necessary client apps for my phone - likely with Rust and GTK
• Sort out Podcast app - either contribute to GNOME Podcast or write something, there are a good few features I'd like