2025 Review

I'm trying to blog more again, having fallen out of the habit over the last few years. Since I saw a bunch of folks doing year review posts, I thought it might be a place to kickstart things again.

It's been an odd one, 2025. In many ways it's been a year of catching up with groups of people who were important earlier on in my life. The vibe has been one of anniversaries. In the early part of the year I caught up with some friends from the UK Indie game design scene circa 2006. Then in the latter part of the year I caught up with the Multipack, the Midlands web design and development meetup I used to run the newsletter for (and occasionally spoke at events with). Stretching further back, I had a 30 years anniversary catchup with the folks from University. One of them survived a major heart attack this year. That was sobering.

Work has been a random mix of amazing successes and irksome frustrations, as work often is. We've improved the organisations processes, made web access to their services easier and more usable, saved substantial ammounts of money by inhousing some functions and made them more efficient. Large organisations are hard to do this in, so I'm proud of the teams I work with for achieving a lot.

Paired with this is that feeling of disconnect being the old gaurd in digital brings, something I've definitely been noticing more of late. A certain ennui maybe? Getting old means people who learnt things third-hand explaining things you pioneered back to you badly, miss the intent and then claim it as great wisdom. I'm glad agile and user centric design won out, I spent the early 2000s fighting that fight. However, I am a little saddened at the facile intepretation of both that seems to have taken over in the wider industry.

That's not even getting started on the casual incompetence that every AI shill is trying to sell as innovation. I'm counting down the days before some vibe-coded mess leaks personal data all over the web for an organisation that should have known better but couldn't resist the FOMO.

There are positive things. I permanently logged out of Twtter and Facebook some time ago, and feel much better for not seeing a constant stream of irrelevant and offensive shit being shovelled at me by the people who have gone out of their way to ruin the industry. I'm enjoying my move to the fediverse. It's not a perfect social media platform, but it is a lot better than the alternatives. It also seems to be actvely improving over time. A curated timeline I control, full of people who I chose to follow because they talk about interesting things feels so refreshing.

I used my 3D printer a fair bit in 2025, mostly for printing scenery for tabletop games, but also for printing useful elements for fixing things about the house. I should probably blog about this bit of kit more(a Bambu Lab A1 Mini). The technology is now both cheap and easy to use, a real turnaround from a decade ago. I worried initially it would increase plastic waste, but I think if used well it can help not buy big replacements when a single part will do.

Other fun thigns? I took my eldest along to a local animation meetup, where they had some of their work on the showreel. I'm a very proud of this. They are studying animation with a view to a career in that arena. It's funny how the same principles that I found useful 20 years ago in the web community can be equally applied here. In any career it's worth getting a peer group. Learning to talk to random folk at meetups who share an interest will exand your horizon and open doors.

I didn't travel much, but we did take the kids to Prague, which we'd last visited in the early 2000s. It remains a wonderful mix of art, history, wonderful food and cheap beer. There's a wonderful museum to the Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman, where you can be greenscreened into a Baron Munchausen film. We also managed to see some seals in Lincolnshire, which was a definite highlight for the offspring.

Speaking of which, I took my youngest offspring down to London to see The Offspring. Which if you happen to like 90s pop punk is a great show I would recommend.