2025 Year in Review

Well, 2025 is a wrap and we’re in 2026. As I’ve tried to do over the last few years, I want to reflect on how the year went and on some of the things I’ve learned and the highlights.

First off, the definite highlight for me was celebrating twenty years of marriage. When we got married, I was living in a different state early in my career - I didn’t know much of anything. I mean, if you go back and look at my blog content, I was just throwing junk out there (though in fairness, this was before social media existed… yes, I’m old…). Now, we’ve got four kids, I’ve been at Clear Function for 10 years working as a consultant, and I’d like to think I’m a lot wiser.

To celebrate our anniversary, we took a trip with some good friends to do a Biblical tour in Turkey and Greece visiting the sites for the seven churches of Revelation. We ended up getting to see most of the sites for Paul’s first missionary journey as well. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was amazing. We took over 2000 photos and I took pages of notes.

Reflections on AI

On the software engineering front, you can’t talk about 2025 without talking about AI… or generative AI and LLMs anyway. I’ve been using AI tools for 2-3 years now, but they’ve become a daily driver for me… (whether I like it or not).

There have been plenty of posts talking about the pros and cons of using LLMs to help with development. Do LLMs speed up development? Do LLMs make you feel faster, but you’re actually slower? Do LLMs infringe on copyright laws? I don’t know. For good or bad, we’re using it because our clients will be asking about it and we have to know and understand it.

Do I enjoy using it? If I’m honest… sometimes. For greenfield projects, or especially for spikes or proof of concepts, I’ve been impressed. I’ve built multiple small projects for personal use as well as UI mockups that have helped us at work with communicating with clients in ways that would have been a lot more costly before. For brownfield projects, it still feels hit or miss.

I started the year off mostly using Windsurf with some Copilot usage in VSCode, but I’ve ended the year mostly using Claude Code in the terminal. In my mind, Claude Code has really taken the lead in terms of development tools. I’ll admit, I still use Gemini as a Google replacement (which is ironic considering Gemini is from Google…) - I guess I should instead say I use Gemini as a search engine replacement. I’m still using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine.

Conferences

This year my team only attended one conference - All Things Open 2025. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though I still wish we could find a technical conference that is full of 300 and 400 level sessions. It is frustrating to go to a session and either get a sales pitch or what we could get from the introductory docs for a tool or library. I guess one difference is that, when I first started going to conferences earlier in my career, most of the good content was only available in books, so conferences could be invaluable… today, most everything is online.

Books

I didn’t read nearly as many books as I might have liked this year, but I will call a few out. I read the Silo books, partially based on a recommendation from a friend and partially out of curiosity based on seeing clips from the TV show. I enjoyed the books quite a bit, though I remember telling my friend that the first book actually felt claustrophobic to me, as so much of it was set in a single silo. I wanted to “see” more.

Another book I read was Absolution, the fourth book in the Southern Reach series. I really enjoyed the earlier three books, though they’re very strange and disorienting. I was sort of hoping for some answers in this fourth book. Just to clear things up… there aren’t any answers in the fourth book, just more questions. I really enjoyed the first 2/3rds of the book, though. The last 3rd… ouch. I really struggled with it. I can’t say more… but if you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean. Sorry for being cryptic otherwise.

The last book I want to mention is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I mostly read this one because I loved Piranesi so much a few years back. This one was great, but it took me a long time to get into it. It’s a long read and I think it takes a while to build out the world… once I was in, though, I loved it.

Games

I don’t normally add anything about games I played, but 2025 had some remarkable games (some of which came out earlier). The first one I want to talk about is Baldur’s Gate 3… and yes, it came out in 2023. I just never got around to it. I’m sure glad I finally was able to play it. Having not played a CRPG in a while, it was difficult to get used to. The story is great and the number of ways you can approach a problem is enormous. It is just a bit overwhelming. But I loved it.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was one of my favorite games. I still remember playing the intro level and having a huge grin on my face. When you play this game, YOU ARE Indiana Jones. I really hope they keep this series going.

Another great game was Avowed. The world building in this game was amazing. Also, there were some absolutely hilarious moments… just side comments from companions in reaction to choices… I actually laughed out loud at times.

My personal game of the year, though, is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33… and most everyone else it seems based on the awards results. I have never seen any medium engage with grief as well as this game. It was an amazing experience.

Wrapping Up

Overall, 2025 was a good year for me. There were plenty of things to get upset about, but I really am trying to look at the positives. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes in 2026!