The best of 2025.

I haven’t done a “best of” list on my blog, but I’ve seen a lot of interesting posts from other bloggers. This is my review of 2025 and what I personally enjoyed or things that stuck out to me. This will be a highly focused, but not a comprehensive, list.

Would be a long post, but I think it would be better broken up into multiple pages. The follow on posts will be published soon after the last:

  • Best of 2025 Technical + Things I bought
  • Best of 2025 Self Care/Non-Technical
  • Best of 2025 Travel and Culture

Without further ado:

Technical

gRPC has been an interesting technology to dive into. I’ve known about it for years, and I’ve worked with technologies that it incorporates (Protobufs). But it’s great to learn about it’s features and the problems it attempts to solve. I’m hoping to publish a blog post on getting started with gRPC soon.

K6: I’ve said it many times, and I stand by the statement: JavaScript is terrible.

However, a place where it does work supprisingly well is as feature tests for HTTP based services. I’ve had an easier time writing feature tests with K6 and would consider doing this as the default way to write feature tests for services.

Gitlab Actions I’ve been reluctantly moving to an Actions-based system for my CI/CD work. They work reasonably well, although getting my GitLab runners set up and running took a fair amount of effort.

The more I work with actions, the less I rely on my Jenkins instance. (Which is good for maintance reasons)

Layering This is a technique where you can build foundation pieces using Git, GitLab/GitHub, and new libraries. I may discuss this technique in more detail in a later blog post. But this allowed me to learn new frameworks, create POCs for problems and tools.

I may discuss this in more detail in a future post, but this approach has allowed me to:

  • Learn new frameworks
  • Rapidly create proof-of-concepts
  • Experiment with tools and architectures more safely

Artificial Intelligence with LLMs

LLMs have probably been one of the biggest contributors to my technical growth this year.

They’ve helped me:

  • Summarize online research
  • Troubleshoot technical and non-technical problems
  • Prepare for and practice interviews
  • Proofread my writing

I even built my own private LLM setup using Ollama and self-hosted models.

I was very reluctant to jump on this bandwagon due to how aggressively AI tooling was forced at a former job: including stack-ranking employees and forced attrition based on GitHub Copilot training participation and token usage. That experience left a bad taste, but using LLMs on my own terms has been genuinely transformative.

Favorite models:

  • Qwen3: Planning
  • Gemma3: writing related tasks
  • GPT5: Adapting code in respect of it’s surrounding codebase.
  • Qwen2.5: Coder

Building my own router Building my own router has been both extremely educational and occasionally punishing, but ultimately very rewarding. I moved from a consumer all-in-one router to a fully featured OPNsense-based setup. I now run:

  • Custom VPNs
  • Advanced routing rules
  • Multiple segmented networks
  • Caching services
  • Private DNS

And honestly? I love it.

What I’ve bought that stood out

Soundcore Earbuds (Anker)

I lost the charging case for my Sony noise-cancelling earbuds and later discovered that if you lose the case, you have to re-pair the earbuds to a replacement. On top of that, a new case costs well over $100.

Given that outrageous price and the fact that a firmware bug significantly degraded the battery life of the earbuds themselves (with no recall… thanks, Sony) I decided to try the Soundcore earbuds from Anker instead.

For earbuds, I’ve been genuinely thrilled with them and plan to stick with them going forward.

Zigbee devices

As I expanded my home automation setup, I found Zigbee devices to be fantastic to work with. I haven’t gone too deep into complex automations yet, but it’s incredibly nice to have devices that can join your network (No stupid, noisy vendor app needed), and report sensor information with ease. This has really helped in getting my smart home setup feel easier to use, and more informative.