Welcome to my yearly "roundup" where I look back at my wins, accomplishments, and just about everything I did over the past year. As I always say, I assume no one really cares about this, but I like to take stock and honestly just remind myself of what I actually did. The years go by faster the older I get, but I swear they also feel longer as well. Of course, this year has been incredibly tough and that could account for that as well. Honestly, I don't feel like rehashing the bad stuff. If you read this blog on the regular, yall already know what I went through, and as I'm ending the year on a high note, I'm going to focus on that. I love my new job, I'm relatively healthy (if a bit more fluffy than I was last year), and I've got a lot to look forward to!

This Blog

If you ever want to see how the blog is doing, stat wise, you can head over to my stats page and check it out yourself. This post will be number 146 for the year, slightly beating my count for last year. Of course, quality means more than quantity, but I try to keep a pace of a post a week at minimum and I had no problem with that in 2025.

I primarily use Netlify Analytics to check my traffic, check what content is popular, and so forth, but Netlify Analytics stops at 30 days of history. (As an aside, if anyone wants to donate to cover Plausible or Fathom Analytics, just reach out.) I also use goatcounter.com and according to it, my top ten page views for the past year only had one article from 2025 in the top ten - Using AI in the Browser for Typo Rewriting. I'm fine with that. I've been blogging for a while so I always see a mix of old and new content in my stats. The top post overall last year was one on Leaflet: Custom Markers with Leaflet. I haven't used Leaflet in a while, but I still recommend it.

Public and Virtual Speaking

With being out of a job for most of the year, it made it difficult to attend, or even CFP, to conferences. I only had 7 presentations with only 3 in person. I'm ramping up my submissions for 2026 and Webflow is supportive of my efforts to help spread the love of the web platform as a whole, so hopefully I'll be on the road and on stage quite a bit more next year. Obviously, if you run or help organize a conference, reach out to me, I'd love to speak at it!

Favorite Media

It's always difficult to figure out what my favorite movie, music, or game is, as usually the one I watched/played last is freshest in my memory. I started using Letterboxd last year to track movies which makes it easy to see what I watched over the past twelve months. There's a couple movies that really stand out, but the best has to be The Substance. I don't really enjoy gore, and this movie has quite a bit of body horror, but it's so freaking crazy, so well shot, it was easily the best movie I saw.

In music, I'm sure I encountered new artists, but I honestly can't remember one in particular that feels like an outstanding artist new to me. I will say I've been loving the mashups and remixes by matt_one on Youtube, enough to go through the trouble of ripping some to MP3 locally so I could play them offline. If you are into that kind of music, absolutely check him out. I'll warn you that the videos are typically AI slop, so I rarely watch them and instead just listen to the music.

Game wise, I ended last year discovering, and loving, Powerwash Simulator, and with the release of the second one last month, it was easily my favorite game. There's something incredibly relaxing about a game you can't lose. I played it much too quickly but there will be plenty of DLC and I plan on getting every single one they release.

2026

I'm going to make this part easy - I've got no plans for 2026. Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely things I want to get done, but after this year, I'm not writing anything down. Whatever I accomplish, great, whatever I don't get around to, also great. Heck, if this time next year I've still got a job, I can still walk upright and my wife and kids are happy, then nothing else matters.

That's it - happy new years!

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash