OK, today's the last day of 2025, and while I'm not usually one for blogging specifically about things like this, I feel like this year it would be helpful to make an exception. It's been a year when my interests have covered quite a bit of stuff outside web development, and as a result I've done more different things that I wouldn't have done beforehand.

What I've done this year

As I write this, I realise I haven't actually written any blog posts this year before today, which is unfortunate, but I've had other priorities. In my own time, I've taken a bit of a step back from web development in many ways, and have done very little outside my day job on it. To some extent that reflects a certain maturity in my learning path - I'm well into senior/lead developer territory now, professionally speaking, and I'm more confident that I don't have anything to prove.

If I needed to pivot to a new language or framework, I could do so easily, and in fact this year I've built my first two full-stack Typescript applications from scratch as Azure functions to demonstrate this. And I'm well placed to navigate the changes caused by AI adoption in the industry - I consider myself a realist and I have adopted it as a tool while being well aware of its downsides. Three years ago I observed that it was likely to move the developer's role from the productive to a more executive capacity, and largely that's what's happened as we've gone through from better autocomplete with Copilot through to largely autonomous agents. If suddenly I had to do without those I'd survive, but at the same time they're a potentially useful tool when used right.

It's not that I've plateaued in my work, by any means, but there's only so many languages and frameworks that you can usefully pick up in a career, and there's little point learning a new framework you're not likely to end up doing useful work with. At this point if we're talking learning skills specifically for work purposes, some of the softer skills may offer better rewards at my career stage.

Dabbled in further education

I came to web development via a rather circuitous route. I had to move schools in year 11 (15-16 in the UK education system), which was not conducive to doing well in my GCSE's because that's the year in which the exams happen. There were differences between the curriculum taught in the two schools that meant in practice I had to drop several subjects, while in others I missed out on specific coursework and lessons, as a result of which I got worse grades than perhaps I would have otherwise. Technically I did meet the standard required to study at A-level and I did start out on those, but I'd had a lot of trouble adapting to the new school and that came to a head, leading to me being asked to leave them and do something else.

As a result I never had the benefit of a university education, instead winding up spending over a decade working for a life insurer in a dull back-office role before web development caught my interest, and after several years on a correspondence course I finally left to take up my first web development role. I've now had a successful career in web development for nearly a decade and a half, but that didn't mean I didn't feel the absence of a university education. There's definitely things that with the benefit of hindsight I'd like to study more at that sort of level, not necessarily for professional reasons.

At the same time, I've also taken to using ChatGPT for exploring ideas. There are legitimate questions about its accuracy and validity, but it's interactive in a way a more static resource like Wikipedia isn't - you can say "Is X an example of Y?" if you're not sure and get a reasonably accurate response. Off the back of one particular conversation about the International Baccalaureate I wound up signing up for a Theory of Knowledge fully remote course offered by Oxford University's Lifelong Learning programme. This was genuinely one of the most worthwhile things I've ever done - it taught me a huge amount, both about epistemology, and about what I'm interested in. Off the back of that I'm going to be doing more of these part-time remote courses.

In particular, a lot of this reflection has led me to realise I lost out a lot in terms of humanities subjects in education. History was one of the subjects I had to give up at school, and English Literature was one that took a particular hit from the move (if you read different books to your classmates you're going to struggle to get good marks for the coursework when you have to study it at the last minute). I was always good at STEM subjects and foreign languages, but the humanities are more slow-burning knowledge that leads less obviously to a stable career in the early stages, but can often start to help more mid-career, as well as being enjoyable in their own right.

Been healthier

A few years ago I had a health issue that required I make changes to my diet in particular. Since adopting the whole "30 plants a week" idea I've felt a lot better, physically speaking. I've also made a point of getting out in the fresh air and sunshine more often, which has been beneficial for my general health too.

Also, late in 2024 I tore my rotator cuff and was prescribed some simple physiotherapy to help fix it. This has been very helpful too - the injury is now largely resolved and the improvement to my general fitness is beneficial too.

What I want to do next year

Own my own content

Yes, yes, yes. We all know intellectually, and have done for years, that we should really own our own content, and using someone else's platform puts you under their restrictions. The trouble is, that always felt very abstract, and hard to actually live in practice. Historically there wasn't an easy way to both own your content, and connect to non-technical friends or family, and for all their flaws, the social media and blogging platforms hadn't become objectionable enough to make it worthwhile.

Now, things have changed. As Cory Doctorow has mentioned, the "enshittification" of big social media platforms is proceeding apace and they're becoming progressively worse all the time. Twitter, though, took a very sharp turn towards getting bad, very quickly. In July 2023, after trying everything I could to improve my experience, including installing a browser extension that blocked "verified" users, I finally gave up, requested my archived data, and closed my account after over fifteen years on the platform. I switched my microblogging activity over to Mastodon, though nowadays I'm finding myself using Bluesky a lot more.

The trouble is, that archived data really isn't of much use outside the context of that social network. I can potentially make it into a searchable archive, but it doesn't easily carry over to a new site - I can't import it into Bluesky to retain my old posts in context. And if I completely dumped Facebook, say, the same issue occurs - your data's only actually that useful in the context of a specific social network. In the case of Twitter the cost of staying became bad enough to override the disruption of leaving, but Facebook isn't quite that objectionable yet, and there's little prospect of it becoming open enough that people could leave and maintain their connections on the site.

So I'm keen to ensure in future any content I write is hosted on a platform I either control myself (eg a blog), or can at least theoretically migrate elsewhere (eg Mastodon or to some extent Bluesky if I decided it was wroth using a Personal Data Server). I'm also keen on the principles behind the Indieweb. Which leads to...

New blogging platform

At some point in the near future, I want to ditch Gatsby.js for this site. I've gone through the following platforms in the nearly 16 years I've been using this domain name:

• Flat HTML site
• Wordpress
• Octopress
• My own bespoke static site generator, built as a Grunt plugin using Handlebars
• Gatsby.js

Interestingly, I always got the best search engine results on the bespoke static site generator. I don't want to go back to that, but I think I need something simpler than Gatsby.js, which has always felt quite cumbersome. Using GraphQL to query for your post data on a personal blog feels cumbersome and overly complex. I liked using React.js and Typescript, so other platforms that use that are an option. I used Next.js for High Performance Laravel, and it worked, but querying for blog posts is still a bit cumbersome with that, particularly if your setup stores them as Markdown rather than in a database. Also, Next.js can still be frustrating to work with if you're not hosting it on Vercel.

I would also like to eventually have a "Notes" section on my site, which would essentially be an ActivityPub-powered microblog with its own feed. That way I could use that to engage with commenters on Mastodon or other ActivityPub-powered platforms without going through a third party. It's not core functionality, though, so it could be added later, with the main blog functionality still a static site generator.

I'm therefore thinking Astro may be the way to go:

• It's a relatively simple hybrid platform that supports React or Preact in islands, if you need it, but you don't need to use them to get things done.
• It supports using Typescript if you need it
• Astro DB allows use of a relational database when needed (ideal for that "Notes" functionality, even if the core doesn't need it.

This won't be the first time I've used it, so there's not a huge learning curve involved.

Blog more, but about more different things

I want to write more, but not necessarily about web development. In recent years I've got more politically engaged and more interested in philosophy, partly off the back of that Theory of Knowledge course mentioned above, but I want to keep that entirely separate from posting about web development. I'm therefore planning an entirely separate blog about those matters. The bones of that is in place and I have the domain name, I just need to get around to finishing it off and choosing a first post to make.

That doesn't mean I'm giving up on posting here, though. But I'm less interested nowadays in writing about specific tools or even design patterns than I was. I have some vague ideas about which way I see the industry going in the near future, which I may be interested in exploring in future posts.

Read more, but different stuff

I've long been someone who reads a lot, but not necessarily widely or deeply. Reading on the train is generally quite good for getting X number of pages read, but not necessarily in-depth. I want to make a point of reading things I wouldn't have thought to read before, and to do so more deliberately, to the point of being able to answer serious questions about it. My own reading history is largely SF, with some technical books, pop-science and occasional forays into fantasy or non-genre. I'm planning to actively read more non-genre fiction that I wouldn't have considered previously.

And I really want to reread Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner again. The point of SF isn't to predict the future, but that book in particular predicted the outline of the future exceptionally well. Plenty of the details are wrong (unsurprising given it was written over 50 years ago), but it's truly staggering how much Brunner predicted in general form if not in specific details. The "information overload" aspect of a world spinning out of control feels scarily prescient, even though it's seen primarily through the lens of television, rather than the Internet which actually caused a similar effect. And we can easily imagine many aspects of it could be quite easily tweaked to mesh better with today's world.

Other interests

Recently I started getting back into playing the guitar. I still had it lying around so it's a cheap hobby to pick up (unless I start buying effects pedals again...), and with no plans to actively pursue anything beyond being able to play something on it again it's lower risk.

I also began drawing a bit. It randomly occurred to me that I hadn't drawn anything since leaving school, and while I never had any particular artistic inclinations, it was something I generally enjoyed when I did it. It also struck me that I needed at least one hobby that didn't involve a screen, and if I was to draw landscapes it might get me outside, in nature a bit more. I'd also like to do more creative writing.

Final thoughts

So, yes, this year has involved a lot of thoughts about what I'd like to do outside work, in my own time. Much of that has been unrelated to work, and quite frankly it's unhealthy how many people in our industry spend a lot of their spare time on industry-related projects. I'd definitely like to make more time for unrelated things in future.