2025 In Review
January 10, 2026
Taking a look back
I thought I might try my hand at an end of year review, primarily for myself as I want to be able to look back at the year to see what I’ve done. I likely won’t share this broadly on social media since it’s a bit more personal. But I’m still happy to publish something so if one manages to stumble upon it, fair enough.
The link between 2024, 2025 and 2026
A few years ago now, I guess I kind of snapped at my own status quo and came up with a new guiding principle. Ultimately I’ve had three life objectives in recent times:
- Learn to drive
- Buy a car
- Buy a home
All of these can tie back into “independence”. I felt that I was just way too dependent on others, namely my parents. If they went on holidays, besides others living at home, I would be in effect, marooned out in the countryside. It was not good for myself mentally (more on mental health at the end of this post) and things needed to change. I wrapped all of this under the simple phrase of “Remember the prime directive”.
I can’t say that the phrase, prime directive, came to me via Star Trek. More I was aware of the phrase from retrospectives held in work. Which is along the lines of “in all of this we assume that everyone did their best with the knowledge that they had at the time”. Which is quite nice and it’s stuck with me since. I repurposed it here, to basically more easily categorise my plans in my head. Putting it into a sentence, the “Remember the” bit, was very deliberate. I have the whole phrase written on post it notes that I stuck around the walls of my living spaces, wherever I generally would have my eyes looking. So for example, on the wall between my two monitors, next to the light switches of a room, bedside locker, mirror in bathroom. If some external factors in life are weighing down on me disproportionately, I could at least look around and see “Remember the prime directive”. That way I could give myself reminders that no matter how bad things are feeling in the immediate moment, I am doing what I can to improve things.
Improve things I did. Sometimes I forget things that work well for me, which leads to moments of thinking everything sucks or something like that. Whereas when I actually lean into what gets me working, things feel better. Having a goal, is something that I can march towards and get onboard with very well, often perhaps, to the detriment of my own wellbeing as I push myself. The prime directive became a bit all-consuming. In 2024 I completed all my driving lessons, did my driving test which I passed on the first attempt, then proceeded to buy a car all within the first half of the year. The second half of 2024, fed into the final prime directive objective, around buying a home.
Which in 2025, I went sale agreed on my first home. At the time of writing, nothing has actually changed besides being sale agreed. It’s a precarious situation, one where I feel like writing about it can jinx the whole thing. But, it’s still something to be proud of and I mean, maybe the odds are in my favour. I’ve not heard or experienced anything yet to say otherwise (foreshadowing??) and I’m hopeful in the next few weeks that I will have a signed contract. If things do fall through, I will likely be very depressed.
It’s still really early days on that process. But it will likely continue to be a big brain bandwidth consumer for the entire year. Even this week (5th January, unsure when this will be published) it’s already been a large amount of time just getting a new valuation report requested. I hope to write a blog post on the entire process when all is said and done.
Other personal things
Normally I do a fair bit of travelling abroad, but 2025 had none whatsoever. As you can imagine, I cut several items that can consume large amounts of money. I did take some time away just within Cork itself, it can be quite nice to just go to a hotel for a few nights. I would have liked to have gone further afield within the country, but the idea just fell through really. I will need to be a bit more deliberate in making sure I pick times to recharge. I will say that I kept a lot of PTO in reserve as I thought I might have been moving out in 2025 itself. Opting for a new build that is still being built, sort of removed that requirement. But now in 2026 with an estimate of sometime towards the end of the year things being ready, that approach may have more earnest.
I think some other big things this past year were around personal health. In 2024 I was attending physiotherapy for back pain and also chest pains. The latter as it turns out, is actually a stress response that my body seems to like to do. Who’d have thought? The former, was primarily lifestyle and my physiotherapist convinced me to try out some strength and conditioning for a few weeks. While it was quite a drag at first and there was a few wobbles (literally), I’ve ended up becoming a bit addicted to the concept of lifting heavy things. I only go once a week, but say at the start of the year I likely was only able to lift or squat weights in the single digits. But I ended the year with personal bests of 60KG on squats and raised deadlifts. I absolutely love it and fully intend on continuing as best as I can with it. I hope to introduce some cardio into my life. On the weekends I do try to do a walk for about an hour on the greenway. Which, is okay. But I need more day to day movement, like walking during lunch breaks. And generally speaking, my diet needs much improving. I kinda sorted out breakfasts on the health front. Least I think granola and soya yogurt could be considered ‘healthy’. Save for the odd breakfast roll. It’s the lunches that I need to target next. I’m leaving the garlic cheese chips till last as that will be an emotional break-up.
I don’t need to say much about games, it’s Final Fantasy 14, it’s always Final Fantasy 14 now.
Work
Work can be a pretty brief section. I’m still at the same place and generally pretty happy. Having nice people to work with in the team is always a great help. And also, changing jobs while trying to get mortgage approval is not really advised. I’ve done a few big projects this year which have been quite challenging, but rewarding. Some of these will continue in 2026 and likely some new ones too. There can be occasional bad days, but when isn’t there? Pretty zen about work.
Side business saw a new segment of products launch, with several new customers and also an increase in the spend by some existing customers. This offset losing one due to their business winding down, which when your number of customers can be counted on one hand, is a lot. I forget the name of the metric, but the money per customer has increased which is good. Having done the books for 2025, it’s usually a good metric when you have to pay taxes on the earnings. It’s not quite at the level where it can offset all my self hosting costs. But it’s getting there.
I think 2026 will be a quiet year for it, but that would be a good thing.
Self Hosting, this blog, etc
I started 2025 doing a lot of writing which was being continued from 2024. And then I stopped. Namely because after the issues I had to solve in my self hosting environment in Christmas 2024, I wanted a break. Then I started the home buying process in earnest and quite simply, did not have the time or energy to do self hosting, never mind write about it. When I eventually got back round to looking at self hosting, I started building again on a foundation that had subsidence, which lead to some disasters and yet another break. After picking myself up and dusting myself off, I’ve re-deployed some services, now with a ruthless focus on backups and recovery before something even enters my production. One to two brand new services have also entered the mix, I’m quite looking forward to writing about them. I think self hosting continues to prove time and time again how important it is to do.
I’m also trying to be a lot more deliberate with writing. I don’t have data to back this statement up, but I do think 2025 was probably the most blog posts I had written in a year, maybe ever? Certainly my best work, not that I have metrics I try to chase. I’m just trying to tell a story, namely for myself, on things that I’ve been working on. I do a lot of journalling personally and the blog feels like my technical equivalent of that. There’s always the chance of someone finding something useful from it too. Put on top of this that I am doing some things with Tailscale now, I think 2026 could be a year that I surpass these rather basic metrics too.
Mental health
If you don’t want to read this section, here’s a handy link to my conclusion paragraph.
Put simply, I struggle with my mental health. I’ve counselling that I attend on a regular basis, which is always helpful. And other medical professionals are more in the loop now than before. Generally I’m just in a constant anxious state and very much, am always overthinking. Depression can sometimes follow around the corner, but thankfully I tend to have a better grasp over that. But change of season is still an achilles heel for me, summers spent in my bed with my room in darkness while hearing people in the garden enjoying a barbecue, is always sad but is alas my reality at times.
It is often very much a pendulum that can be swinging very slowly, or quite quickly. And I think that’s how I could categorise 2025 on that front. I’ve had many moments where the pendulum has swung into “very great” and stayed there (e.g sale agreed on first home). Then moments where it swings the other way and stays in “very terrible” (e.g self hosting disasters). It’s hard. But I think I know a lot more about how to help myself and that is in of itself, a help.
I’m also, now officially five years sober and very happy for that fact. Here’s to continuing that trend and seeing the day count continue to climb.
2026 and so forth
For this year? There’s a lot of just good habits started in 2025 that I just need to continue. Expanding the personal fitness, keeping my blog and self hosting going are two big ones. And of course, the biggest one, closing the purchase of my new home and moving into said home. Even if just that happens in 2026, it will be a successful year.
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