2025 - it’s been a year. According to the Chinese Zodiac it was the Year of the Snake. 2025 was the Year of the Snake and 2026 will be the Year of the Horse. I find it to be quite fitting, because in 2025, like a snake sheds their skin, I shed a lot of what was slowing me down. This helps, because in 2026, like a horse I will move forward and get me further.

So let’s take a look at my 2025.

New job

I started the year with a new job, starting to work at Cluster Systems on their POS system. It has been great so far. I’ve added lots of integrations or plugins to their software using my knowledge in API and .NET to make sure that they are nice and clean and robust. I fixed a lot of bugs whenever I found them and made sure to put in as few as possible.

I worked on myself, trying to keep my energy, while still being professional. It’s a very fine balance, but I think that I finally got it down. It’s not easy and I still fail from time to time, but progress is progress and life is a marathon, not a race. I

Articles, keeping up with .NET and community contributions

In 2024, I’ve got the blog set up and I’ve published one single entry in August. I finally started using in 2025, where I published 6 articles, which would technically average at 1 article every two months, but 5 of them were between March and May and the 6th was in December on Christmas Eve.

After May, I started working on learning the latest and greatest when it comes to writing modern API endpoints using .NET 9. A lot of the past jobs, I’ve been in .NET Framework or .NET Standard 2.0, which means that I could easily fall behind. I asked AI for a project and this was its idea. It’s now a complete project even though I did not give it a UI. Who knows, maybe I’ll do that in 2026, or maybe not. The goal was to stay up to date on modern approaches to API, not to make an application, which is exactly what I accomplished.

The last few months of the year I’ve decided to contribute to Knights of Academia and their community Discord server. I worked on migrating Horace, the Discord bot to a newer version, so that it does not become obsolete. This took a lot of effort, because Discord and DiscordJS changed a lot of things from version 12 to version 13. The goal is to get it to version 14, but I decided to proceed iteratively, since moving from 12 to 13 is more complex. Before the end of the year I was able to fix most issues, but I am still left a few bugs to deal with. I’m very proud of this, because it’s a very complex bot that can do a lot for the server.

Personal life - downsizing

I bought my place back in 2022. It was a dream I’ve had. I knew that owning a house is a lot of work and a large responsibility. I was warned that it takes a lot, but I did not want to be let myself influenced, so I went ahead and bought the house with my wife. In the end, however, it really was a lot. On one hand, when you have a house, you never have any more free time - there’s always something that needs fixing or tweaking. On the other hand it was far from the city, which meant a long commute to and from. With a single car, I’d have to drop my wife at work downtown, then head to my own work, finish working, then drive to pick her up and go back home. I could easily spend 3 hours commuting and often more. So, we discussed it and we went ahead and sold it. Sold a lot of the stuff, before moving and then moved to a friends place and now in the last few days of 2026 I am finally living in my own place again. A single-bedroom apartment for me and my wife. It’s downtown, it has a gym and I think I’m going to like this place.

Plans for 2026

I’m not going to spoil things and say everything, but 2026, as mentioned will be a year to move forward. After shedding the skin, by selling the house and all that, in 2026, I am planning to be more active and post more frequently among other things. I did the 2025-2026 YearCompass and while I do not have any New Year resolutions, if there were any early goals they would be to incorporate all 4 cornerstones of wellness: meditation, affirmations, journalling and now, workouts. I already started working out in late 2025, to make the move easier, and I want to continue the habit. Other than that, I don’t want to give out any spoilers, but I am for 2026 to be big. If you want to know more, you should definitely subscribe via RSS to stay up to date.