My 2025 in review

2026-01-14T12:00:00Z

My 2025 in review

I have been inspired by several posts where people reviewed the past year to write such a post too.

Vacations

I have been going snowboarding for the first time in many many years in February. I have been skiing and snowboarding a lot in my teens and twenties. After moving further away from the alps and also rupturing my cruciate ligament while playing Fussball (soccer) I have been less motivated to pursue these riskier sports and have instead mostly been running and biking. Some may argue if mountain biking really is less risky but for me that seems sort of obvious.

Anyway, the motivation to go hit the slopes again was that the kids wanted to go and leaving the gray city in winter is always a great idea.

My wife and me have also been in the black forest in Southern Germany twice at the beginning of the year and been spending time together in a nice hotel, eating great food and spending a lot of time in the spa.

In late April we went to Liguria, Italy as a larger group. We did cook a lot, went on a few bike rides along the coast and were even bathing in the Mediterranean Sea even though the water was very cold, at least for my taste (about 15°C).

I also went to France with friends several times for manual work and leisure. We are still in the middle of renovating and altering a house to fit our tastes better. It’s always interesting and a good diversion from staring at the computer all day long. I have helped with larger projects inside the house and also restored a few city bikes to full functionality after they were collecting dust and rust in a moldy cellar.

In October we went to Sitges near Barcelona with my parents-in-law. We took the train and spent the night in Lyon both ways. It’s possible to do the voyage in a single day, but we thought it’s nice to spend a little less time per day in the train and visit Lyon since I’ve never been there before. High speed train networks in Europe are great, but we had some bad luck with a total collapse of the timetable because a deer was hit by a train. Very sad for the deer and unfortunate for us. I thought about going to Django on the Med 🏖️ and it would have been really close, but it didn’t fit into the schedule very well with everything else which was already going on.

In Sitges the locals didn’t go to the beach anymore, maybe it was too cold for them or they just had enough after months of summer?

Sports and health

My full suspension bike was stolen in 2024 and I have been riding an old 26” hardtail in the meantime. I bought a relatively cheap 29” hardtail instead of a full suspension bike and have been enjoying the slightly more technical descents and the much improved climbing behavior a lot. The bike trails around here don’t really call for a full suspension bike; a lighter bike works nicely and I feel like I get more out of the same trail again.

Unfortunately, later during the year I herniated a disc in the lower back, and biking doesn’t really help there. It isn’t over yet but at least I have now started some strength training again. I don’t enjoy it too much but doing some exercises while listening to podcasts is actually fine. Also, the gym subscription includes access to the spa (sauna and steam bath) so it’s not too bad. I do hope and am working on enjoying that more. It’s not the first time that my back is in a bad shape despite the fact that I’m generally athletic, just not in a very balanced way it seems.

Gardening

Not much to tell. The year wasn’t excellent, but was good enough and we are still happy with our little garden.

The shed (it’s really not much more than that) is causing some headaches. I somewhat wish it would come crashing down so that we could build something simpler and smaller. The roof is bad. At least the wasps enjoy the wood and the niches in there. They weren’t aggressive towards us so it was fine leaving them there, after all, wasps are really valuable for the ecosystem.

Computering

I still do not enjoy the idea of working with LLMs but I admit that they are useful. I generally work on websites and webapps, but I’m currently working on a React Native project and I have to say the headstart I get with those tools is really quite enjoyable. I think the Oxide RFD on LLM usage offers some excellent guidance. Using LLMs for writing seems like a really stupid idea, since writing is thinking, and you don’t want to offload thinking to a machine. I want the machine to do the busywork.

Like probably many other people I have too many computers. My main working machine is still a Thinkpad X1 carbon with Fedora. I also have a Windows Notebook for some gaming; I enjoyed Doom: The Dark Ages a lot. Not as much as Doom Eternal, but that one will be really hard to top. I also use a Macbook now for the React Native project to be able to run all of the iOS tools. The Mac hardware is nice again after the butterfly keyboard disaster and the touch bar abomination. Battery life and performance are great. The macOS interface is jarring though, each time I use it I wish I was using GNOME, which – as a power user – I like a lot. At least there’s now an easy way to switch the keyboard layout to a Logitech/PC layout. Not because the PC layout would be better, just because I’m accustomed to it.

Apart from that the development setup is essentially unchanged.

Open source

I’m writing about that all the time on this blog, and I won’t even try giving an overview. I think it’s important to give everything else some space now.

Politics and society

I don’t really know how to say this. I’m offended that we live in a world where, instead of working together for a better future, we instead have to fight the slide back into authoritarianism and fascism. I’m not exactly surprised, but it’s hard to accept the news every day (or every week). I hoped for a better 2026 because the new year always has a promise for me that some new thing may happen. Let’s just say that the first two days of the new year were nice, and then I started reading the news again.

Not engaging with the world isn’t a choice I want to make either. So, all I can do is continue trying to make a difference.

Closing thoughts

Enough said. Let’s continue hoping for and working for a better 2026!

Matthias Kestenholz: Posts about Year In Review

My 2025 in review