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What has happened this year?
Another year is coming to an end, and as it is tradition in this blog, I want to make a post about my past year. I will check what happened in the last twelve months. This has been the blog’s third year of life and also my first full year in my new job that I started by the end of 2024.
Professionally
As I mentioned in my previous recap, in late 2024 I started working at a new company, in an international environment and once again focused on backend development with Django. Therefore, 2025 was my first full year in this new role.
Beyond specific technologies, I believe one of the most important lessons I’ve learned has been to improve my ability to understand existing systems, make sense of decisions made in the past, and find solutions that fit correctly into the bigger picture. I was even taking the lead of the team on some occasions.
In the same way, I’ve also continued to develop my communication and collaboration skills in an international and multicultural environment.
So, overall, I consider it to have been a positive year. I’m not someone who settles easily and I aspire to more, but looking back, I can see clear progress from my first few months in the role through the end of the year. It’s a good start, though it won’t be the end of the story.
On a personal note
As far as the blog and my personal projects are concerned, 2025 has been quite a diverse year. Although the posts cover different topics, when I look back at them, I see common threads like backend development with Python, my homelab, the tools I use every day, and maintaining the blog itself (this maintenance is more work than I first thought, but I like it).
On the Python and backend side, I wrote about how to use Celery with FastAPI to run distributed tasks, and I published a comparison of pip, Poetry, and uv for managing dependencies and virtual environments.
I also continued working on my homelab. After presenting my setup in 2024, this year I documented my migration from Pi-hole to Technitium DNS. And this is one of my favorite posts as I was able to learn more about DNS, how different devices on a network behave, and how to design a more robust setup.
Another important part of the year was reviewing some of the tools I use regularly. I switched my terminal configuration to Oh My Posh and tried Zellij after several years of using tmux.
The blog itself also received quite a bit of attention. At the beginning of the year, I migrated from Astro Cactus to AstroPaper. Found a way to adapt some images so they would work properly with the light and dark themes (although I still have to go through the images from the old posts), and used Claude Code to correct errors in older posts.
Finally, and shortly, I wanted to spend some time on more fundamental concepts. Reading Code, by Charles Petzold allowed me to review how computers are built, starting from very basic concepts, and to recall my years studying Industrial Engineering.
Looking back at my goals for 2025
In last year’s article, I planned to continue growing my skills in backend development, infrastructure, cloud computing, and DevOps practices. I also wanted to write more in-depth technical tutorials, develop a project using FastAPI, and keep expanding my homelab.
The results didn’t turn out exactly as I’d planned, but that doesn’t mean they were negative. My article on Celery gave me the opportunity to work with FastAPI and explore a common component of backend architectures. The migration to Technitium was a direct continuation of my homelab and ended up teaching me more about networking than I had expected when I started.
I also believe I’ve made progress in my goal of publishing more comprehensive and useful technical content. Articles like those on Celery, Technitium, or dependency management with Poetry and uv came out of real-world problems and practical decisions.
On the other hand, I didn’t get as deeply into the cloud, Kubernetes, or DevOps as I’d hoped. Over the course of the year, other interests and projects emerged that ended up taking priority.
In addition, I ended up spending more time than planned on maintaining the blog. The theme migration, visual improvements, and revision of older articles weren’t among my main goals, but they’ve created a better foundation for continuing to share my interests and thoughts over the coming years.
What do I expect for next year?
By 2026, I want to continue moving in the same direction, but by combining three types of content: computer science fundamentals, hands-on projects related to my homelab, and improvements to the blog itself. And I already have several ideas in the works!
Professionally
After a first year spent largely getting to know the position and adapting to the project, my goal for 2026 is to take on more responsibility and gradually assume a more leadership-oriented role, just as I have occasionally demonstrated my ability to do this year.
And as always, I hope to share some of what I learn on the blog (while respecting necessary boundaries) and turn it into content that’s useful both for others and for my future self.
Regarding the blog
As I mentioned earlier, I already have some ideas for my first posts of 2026. I want to start with a review of a book on algorithms that I’m reading right now and write about my experience with different Linux distributions. Both topics are related to my desire to revisit more fundamental concepts and decisions from time to time.
In a way, I also want to keep documenting small homelab and home automation projects, but I’ll have to see what the future brings and what needs I encounter.
Finally, I’d like to keep improving and customizing the blog. But unless something unexpected comes up during the year, I don’t think it will need any major changes.
See you in 2026!
Quote
And to finish this post and continue with the tradition, a quote from one of my favourite books I read this year, The Will of the Many:
The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.
― James Islington, The Will of the Many