I have never written a year in review post before. I always gets sort of self conscious about it - do people care what I have to say, and have I done anything spectacular enough that it's worth sharing.

So I'm trying to convince myself this time, that that isn't necessarily the point. This is something I write for me to look back at in a year. I can look back and reflect, see if things went the way I thought they would, or if the future turned out about as scary as I had speculated.

Work

2025 was the first year where I did freelance full-time. And with that came a bunch of uncertainty, a bunch of speculations - not knowing if there will be work enough for me throughout the year or if things would go smoothly. I was very fortunate. I worked with some great clients in 2025 and the first six months exceeded expectations from a workload point of view - the work was interesting, the projects were fun. But it was probably a bit too much, I didn't really have a day off until our yearly trip to Denmark in early June, often working weekends and some evenings.

It's not something I feel like I can complain about - because I know not everyone is so lucky in these harder job times - but it's something I want to be aware of, I need to take care of my self and I might not be as lucky in 2026.

Vacation

On our yearly trip to see my parents in Denmark, we decided to do a couple of days in Milan first - to hang out with some of our friends. It was a great break away from work, it was fun to explore Milan with two ex-pats who have lived there for close to a handful of years already. I went to Denmark a couple of days before my partner, and she stayed in Italy hanging out with a group of friends from all over the world that she met a few years earlier on a trip they all got together on based on a shared interest of a book they had all read. She made some great friendships! And one of the people she met there, was one of the ones we were visiting in Milan. But I went back to Denmark a few days earlier, and got to see some old friends I hadn't hung out with in forever. It was great!

Conferences

2025 was another great conference year.

Sin City Ruby in Las Vegas in April. The first conference I attended after my 11 year conference drought back in 2024 - it was great to be back! Meeting old and new friends. On top of that, i had one of the best craps experiences I've ever had :) I'm not the biggest gambler in the world, but always have a lot of fun playing craps and this exceeded everything I had experienced until then.

RailsConf in Philadelphia in July. This was my second RailsConf ever, and also the last of it's kind. Met a lot of old and new friends once again - conferences to me, are more about meeting and talking to people than watching the talks. I can always do that at home once they're released on YouTube. It's a fun way to see different parts of the country and world and hang out with great people!

Rails World in Amsterdam in September. I was lucky enough to get tickets to this one. Rails World in Toronto in 2024 was a blast, and I was really looking forward to this one - however a bit nervous because it's a 9 hour time difference. But it turned out to be a blast, with very very little sleep. Lots of great talks, people and memories.

San Francisco Ruby Conference in San Francisco in November. I live in the Bay Area so this one was easy. It's put on by great people from Evil Martians and was just a 30-40 minute drive from me. However, I only got to experience the first talk as I ended up being hit by a heavy cold/flu that took me down for a good 2 weeks. But another great conference. I do think I'll keep it at three conferences max in the future as four felt like a bit too much :)

Personal life

2025 was a harder year on a personal life front. Generally it was very good, we had some fun trips to Denmark, Italy, a road trip around the east coast, Disneyland in SoCal, birthday in Yosemite and many more. But there were also some health scares - very invasive things we need to act on now, in order to potentially prevent scary scenarios later in life. It's hard to plan for something that could happen to you from now on and the rest of your life - but it might not be a given. So that sucks, and that'll hang like a dark cloud over what's to come in 2026.

But I'm lucky that life has been this easy so far. I'm lucky enough to still have both of my parents, and even though they're in their eighties they still seem healthy, with it, and willing to live their life. Now it's just a matter of visiting them as much as a I can while I still have them :)

Artificial Intelligence

It's impossible to say 2025 without also saying AI or LLMs. I remember recording a video of my screen in late 2025, where I had Cursor I think it was, implement a basic design in HTML. My mind was blown. It saved me minutes! Little did I know that about a year later, I would be in a situation where I often don't touch my text editor for weeks.

In april or may I switched from Cursor to Claude Code and my workflows drastically changed to be manual code with a drizzle of LLMs to being LLM written code with a drizzle of manual code. All of that only got better as we went towards the end of 2025. I'm now at a place where LLMs (Claude Code is my buddy) writes the majority of all code that I write. Even considering not using LLMs to write code seems foolish at this point. It has gotten to a point where it's so good, that it's a waste of my time not to.

Once the code is written, instruct the LLM to group the work into logical commits with a clear, minimal description and then push it. I still look over all code it writes for more important projects - and I do that on GitHub in Pull Requests.

At this point it's crazy to think we entered 2025 without knowing the term "vibe coding" - 2025 has been so incredibly transformational when it comes to this.

We're at a point where you can't really use the excuse "I don't have time to try this idea" - it's not about time anymore, it's about a lack of imagination.

Same when it comes to driving. We've had Waymo's on the streets of some bigger US cities for a while now. But on a consumer level, Tesla's Self Driving has gotten so good - that i can sit in my car, use the built in voice commands to tell it where to navigate to (or share it to the car from my smart phone) and then press a button in the car, that will cause the car to reverse out of the driveway, and take me to my destination and park itself. All of this is only going to get better in 2026.

We're in for a wild ride, strap in!