I can't has cheezburger

Note: this is about 2025 for my life specifically. For the world at large, it continued to be a dumpster fire and I acknowledge that how my own life went and how the world went aren’t necessarily in sync.

I’m really happy with how life went for me in 2025. And that’s pretty exciting, considering that I got a nasty little surprise the week after my birthday when I learned my job had been eliminated at GitHub, presumably to burn the extra money on more Copilot stuff.

But I seriously couldn’t have asked for a better year:

• I biked over 550 miles this year, blowing way past my goal of 375 miles.
• I finally made a modern macOS port of my favorite Tetris clone from the 90s (I can’t really share it with the world because reasons, but it exists now and I’m happy it does).
• I got to meet up with a childhood friend I hadn’t seen in almost 25 years.
• I won a free ticket to the final RailsConf, where I got to meet another friend in person that I’ve known for almost 20 years. Then we road tripped back to Portland together.
• I took another road trip to California with my boyfriend, during which time he proposed to me.
• Then he got top surgery, for which I provided moral and logistical support.
• I sent my resume to exactly one company and they offered me a job. And I’m having a lot of fun here!
• I closed out the period of unemployment by getting married in a humble and intimate ceremony in our living room.
• I finally got an electric car.
• I gave a talk at XO Ruby Austin (it was recorded but not yet published)
• My long-awaited kitchen remodel began after a ton of delays.

In last year’s post I said I’m going to make more in 2025, and I executed super well on that.

I didn’t fully check off every single thing on that goals list, but I’m really happy with what I did (and all the other things I did)

These were great highlights but I’m going to remember 2025 for so many simple and enjoyable moments I remembered to pause to enjoy. I enjoyed so many dusk walks in my neighborhood. I loved stepping inside from the hot summer evenings into the air conditioned house and relaxing in my hammock chair. I cooked delicious meals. I made some tasty non-alcoholic cocktails. I relentlessly tried finding the perfect watermelon.

I also felt like I got to be really prolific in 2025 and that was really healing to me.

I did a lot of soul searching this summer too. I participated in a program designed by a good friend and former colleague who stepped away from a lucrative tech career to help people find their true calling. I’ve never necessarily seen myself as an entrepreneur type, but after spending a lot of time thinking about how I want to spend my life, it feels like an inevitability to me, and I am investing more heavily in finding the right calling for myself.

Going into 2025 I felt like I had been putting a lot of work into healing (from what, you ask? It’s a long series of stories), and 2025 got to show me that that healing work was bearing fruit. When faced with some serious challenges I took them in stride.

But I admit that in 2025 I’ve been running hot. My bullet points above don’t even capture the half of what I did in 2025, and I don’t want to try keeping such a frenetic pace.

My 2026 is going to look decidedly more chill.

Whereas 2025 was about making more, 2026 is going to be about doing fewer things. I will do plenty, but I’m going to be really selective about what makes the cut.

I’m going to focus on much smaller subset of things and really get into them more:

• Enjoy the new kitchen/home remodel, hosting friends for some great meals and get togethers
• Use the remodel as a ground-up fresh start in terms of home organization, and establish a few tweaks to sustainably keep things organized (and also share that journey as part of a 3Delights project I’m calling 3Drawers)
• Bike at least 400 miles (that’s less than what I did this year but also I don’t think I’ll have several months of being unemployed)
• I’m keeping retro game nights as a thing I do with my friend, but we’re going to play a bigger variety of games, and invite other friends into the fold

I’m keeping up with 3Delights, my side hustle. The thing I love about 3Delights is that it scales down beautifully and has only a handful of fixed monthly costs, so even if things are very slow with it I won’t feel pressure to shut it down (not unlike this blog 😏). If no one buys anything I won’t print anything, and people can literally order anything I make and I can make it on-demand, so I don’t have to worry about inventory (aside from supplies)

I like using 3Delights as an incubator to experiment with entrepreneurship. The skill I want to start building in 2026 is community building. I stop short of calling it “audience building” because I really hate that framing. An “audience” feels like a resource that you extract value from. I want to do something that feels truly mutual. I want to help people out by putting out useful and entertaining stuff, and I want to make cool things for friends to help them solve problems, and then share that with the world and help build a bigger following.

I’ve done small marketing experiments in the past, and my biggest conclusion was I don’t want to throw money at Big Tech on ad campaigns to try to drum up business; I want to make better connections with real people and help solve problems for them. That will take time but I want to approach it with more intentionality because I think it’s a long game for me. Generosity is a core value for me, but I want to try to see what generosity at scale looks like. Baby steps.

Even if the world is continuing to suck in a lot of ways, I am intent on having a wonderful 2026 and helping other people have a great 2026 with me. I cannot single-handedly solve the big issues the world is facing, but I can directly make other people’s lives better.

Goodbye, 2025. You’ll be a memorable year.