{"id":641,"date":"2025-12-30T12:34:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T20:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/?p=641"},"modified":"2025-12-30T14:24:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T22:24:34","slug":"2025-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2025\/12\/2025-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 In Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>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&#8217;t necessarily in sync.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really happy with how life went for me in 2025. And that&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>But I seriously couldn&#8217;t have asked for a better year:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I biked over 550 miles this year, blowing way past my goal of 375 miles.<\/li>\n<li>I finally made a modern macOS port of my favorite Tetris clone from the 90s (I can&#8217;t really share it with the world because reasons, but it exists now and I&#8217;m happy it does).<\/li>\n<li>I got to meet up with a childhood friend I hadn&#8217;t seen in almost 25 years.<\/li>\n<li>I won a free ticket to the final RailsConf, where I got to meet another friend in person that I&#8217;ve known for almost 20 years. Then we road tripped back to Portland together.<\/li>\n<li>I took another road trip to California with my boyfriend, during which time he proposed to me.<\/li>\n<li>Then he got top surgery, for which I provided moral and logistical support.<\/li>\n<li>I sent my resume to exactly one company and they offered me a job. And I&#8217;m having a lot of fun here!<\/li>\n<li>I closed out the period of unemployment by getting married in a humble and intimate ceremony in our living room.<\/li>\n<li>I finally got an <a href=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2025\/11\/the-volkswagen-id-buzz\/\">electric car<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I gave a talk at XO Ruby Austin (it was recorded but not yet published)<\/li>\n<li>My long-awaited kitchen remodel began after a ton of delays.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/2024\/12\/2024-in-review\/\">last year&#8217;s post<\/a> I said I&#8217;m going to make more in 2025, and I executed super well on that.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t fully check off every single thing on that goals list, but I&#8217;m really happy with what I did (and all the other things I did)<\/p>\n<p>These were great highlights but I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<figure>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_0430.jpeg\" alt=\"a beautiful sunset shot of a road in my neighborhood\" title=\"IMG_0430.jpeg\" border=\"0\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_1328.jpeg\" alt=\"a sunset shot of a particular intersection of a road in my neighborhood. There&#39;s a colorful former weed store in the center of the image across the street.\" title=\"IMG_1328.jpeg\" border=\"0\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_2447.jpeg\" alt=\"a home decorated for Halloween with fun exterior illumination\" title=\"IMG_2447.jpeg\" border=\"0\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_2610.jpeg\" alt=\"a neighborhood intersection where the street is painted with a rainbow\" title=\"IMG_2610.jpeg\" border=\"0\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" \/><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\" src=\"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_2837-1.jpeg\" alt=\"a late-fall scene in a nearby neighborhood\" title=\"IMG_2837.jpeg\" border=\"0\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" \/><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>I also felt like I got to be really prolific in 2025 and that was really healing to me.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Going into 2025 I felt like I had been putting a lot of work into healing (from what, you ask? It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>But I admit that in 2025 I&#8217;ve been running hot. My bullet points above don&#8217;t even capture the half of what I did in 2025, and I don&#8217;t want to try keeping such a frenetic pace.<\/p>\n<p>My 2026 is going to look decidedly more chill.<\/p>\n<p>Whereas 2025 was about making more, 2026 is going to be about doing fewer things. I will do plenty, but I&#8217;m going to be really selective about what makes the cut.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to focus on much smaller subset of things and really get into them more:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Enjoy the new kitchen\/home remodel, hosting friends for some great meals and get togethers<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;m calling 3Drawers)<\/li>\n<li>Bike at least 400 miles (that&#8217;s less than what I did this year but also I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ll have several months of being unemployed)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m keeping retro game nights as a thing I do with my friend, but we&#8217;re going to play a bigger variety of games, and invite other friends into the fold<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m keeping up with <a href=\"https:\/\/3delights.store\">3Delights<\/a>, 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&#8217;t feel pressure to shut it down (not unlike this blog &#x1f60f;). If no one buys anything I won&#8217;t print anything, and people can literally order anything I make and I can make it on-demand, so I don&#8217;t have to worry about inventory (aside from supplies)<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;audience building&#8221; because I really hate that framing. An &#8220;audience&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve done small marketing experiments in the past, and my biggest conclusion was I don&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s lives better.<\/p>\n<p>Goodbye, 2025. You&#8217;ll be a memorable year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t necessarily in sync. I&#8217;m really happy with how life went for me in 2025. And that&#8217;s pretty exciting, considering [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_1328-1-scaled.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icanthascheezburger.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}