My 2025 Wrapped

^{Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash}

At this point, this has become my yearly tradition! Year is about to end, and I'd like to share some things that happened to me this year.

A Year Full of Challenges

I was hopeful that 2025 would be a great year, but I must admit that I spent the year dealing with a lot of challenges. I'd say that this year turned for the worse as months went on.

With crazy progression of AI, along with the everyday news of bad economy and layoffs, I got scared of what will happen to me and my career in the future. This impacted my work and personal life, and I had to remind myself to stop thinking too much of the future and focus on what's in front of me right now.

As corruption in flood control projects was being uncovered, and with the ever increasing tax compliance requirements for my business, I ended up closing it permanently to save me from stress and keep myself sane. It started as a perfume collecting hobby, then I began selling some to save money and fund it. Now, I've got a dozen boxes of perfume sitting in storage. I've been giving them away to family and friends since I refuse to sell and profit from them.

This year, I also lost a few people in my life.

Rekindling the Fire Within

I used to work on a lot of personal projects in my free time, but this year, I spent less time coding outside work hours due to burnout.

I used to love writing code even in my spare time, exploring concepts and other things that I'm curious about. A few months ago, I attempted to write an AI-powered bot that reviews pull requests. Though it was fun learning about vector databases and the concept of embeddings, I ended up abandoning the project completely when Cursor released bugbot.

Late this year, my sister asked me to build something for a project she's working on. I was initially hesitant, but I ended up agreeing to help after she gave me a presentation. I won't talk too much about the specifics, but this made me feel the fire that I used to have when I was writing code late nights.

A Few Good Days

This year, I also had some days where I had fun too! I participated in several running events and travelled locally a couple of times to recharge, doing some camping, hiking, and swimming in open water. I also travelled overseas three times this year, twice to Japan. I had fun with the food, culture, and the sceneries. I'd definitely come back at some point since there are other prefectures that I want to visit.

A Hopeful 2026

Though 2025 wasn't the best year for me, I'm still hoping that next year would turn for the better. I'm not setting grand expectations, just hoping for more good days than bad, and maybe a few vacations that reignite that spark. See you in 2026.