Wow. 2025 is done. It’s been… a lot? A lot. It’s been a lot.

Similar to my 2024 recap, I’ve got a lot to write before midnight strikes, so let’s get into it.

Work things!

I’m still working at GitHub!

This year my team was a content machine. We revived the biweekly YouTube show, The Download, and hit millions of impressions (just one episode alone this summer hit over 300 million impressions across socials, which is WILD). We also revived The GitHub Podcast, which has been really fun to record, too. Our writing processes for The GitHub Blog got way more streamlined, and we’re writing more and more technical content there and in the developer newsletter. We gave talks, we made demos, we held livestreams every week (by the way, we stream our coworking Rubber Duck Thursdays stream on YouTube and Twitch every Thursday, resuming next week) in multiple languages, we presented lectures and webinars, we held office hours… it’s a LOT. I gotta say though, this video from last week is probably my favorite one I put out there this year.

The scale working here is amazing. I’m very used to startups still, where you fight for eyes and attention to keep the company alive, and here… the developers are already here. And there’s literally millions of them?? It’s less about “how do we make people notice us?” and more, “how do we make developers feel heard and work better?”

In 2026, I’m really looking forward to working with the product teams on prioritizing what open source maintainers want, above all. I really love the “Tiny Wins” initiative that happened this year specifically for fixing “papercuts” for maintainers (my favorites were consistent tab widths, one-click merge conflict resolution, and contributing guidelines now in the repo sidebar), and that’ll be a bigger priority moving forward!

Outside of GitHub work, I paused advising companies for a bit to manage my time a bit better. I do hope to pick that up again though, soon! I (finally) made a website for my investment work this year. It’s been cool to work not only with startups, but also with existing investment firms to help find and advise startups from a different angle. The economy is weird, as always, and AI is everywhere, and I’ll be curious how things change in that regard in 2026.

Personal things!

I had a baby! Leading up to giving birth was scary but baby Mateo has been a wonderful joy in our lives. It’s been a lot, I had another c-section and had to physically recover from that, and maternity leave was full of getting used to our new baby roommate, playing pretend, and listening to my toddler Nadia say the darndest things. Watching my two kiddos 1 but surely start to interact with each other is the best thing ever.

Unfortunately, we experienced a close family loss this year as well, during my maternity leave, and it was really, really hard. It brought our family closer, and I think we’re all still reeling from it. Having baby Mateo has really been a light in this dark time for the family. That extreme contrast of mourning and celebrating has really messed with my brain, I admit. Life’s ups and downs can really make your perspective on things change, constantly.

Our community here in Chicago has been such a great support system through everything. Chicago is a strong city, even when people try to tell it otherwise. We’ve been regularly opening our home for people to come by and share a meal with us or to just hang out and cowork, and having that has been awesome for making new friendships and being there for each other! Building community can feel inconvenient, but it’s worth it to have friendships beyond the “let’s catch up” phase. My introverted self has had to build that social muscle, and the return on that investment has been so good.

And, outside of Chicago, my internet friendships are great (and you are probably the ones reading this blog more than anyone). You are so fun. I love the gabbing and the memes and the trolling. See you soon in the group chat.

Side project things!

My projects are going pretty well! I actually used domain names this year, which was once of my big goals!

First and foremost, my newsletter is still going strong, and crossed its 8th anniversary this year. It has persisted as my biggest labor of love for the tech community, and I love writing it. I didn’t cross the 20k subscriber goal this year, but that was kind of a long shot anyway. I did improve some technical parts of it behind the scenes, and have a laundry list of tasks to do to make writing it more efficient this next year!

I finished writing for The Stack Overflow Newsletter this year. It was really the end of an era, after about 6 years! I still feel weird about not having things prepped for it on Wednesday evenings, but it’s also nice to have that time back.

My tiniest project was an FFmpeg script that I hyper-focused on for far too long, but it’s been handy particularly at work. I made it so you can record a technical demo in dark mode, and convert the video to light mode!

I made two apps this year that I had been meaning to build for a long time, PocketCal and Ductts! These were definitely made in the throes of my maternity leave wanting to feel productive outside of keeping children alive, ha. Though I still consider myself a bit of an AI skeptic in a lot of regards, it was SO helpful for getting over the initial hump of starting. In building PocketCal, I started the project using GitHub Copilot, and it got me started in a good enough way that I was able to take the code and run with it. When building Ductts, the AI tools I tried were not nearly as useful for getting started (maybe because the stack was React Native? Eh?), but they were handy for generating some mockups that I could work with!

I made a game for the GitHub Game Off called Code Wave last month, too. I still need to write a build log for it, but it was fun to work off of what I learned when building Thirteen Potions a couple years back!

I also did a really weird “contract” project this year for the Alinea restaurant group. I say “contract” because I did it in exchange for free food, which was pretty worth it. It was also really cool to see a totally different industry and how they approach their work!

I made some physical projects this year, too. These customizable wooden phones have been a hit in our house, and I’m slowly sewing again! I still love building mechanical keyboards (and have some parts I have to work on next to me as we speak), and have gotten more into nice pens as well.

In the video world, I’m streaming again! I want to improve my setup there, but it’s been fun to get back into it.

Because you’re here: I’m still blogging! Amusingly I looked up how much I wrote this year compared to last year, and… it’s the exact same number of posts. So… at least I’m consistent? What I’ve really loved though is seeing folks use my open source blog template and run with it. You should blog more! Use it. I made some updates to my blog setup too, which you can read about under my “meta” posts.

And finally, my “not really a side project” project that I always like to share, I’m still playing go daily! My strength in the game has been hovering around the same point for a while, and I definitely lost some skills in the brain fog of pregnancy and early baby days, but I’m hoping to improve more this next year and play at the local go club here in Chicago.

I know there’s more I’ve worked on, but you have been reading for long enough, so let’s wrap!

Phew!

And with that, goodbye, 2025. The state of the world is weird in this moment and I don’t love it, but I’m so grateful for the times with family and friends that keep me going.

In 2026, I’m hoping for some more stability, and to bring more value to people with the stuff I build. I want to help people navigate this weird tech industry, and I want to build fun things.

…I also want to sleep through the night, so maybe I’ll focus on that first (she says, as she hears her baby murmuring in his sleep).

Thank you for reading all of this! Here’s a joke for you as a reward: Why do ducks make great detectives? They always quack the case!