Reflecting 2025

Be More Organized

For starters, let’s begin with one of my main gripe in 2024: how to organize myself, especially when it’s related to tasks unrelated with professional matters.

I openly admit that I’m a pretty much a disorganized person. I rarely planned anything and everything I did was mostly out of reflex or a whim.

And what did it do to me? Nothing big gets done and I feel pressured when something big happened. I felt like life couldn’t go on like this and beginning to seek way of self-improvement.

Fortunately, that changed big time in the August 2024 when I finished Atomic Habits. I started to build small habits and the best way to do it is by organizing myself.

I started to plan what I’m going to do for the day and schedule them in my calendar for both weekdays and holidays. My once empty calendar now looks similar like this:

The result? A more fulfilling life compared to my previous unorganized self with some notable ‘achievements’:

• Finished twice the number of books compared to 2024
• Started a new habit of learning Japanese since October
• Lost 10 pounds without changing my diet at all

In short, I feel happier and the fire inside me is lit again because there are actionables from problems that gets done no matter how small they are.

Growing The Site

After talking about habitual problems, let’s examine the first item on last year’s resolution: growing the website, which should be visible if we take a look at the analytics dashboard.

Compared to last year, the traffic has certainly grown quite a lot, with added bonus of opening connections and some interesting offers.

There are 2 main reasons of its growth:

• I registered my site to deadsimplesites.com, a curation of website that has minimal design. Surprisingly, a lot of traffic came from here.
• I wrote a guideline for Upgrading Astro Code Snippets, a fun exploration I conducted when developing this site code snippets and shared them with the Astro community.

Although there are some problems such as high bounce rates and low visit duration, it’s safe to say that the site is growing compared to 2024.

Migrating To Linux

If you ask me when did I first thought of migrating fully to Linux, the answer is during the start of 2024 and it’s not related to the Copilot controversy.

As a daily driver, Windows has become sluggish for me to the point some features decided to break randomly that isn’t fixed by updates, such as:

• Most of the time, search from the start menu were not responsive at all
• Slow indexing large number of files, even after defragmentations
• WSL2 corrupts my Git histories once per month or two

While I enjoyed WSL2 as a way to experience Linux for development, I feel like it still can’t beat the speed of native Linux shell especially since I’m mainly a CLI user.

After thinking carefully about what I need and don’t need, I started to try out some distros and finally sticking out to Cachy with the main reason since I game a lot.

I have to admit, my development workflow feels way smoother compared to my WSL2 setup and I feel to be more in control about what I have.

In the process, I also learned to rice my setup to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible since I’m a firm believer of Aesthetic-Usability Effect.

Anyway, that’s an obligatory I use Arch btw.

Automating Menial Works

Finally, 2025 has affected my professional work efficiency a bit since I started to automate menial work stuffs like compiling weekly report, triaging bugs, and provisining environments.

It was a pretty fun distraction from my usual workflow since I learned to do an effective AI-assisted workflow, in contrast of my fanatical anti-AI stance.

From this distraction alone, I managed to save 30 minutes daily and 1 hour on specific weekdays that I can allocate into more important tasks.

While these projects are small and can’t count as personal projects since it contained proprietary data, I’m very happy with what I’ve accomplished since it solved my problems.

As someone put it:

Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

Mark Manson, A Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

The Bad

Let’s start with a confession of sin: I didn’t code much in personal capacity last year.

While my 2024 reflections claimed that I wanted to take a step back to do maintenance work for my old projects, I didn’t do it in the end. Heck, one of my projects still have an ongoing issue since 2024!

Part of me want to blame the rapid advancement of AI that forces me to always learn and adapt the latest AI technology, especially since it’s been forced strongly encouraged in my office.

However, reflections that I conducted during the end of December revealed the actual cause of my slump:

Final Thoughts

With the year closing and new year coming, I hope this year I can put more commitments on professional growth and my personal exploration goals.

While it’s pretty disappointing that I didn’t do much in a personal capacity, I still think 2025 was mostly a win since I’ve sorted out most of my habitual issues and made peace with AI integration in software development.

For now, I’m going to face 2026 with the best the I can offer. Namchee out.