The End

Today is, for the most part, the end of my professional year of 2025. What have I done, what am I looking forward to in 2026?

2025 Year in Review

This year I’ve had the chance to work on some really cool tech. You can read more about it here, where I put together a quick QR code prototype. I also did a ton of documentation writing, but also shipping it as a product, and making sure it was updated and kept up with the products and services it was being shipped with; How Principal Engineers Shape Documentation as a Product + Punch List Lagniappe. Beyond that I’ve shipped tons of AI processing pipeline code that changed about 4,923,123** times because the tools provided weren’t up to snuff, so reinvention and filling the gap in the tools it was. Lots of fun challenges, great tech shipped, and users of said software up and running.

On a personal front I got a reasonable amount of my expectations met for 2025, which mind you, wasn’t a lot considering the changing of the guard and the current state of the tech industry. To which, let’s talk brass talks, not beat around the bush, dispense with formalities, and get to the pending chaos of 2026.

Let’s Talk, No Filter

The specter and haunting horrors of what AI is forcing on society isn’t really great. I’m part of the way through reading enshittification and ouch, does that just sting. To say that book is on point in its complaint is to put it mildly. Many things are just getting bad in the tech space and it’s lost so much of it’s character that was redeemable, the technology that was interesting, the hopefulness of the sector, the independence is also gone, as there are so many negative aspects. Throw on top of that layoffs for spurious reasons, RTO for idiotic ideas – but done largely from incompetence of executive leadership to actually manage communications at their respective companies. Plunging *actual* productivity, economic numbers that are lies conflated with entities still reporting accurate number, and the list of things that made 2025 a trash year and the year ahead looks to be more of the same. The state of America, the world even, is pretty bad in the tech and software development space. Overall, from a professional point of view, I’m just hoping the industry doesn’t crater further and that the United States has opportunities open up. With a big hopeful wish that the overarching dystopian timeline that we’re being forced to live through doesn’t get worse.

Ok, I oddly do have hope!

Beware, not a lot of hope. But some.

What I am looking forward to is getting more active in the Seattle tech space again locally. I intend to either fire up, or join up and contribute to at least one meetup. I want to get involved too so that there’s something besides the endless stream of “Come join us for the next AI scam!!!” meetup and instead something that has some real substance. It might have some AI topics, but none of the “Quick learn this AI thing cuz FUD about jobs and make a million dollars instantly” type nonsense.

On the tech front, I hope to ship some of the sites and apps I’ve actually been working on for longer than I will admit. To get ahead of myself:

interlinedlist – This is a different type of time series based, micro-blogging, programmer oriented tasks and automation wildness! More on this soon, as I’m steaming ahead on this sucker and hoping to get its first version shipped by February.

https://www.datadiluvium.com – This is already shipped, it’s live, but it needs some tender love and care. It’s rough right now and I need to clean up the flow and way the data is generated. I also need to do the opposite of RTFM and follow the practices I’ve written about in this, this, and this on documentation and write it!

dashingarrivals – This is purely a transit oriented app I’ve wanted to build for years and finally have the core skeleton built for it. Basically a more focused, and kind of transit nerd friendly, way to setup alerts for arrivals of different modal options in Seattle or Portland. The side kick of this, I hope, is that I’ll be able to write up metadata that is geography based to arrival points and related things, so you could tag details and such about a particular stop that you want arrivals for. I’m hoping for a mid-August deploy for this one.

collectorstunetracker – This app I started here. This went onto the backburner, cuz’ there is redundancy of functionality in the niche space with Discogs and the fact they they released a mobile app. Didn’t really need most of what I was working on here, but I may put it together as my own custom online tracker of my personal vinyl/CD/music collection and use it to control how and in which way I show that collection. No promised delivery date because it might not get back onto the front burner, but I haven’t forgotten it.

Writing – I also hope to write a lot more this year. Even though it’s routinely claimed when I write professional pieces that it is AI. The LOLz of that. But I digress, I did generate some pictures this year but I’m not really feeding y’all any AI generated text or AI generated ideas. This blog is from my mind, I intend to keep it that way, and will continue as such. I suppose, in that regard, AI can keep stealing my thoughts and regurgitating them into whatever OpenAI slurry they’re being put into. The TLDR, expect to have more original thoughts coming from yours truly, I hope you’ll subscribe to this here blog and throw in some comments now and again, I am always up for a conversation or three!

Overboard?

This coming year I have that little bit of useful hope and I’m going to keep it at that. Seems like the smartest thing as I’m not a fan of over-promising to myself what I want to accomplish and then under deliver. It sucks to under deliver, so I guess that follows previous years’ goals, let’s not under deliver ya’ll!

May 2026 be good to you, let’s hope we can start cleaning up the dystopian disaster it is that we in the industry exist in and bring back some hope to the world. Or maybe we just make it through and keep a stiff upper lip eh?

Cheers! Cin! Cin! Sláinte! Şerefe! 乾杯 Salud! Prost! À votre santé! 건배 Skål! Gesondheid! 干杯 Υγεία Tagay! ชนแก้ว будмо

and especially “Слава Україні, хай горить Російська імперія!” and let the madness and genocide end!

** may be an exaggerated estimation.