In no particular order - a reflection on the year 2025. Spit into a few different areas of life.
Biggest and easily the most exciting update (currently redacted)!
If you’re reading this, I guess I’ve decided to share it (or you’ve done something bad and should be ashamed). Here’s to another one!
Some cool “wrapped” shares / stats:
Github Wrapped: https://git-wrapped.com/profiles/Heathhenley Goodreads year in books: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2025/33307498 According to Spotify my music age is 66 lol.
TL;DR - Recently set out to speed up a slow query behind a multi-column cursor paginated endpoint. A simple switch to represent the where filters as a tuple makes a huge difference in performance on the exact same data with the same indices. Eg - change where ( a > c or (a = c and b > d )) to where (a, b) > (c, d). In the “tuple” case postgres can use the index more efficiently and get more of the needed rows using the index condition, versus walking it, reading rows in and filtering.
TL;DR: A side project I’m working on is a web interface for the photos collected by a smart scale. The scale and its attached camera is deployed in remote areas and as the fish are caught they are weighed on the scale and their picture is taken. There is a mobile app that coordinates all of that and when the user is back in an area with service / wifi, the photos are sent up to a bucket.
TL;DR - It sets a global flag so that when the OS allocates memory in your application, it specifically sticks the allocated chunk at the end of the page, with a special no access page after each used page. Then any buffer overrun becomes immediately obvious!
What happened We have a relatively simple standalone Windows MFC desktop app (old school) whose sole purpose is to take user inputs and call into a third party library with them.
TL;DR - Recent advancements with LLMs are awesome, but also overhyped. I think too much money is after too few novel ideas. We’re fueled by “irrational exuberance” (thanks Alan Greenspan) again - and normal people will somehow get stuck with the bag. Though if you can get past the hype, maybe there are “this tech isn’t currently trendy” discounts to be had.
Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong before Still - I am aware that this could prove to be the most wrong thing I’ve ever posted.