Blogging by Heath™

A mostly technical blog and collection of my notes and thoughts

Reflecting on 2025

Posted on | 1526 words | ~8mins
2025 summary reflection

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:

Family

  • Got together with the family a bit this year, could always do better though and hope to next year
  • Especially need to make more time to see my nephew(s) and niece! They are growing up so incredibly quickly!

Reading

  • 33 books on my completely arbitrary goal of 12 this year - here’s my “year in books” : https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2025/33307498
  • Mostly fiction this year
  • Unintentional theme seems to be “read classics I missed, try some new things”
  • Favorites this year - “If on a winters night” – second or third read through ever, this is a classic and it had been a while since I’d read it. “Rejection” –> this was exacting, funny, hard to read (no likeable characters), you probably won’t like it but I did
  • Finally read through OSTEP - favorite on the technical side for sure. I suppose it’s not usually read cover to cover but honestly I love computers and it was interesting to me. Even though I’ve organically learned a lot the things in there, that left a lot of gaps (or I simply forgot since college) and reading through as things were introduced systematically was super useful

Writing

  • Mostly wrote a handful of random blogs or notes this year. Still the most popular by far is the one about how S63 works, didn’t write it this year, but it must be search engine related because this year I’ve gotten a lot of emails with questions on it. My Cryptopals notes / solutions have also caused people to reach out, even though they’re unfinished. Mostly for hints on them or for hints about the praetorian crypto challenges (which if you can sluthe the around enough to find out I did those, I might just give you a hint!)
    • Doesn’t bode well for anything recent I’ve written, at least as far it being useful to other humans. But it helped me in some way or scratched some itch so I’m good with that.
    • This one about Mersenne Twister also gets a lot of LLM traffic for some reason 🤷‍♂️: https://heathhenley.dev/posts/python-random-module-random-notes/
  • Trying to commit to writing a bit more, whether it ends up being shared or not - to help organize my thoughts
    • I’ve been going back and forth on whether it’s even worth it anymore. I write to organize my thoughts, true. But I also write because I had some small bit of information or interest that I hope maybe, just maybe, some other person (an actual person) will benefit from. I’m mostly wrong so far, but now with LLMs I don’t even know that’s a reasonable way to connect with people anymore. They aren’t going to be googling S63 and stumbling on my blog anymore - they’ll just ask Claude or whatever. Aaron Francis would probably disagree with me and inspires me to continue clicking publish! (or git push in this case)

Music

  • Started casually playing guitar again, which I realized I missed only after starting to do it again, also learned a lot about analog electronics… did a “build your own pedal” kit and fixed my electric guitar (blows my mind that it’s like 20 years old now, acoustic isn’t far behind either)
  • If you’re into that kind of thing I got the pedal kit from https://aionfx.com/ - excellent docs and quality - fired up the first time even with my subpar soldering skills!
  • Saw a lot of live music - folk fest (including getting locked down in the fort due to crazy thunderstorms) - Favorite was Explosions in the Sky, then Ripe and Goose - and of course shout out local Strip Mall (saw them a few times at least this year)

Travel

  • best trips this year
    • Portland - ran Hood to Coast - my first leg was 7 miles in 100F along a highway, was brutal but glad I did it. The rest of the week we hung at RJ and Molly’s and explored the area
    • Albuquerque - hung out with my sister, bil, and the kids there a week, mostly legos, forts, laser tag and trick or treating dressed like chars from Mario Bros
    • Bunch of shorter trips - New Hampshire, NYC, Boston - all fun stuff

Attitude / reflection

  • worked and am still working on self awareness and trying to round out some of my more “objectively” annoying qwerks
  • getting better at appreciating the beauty of everything I have and the people in my life - not getting any younger, focusing on not taking things for granted

Random skills

  • Maybe kind of maintained my Spanish level? Watched a lot, read a bit, and I still write a good amount in Spanish / chat with LLMs about what I’ve read / watched. Finished a couple YA books by Lauren Gallego that I mostly enjoyed (though I find them long winded). Notable failures though - my second time picking up and putting down “Cien años de solidad”, I love a lot of the quotes and themes, but it just doesn’t really keep me interested. The whole town insomnia epidemic and Melquiades character arch are favorite parts from what I’ve got through (about half). Another notable failure - Pedro Paramo- had to put it down despite some great one liners. It’s too above my level to follow to be honest, as it’s supposed to be hard to follow in general - mixed with some not so common vocabulary and it being in Spanish in general it was really difficult for me to figure out what was happening. It jumps throughout the timeline and it’s not always obvious (to this gringo anyway) who is saying what so it’s pretty disorienting. I might try reading the translation or watching it first and coming back to it as I like the idea. Basically followed it until he gets to Colima and shit gets weird (pretty much the start of the real narrative - maybe got 1/4 in).
  • Haven’t spoken Spanish in real life since starting the year in Mexico. Trip overall was excellent. Thought the highlight of my Spanish speaking there coincided with kind of a lowlight of the trip… Molly and I tag teamed an argument with the hotel staff in Spanish (not our style usually, long story, would have handled differently if emotion wasn’t involved ). Them being able to upset me over something trivial was also a “teachable moment” (pour one out for the aspiring stoic in me); but after the fact, reflecting on it a bit - it felt pretty cool that I was able to even manage that difficult conversation.
  • LLMs are great for dev, makes things less tedious which I can appreciate - getting better at building with them in a maintainable way - recognizing when to pull back and refactor / focus on organization / decoupling versus steam straight ahead and add features, etc.
  • I love to learn and LLMs have been awesome for that, using them as a rubberduck buddy a lot too. Of course you just need to do a little extra work to prove things / get actual references out of them - especially as you get into the details of something, but it’s useful to approach anything in that way IMO.
  • Learned a lot of OCaml and used it for advent of code again. In general I’m drawn to FP paradigm for some reason - I really like the “functional core, imperative shell” idea.
  • My love/hate relationship with Google Cloud Platform has yet again intensified (both sides of that coin unfortunately) - fodder for another post maybe?

Work:

  • Shipped a lot at FarSounder, and we had a really good year as company, team is great - looking forward this coming year’s projects / progress
    • developed a new “lighter” version of our UI that can run in a browser with webgl - got to use Typescript, React, Three.js - streaming with websockets - going to be pretty cool I think!
    • much easier to iterate on UI design using modern tech versus Windows C++ / MFC from back in the day let me tell you!
  • Working on a fisheries data platform (freelance side project) - got a lot more Django / HTMX web experience, still a lot more to do but the project is going very well!