I’ve seen a few posts like these before, and I feel compelled to write my own. I’ll probably group future posts, to track my progress over the years.
So, for 2025, what did I do?
Site Hydrator
Started back in sometime end of 2023, Site Hydrator is a platform for me to develop and host websites. From its inception, I always had a plan: a place where someone can just fill out, or update a form, and the website will then build and deploy automatically. I was frustrated at Wordpress-esque sites and I felt compelled to do something better. I’m happy to say this is more-or-less feature complete, and the real limiting factor is marketing it outbound. I believe a business could be created off of this, when I finally gather the courage to do that.
This site runs off of the platform now, which highlights how easily I can develop the code behind the website, while also using a friendly front-facing UI. We’ll see if I revisit this in 2026!
Business
I’ve been running a small e-commerce shop through Shopify & Etsy for the last few years. But this year we reached a new high, touching around 60k in revenue and reaching 20-30k over a month or two during the holiday season. The speed and complexity this scale required better organization, and I learned to integrate Etsy & Shopify into Notion with an order table.
New Businesses
The skills I’ve learned during the e-commerce time has shown me the frustrating and limiting parts of it. How do you handle multiple shops? Multiple platforms? Keeping track of orders as they’re completed? Learning to integrate multiple platforms and their API’s gave me some ideas for something I could sell to others plus the credibility of having real income. We’ll see how this progresses into 2026!
New Car
I ended up selling my car that I’ve had for about 6 years. Bought a new one that reflects who I am a little bit more. Things like cross-beams on top. I even modded my car to include a hitch, which I installed myself! This was the largest modification I’ve ever done on anything expensive like this. It was quite scary to pull my car apart, but exciting too. To install this hitch, I had to remove the rear fascia, torque everything the correct amount, unhook and rehook things like muffler isolators, cut into my fascia (to allow the hitch to fit ok) and put it all back together. Very scary on something that costs so much. I don’t have many resources to ask for help, so accomplishing this all on my own was scary but I am proud of myself. I also saved a good chunk of change as well.
I also bought a bike rack, something I felt was too costly, but for the first time, I am trying things to enjoy my life, instead of saving it all and buying nothing. It’s wise to have a budget and save, but not at the consequence of living a meaningless life.
Travel
I traveled to a new city, Los Angeles, CA this year. Having gone much of my life without travel, I have recently traveled to a number of places, including Chicago, IL. I have also increased my driving range, driving to Portland, OR a couple of times. Better late than never!
Blogging
I’ve never really liked existing blog software. I never felt like I could fully express ideas I had, especially with custom code. I also didn’t really like a completely plain website, or static site generation. I’ve been a big proponent for Hugo but always felt like it was a confusing mess after a little while for each site I built. I built this website in Astro, and now it allows me to put React wherever I feel like it, or plain HTML if I want. It might not look necessarily professional, but it’s mine and feels like I can expand upon it if I want.
I also got to expand different kind of blogging, including code snippets, reviews, tools and others. They’re not all fleshed out yet (I don’t have many reviews), but there are some interesting tools like for tipping, or for optimal weather for bicycling. I believe all the tools were written this year as well.
There’s a lot of features (like group posts) and missing obvious features (like search). But I consider it a work in progress.
Finally, writing is beginning to feel a little easier. I don’t think my writing is the best, I see others writing with more fluid transfer of ideas, and I think that how I write about my ideas is difficult to understand. But, I am hoping this improves over time.
Probably the biggest change here is to not write with a purpose, but to naturally have ideas over time, and write about those ideas as I go through them. For example, the Artifacts With OCI (& Docker) post.
Golang
I’ve wanted to learn Golang for some time, and I did accomplish this through both an API through something called the OpenHeart Protocol and as a CLI app using Straico’s API building a buffer styled chat client.
They’re both unused, but I personally use straico-cli a lot, to query quick questions. As a part of business, I also launched a mini-business call Heart Me for a high performance version of this protocol. No takers yet.
As part of new businesses though, I’m using Golang, but this one with come with some credibility, so I’m hoping for some better success at marketing.
Strength & Fitness
I now go to the gym much more regularly. I’ve lost weight, gained weight, but I am overall more physically stronger, and my cardiovascular system is stronger. For the next year, with my hitch & bicycle rack, I plan to restore my passion for cycling again.
Conclusion
That’s it! This is a recap at the end of year. In the future, for the next one, I think I’ll write this throughout the year, so everything will probably be linked with other posts and contain more details.