I've been writing an annual retrospective since 2020. The format has changed a little over the years, but overall it's a look back at my own tech changes and projects throughout the year, particularly those not covered already by another post on this blog.
Work in 2025
2025 has been a year of continued steady work progress, building brick-by-brick towards an overall change of picture. A mosaic year if you will, that moves from a mostly traditional day job to one that’s all around building new products and businesses.
I began the year splitting time between three companies (Dstny, Haptap, Goldbyte) and finished with two (Haptap, Goldbyte). This is a move in the right direction and 2026 would be a success on the work front if both Haptap and Goldbyte continue to provide interesting projects to work on, which certainly looks to be the case.
Haptap officially launched its first product Call Manager in 2025 and started signing up partners. We are picking up pace on that project now, which is an exciting, and slightly daunting, part of the new business journey.
Office Space
Qunifi and later Dstny's Office at Hartham Park (circled)
In February I changed up my typical weekly routine to always work from the office where possible. Prior to that it had been a 50/50 split between the office and work-from-home.
Trying to keep some core office hours is helping to carve up the days and weeks more neatly into focussed work time. I can sit at my home desk of an evening or weekend and not feel a slight underlying guilt that I should be working on something useful.
That might sound at odds with working on start-ups/new software products, but if persistence is the key to success you need to build your working patterns and environment for longevity.
I’ve been spoilt for office space over the last few years as Qunifi, and later Dstny, had a serviced office room at Hartham Park. The best part of Hartham was the lunch time walks around the parkland and country side. 2026 will mark Goldbyte having an office location, hopefully somewhere with good walks.
The lunch country walks bring much benefit. They typically are conducive to doing good work. Dickens used to work 9am to 2pm, then head out for long walks. I think there’s something to this, if your work setup allows.
Continuing my tangent into working hours, Cursor produced ‘Your Year In Code’
(available for Cursor users at cursor.com/2025).
My most productive time period, at least on Cursor, is 10am - 12pm,
closely followed by 12pm - 2pm.
Taking the other side of the argument, as I’m typing this out I’m remembering John Carmack’s comments about working hard (emphasis mine):
If you’re doing what you think is important work that you’re passionate about, working more gets more done.
That is to say: while there is a limit at which point continued work becomes a net negative, it’s pretty far out from the classic 8 hours a day.
I think what that misses is life is more than just work. Also time away from tightly meditating on a problem, if possible, can give the subconscious opportunity to present a novel solution. Something I’m sure most programmers have experienced.
The takeaway point is perhaps that my own reflections over last year is that having an office/somewhere away from home, focussed time and plenty of walking, are all good (and classic) ingredients for doing good work.
Hardware Changes
Moving on from musing on the best working day setup and office location, how about hardware changes in the last year? In no particular order:
- Sony WH-1000XM4, my first noise cancelling headphones.
- Keychron K1 Max, with low profile Gateron red switches. Marks the end of 9+ years of the trusty Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard. I don't miss having to constantly remember to put the keyboard's USB dongle in my bag.
- iPhone and Apple Watch. I've been a mac user for 15+ years, now the rest of my daily devices have finally joined the ecosystem. I do enjoy how things Just Work™. The seamless copy/paste, do-not-disturb and notification handling between all the devices is a joy.
- Zyxel GS1100-10HP-GB0102F PoE Switch (catchy name!). It runs silently, has a decent 130W power budget and was relatively cheap. More on the network changes in the project section below.
A cron to fix another cron? A short story
Despite the effort to get a quiet PoE switch, the cupboard with the networking gear has a weird hum at night. I’ve (still) got an old 2015 Synology NAS. This has an on/off cron so it doesn’t run overnight, however, it turns out the power supply makes quite a loud hum when the NAS isn’t being used (is that a worry?).
To get around this I bought the entry level Tapo smart plug, and basically have this set to go on/off around 5 minutes either side of the NAS power cron. I am undecided if this counts as a smart hack, but it did solve the issue. It also suggests other problems can be solved with more cron jobs, which I find reassuring.
Here’s a mid-year in-progress photo of my scrap wood home lab.
75% of the way through, missing just a couple of small devices and cables
Playing Games
Part way through 2025 I found myself getting into old games I used to play. I am historically a very casual gamer, but it’s been great. Although there’s a strong nostalgia theme in the games that I played last year, maybe I’ll branch out in 2026 to those that are modern (which to me is anything released in the last 20 years).
A direct result of watching YT videos like RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind, I’ve been playing Rollercoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon. You can play the game on modern hardware using OpenRCT2 and OpenTTD. They’ve both been around for a while but this was all new to me.
I’ve also been playing more of my SNES Mini Classic. In part because I moved it to my desk (it looks good!). I also realised that my old Dell monitor has USB sockets that are powered without requiring USB in to the monitor from a laptop or similar, so just turning on the monitor is enough to also power the SNES. Perfect!
Books
Each year my book selection tends to be: Cozy crime, some Dickens, some tech related books. This year was no exception.
Some highlights from the year include:
- What If? by xkcd author Randall Munroe. A gift from last Christmas.
- A couple of Dickens books: Little Dorrit, Barnaby Rudge
- Source Code by Bill Gates. Very readable
- The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
- All the Berkshire Hathaway newsletters. I read a couple of the early ones and then thought I may as well read them all. There's a lot of repetition for some of the financials, but you can skip that to just get the Buffett wit and wisdom.
What about Cozy crime?
This is worth its own section. I read We Solve Murders and The Impossible Fortune, both by Richard Osman. The Impossible Fortune is another in the Thursday Murder Club series, which I thought was great. Plus it has a Bitcoin plot, which was fun.
The standout books for 2025 though were all Agatha Christie books. I’d never read a single Christie book prior to 2025, but always thought I’d probably enjoy them. I like a cozy crime book, and Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time and primarily writes that genre, so the books must be pretty readable! I picked up ‘A Murder Is Advertised’ at the library (one of the Marple books), and thought it was great. I then promptly set about reading various others throughout the year. They tend to have a very engaging story, and are also not tremendously long books, which fits my style of reading for say 45 minutes at the end of most days.
I think this is all the Christie books I read in 2025:
- A murder is advertised (Marple)
- The Murder at The Vicarage (Marple)
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot)
- The Murder on the Links (Poirot)
- Poirot Investigates (Poirot)
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Poirot)
- The Big Four (Poirot)
- Evil Under the Sun (Poirot)
- And Then There Were None
In the autumn I had a few days away in Devon. We stayed near Greenway, Agatha Christie’s holiday home, so before going I read the books that are loosely inspired by the place: Five Little Pigs (Poirot), Ordeal by Innocence and Dead Man’s Folly (Poirot)
I strongly expect 2026 will have a bunch more Agatha Christie books in it. I’m late to the party, but enjoying that there’s a whole back catalogue to read for the first time and enjoy.
London Walking
Eventually, I'll aim to do all 15 London walks.
During a visit to Shaftesbury, I’d found a book by Tim Potter called ‘Walking London’s History’. I always thoroughly enjoy my time in London, but have a tendency to visit the same places and do the same walks. The book has inspired me to branch out. There are 15 walks, of which I’ve managed 6 so far. I’m not quite sure how many times I’ll make it to London in 2026 - hopefully enough to try a few more.
The 2025 Projects
Failures
First of all, I abandoned my plan to build a guitar amplifier cabinet.
I purchased a second-hand Hotone British Legacy micro head, and created a rough cabinet with a Faye speaker from an old Laney amp. So far so good. Ahead of trying to make the cab look good I gave it a test and it just didn’t sound that great.
I think part of the problem is I had a specific space in mind, so built the cab to fit that, rather than following any sensible plans on how to get a good sound from the speaker. The speaker was 12” and the space was approx a 13.5” cube.
Realising that the project would need a re-think, I have abandoned, and plan instead at some point in 2026 to buy a small practice amp or similar.
Successes
Tech
I finally ceiling mounted via PoE the second TP-Link X-50 access point. That’s been on the to-do list for perhaps 18 months. I did some benchmarking and experienced a decent ~25% up lift in speed from my desk at home after this change. I expect the other wireless devices elsewhere in the house probably got a small boost as well, as all the backhaul traffic between the APs is now happening over Ethernet.
I’d planned to repurpose a Raspberry Pi 3 to run PiHole. This works great. You can see the Pi in the home lab picture above next to the Hive on the middle shelf.
I replaced lighting in two rooms from old halogen spotlights to modern GU10 LED bulbs. Perhaps not overly ‘tech’ themed, but it paves the way for some smart bulbs in 2026.
Gardening
Perhaps a first for retrospectives on this blog, some project talk about gardens. There were two things missing from the home garden in 2024 which I fixed in 2025.
The first was a lack of convenient places to sit. We had some chairs but didn’t keep them outside, which meant we hardly ever used them, it always felt like high effort to get them out of the garage and put them away again. Selling those chairs and getting garden furniture that can be left out all year has been a great move. As expected I sat outside way more often once the furniture was always ready to use.
The second issue is the lack of trees. It is a small garden with various shrubs and flowers. I’ve now planted a single Whitebeam tree. Here’s hoping it thrives in our garden for many years!
Musical Instruments
2024 was the year of the V-Drums. 2025 has seen different instrument purchases.
I’ve been playing more guitar of late after getting a great deal on an Ibanez 335-style copy, it is an Ibanez AM93ME. A genuinely lovely guitar to play with a quality finish that is surprisingly good at this price point.
I also picked up a midi keyboard again, this time much smaller than my last one (which I sold as it was taking up way too much space in our small home). It’s a Korg microKEY2, 49 key edition. Whilst I can play drums and blag my way through a bunch of guitar music, my keyboard skill is closer to zero. It’s enjoyable though! I’ve been using it with the piano sounds in Garage Band which, to my untrained ear, seem pretty decent. I also bought a sustain pedal, which feels like a cheat code as it takes me longer than ideal to get my fingers in place from chord to chord.
Travel
World's Tallest Christmas Tree at Cragside, Northumberland. I've visited a few times, although never in December before.
Whilst I didn’t go abroad in 2025, I did spend over 40 nights away. This was a mix of trips for work, events or holidays. If I look back and try pick out highlights from last year, I often pick out moments from the trips away. Unsure if they are automatically more memorable because the location is novel or because it’s time set aside with friends and family away from the typical routine.
Most of the travel was not to new places. The BBC have a good article on the joy of going back to the same place, something I found out first hand last year. Interestingly I have three short trips planned for 2026 so far and two of those are to places I have been before.
Projects Plans for 2026?
I’ve touched on work plans already, but what else?
This isn’t a DIY blog, but I’ve got quite a few house projects I’d like to get sorted this year. There is some tech cross-over, e.g. fitting some smart bulbs for the home office/dining room. If it turns out there is some unexpected/interesting anecdotes around that project then I’ll blog about it.
At the tail end of 2025 I found myself getting back into physical media (CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes etc). I’m keen to get a CD player again. Listening to an album on CD encourages going beginning to end, and without the distraction of a screen. I will semi-often put music on in the background, but I can’t remember the last time I purposefully sat down to solely listen to an album.
A closing thought, that mostly fits in the ‘Projects for 2026’ section, is that I’m keen to keep blogging. This blog has been going for 10 years, and whilst it has changed a little in typical post subject, it’s still an enjoyable project for me to work on, just for the fun of it.