Posted on
4 minutes to read
2025 in review
My thoughts on a mixed year.
2025 in general
Did some cool things. Remodelled our kitchen (complete with my dream tutti-frutti terrazzo floor tiles). Celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Still a governor at Rudyard Kipling Primary School -- focus is turning towards Ofsted preparedness as we enter a new inspection window.
2025 in Work
First full year of being a remote worker. I miss the buzz of daily collaboration in person with people I respect and trust.
I'm working on an even wider portfolio of sites, including IGN and HowLongToBeat. Honoured to be trusted to improve and grow them alongside the other iconic gaming brands I take care of. I'm working with some fabulously talented and thoughtful people in a difficult time for publishing. Hoping 2026 allows this incredible (but thin) team to shine.
Performance remained a recurring theme. Time-to-first-byte, memory pressure, caching strategies, bundle sizes, and the uncomfortable reality that faddy architectural decisions create problems that can impact teams for years and take ages to unpick.
Reaffirmed my belief that site speed isn’t just a technical metric, but a cultural one -- and within the publishing world it needs to be treated as a first-class metric at the highest levels of the org.
2025 in Technology
This was the year I solidified a lot of my opinions on what reliable technology looks like.
More appreciation for boring, legible systems. Less patience for complexity dressed up as modernity. I found myself increasingly drawn to architectures and frameworks that optimise for developer experience and raw performance over novelty. In short: jettisoning shiny JavaScript frameworks and going back to basics on server-side-rendered fundamentals.
AI was everywhere, of course. You can smell when an executive memo or a requirements doc has been cooked up using an LLM. Noticed a trend of first-draft AI gibberish being dumped on people without thought and expecting it to be perceived as good work. It is an unkind way to put unnecessary mental load on people who have to untangle paragraphs of nothing. Where I've found AI useful is not in replacing thinking, but in prototyping, distilling arguments, in exploring alternative framings, or in finding gaps in logic. Annoyed that my penchant for emdashes has been subsumed into AI and is now considered an AI smell. Grrr.
2025 in Art
After a real burst of creativity in 2024 my output slowed down a lot this year. But in January I made my favourite piece of generative art so far: Cluster.
2025 in Books
Reading was uneven this year. Bursts of intensity followed by long gaps.
Favourite books of the year: Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams. The anecdote about how teenage girls were targeted with beauty adverts after they'd deleted a bad selfie made my blood boil. Also really enjoyed I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
2025 in Movies
Had a busy year watching for the first time every movie from two long-running horror franchises. Watched every Hellraiser movie (absolutely incredible at times), and every Friday the 13th movie (repetitive, sometimes very inventive).
Favourites of 2025: 28 Years Later, The Long Walk, Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster, Final Destination Bloodlines, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Favourites that I watched for the first time this year: Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Phantom Thread (2017), Ninja (2009), The Menu (2022), The Neon Demon (2016).
2025 in Health
Maintenance year. I boxed. I rowed. I lifted. I ran. I stretched (not always enough). Extremely aware of the cost of two decades of sitting at a desk. Neglect compounds silently.
This website in 2025
Added a lot of small hand-crafted touches here and there. Also added a new "Pixel" theme which I think is very cute.
