The Best Things and Stuff of 2025

28 min read Original article ↗

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

also: see the lists from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010

Great posts | articles | vids read/watched

Most viewed posts/videos with/by me

While I’ve posted a few technical post on my personal blog, I’ve taken a lot of time to guest-post on the Wormwoodania blog about weird, macabre, and sardonic fiction and other related, non-technical topics. I hope to continue this trend into next year. Also, my most assiduous readers will have noticed that I’ve written more about games. I’ve decided to keep those posts on this blog since my intent for the site has always been about systems and systems-thinking and games are a great way to study and model systems.

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

Favorite non-technical books read

The vast majority of my reading this year was fiction, and I discovered some real gems.3

Number of books written or published

As I mentioned, I have taken to writing more on non-technical topics, but I’ve even taken to dabble in fiction this year. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was (much) younger but all that I wrote from those days resides at the bottom of a landfill in Baltimore… which is probably for the best. I doubt that this avenue will result in any publications or even anything worth reading at all, but I’m having a great time regardless.

Number of programming languages designed

I’ve tinkered with a concatenative functional programming language named Juxt for years, but it’s not something that anyone should ever use. My thoughts are almost entirely focused exclusively on moving Clojure into the future, but I take a moment to think in stacks from time to time.7

Favorite musicians / albums discovered

The artist that I listened to the most in 2025 was Cocteau Twins – which probably mirrors a couple of years around when I was 15 or 16.8

Favorite show about a misanthrope tasked with saving a humanity that might not be worth saving at all

Pluribus

Favorite films discovered

Favorite podcasts

Favorite games discovered

Usually tabletop games, but occasionally video games.

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

none of particular note.

Still haven’t read…

I Ching, A Fire upon the Deep, Don Quixote, and a boat-load of sci-fi

Favorite technical conferences attended

Favorite code read

Life-changing technology “discovered”

Some Zettelkasten notes used for Checkers Arcade post

State of plans from 2025

2025 was a particularly productive year for meeting my plans for the year. Starting early in the year I knew that I needed a better way to track my tasks. So to start the year I visited a couple of Japanese stationary stores15 to get some ideas. In 2024 I had used the Hobonichi Techo16 and while I found it to be a lovely system, it didn’t quite work for me. First, it wasn’t clear how or if I was making progress on my tasks without spelunking into the past pages of the schedule. Second, I take a lot of notes longhand in cheap composition notebooks and so I found myself jumping back and forth between those and the Hobonichi. I tried using an insert into my Techo case for note-taking but I didn’t like the form-factor. I take big sprawling notes and filled the pages too quickly. So after the new year I took a minimalist approach with a Japanese calendar stamp:

Rubber stamp calendar

The image above shows an example, but the problem with it should be apparent… there’s just not enough room for fidelity. OK, sure it didn’t work as a real task tracker, but I still use it to keep track of small bits of detail associated with days of the week like: energy level, mood, sleep, exercise, etc. It became apparent that I needed something that solved three problems: 1) track any number of tasks, 2) give me an idea of my progress at a glance, and 3) be on hand already. My first pass at this was to draw a 4-week grid on my notebook and scribble tasks in pencil into the cells. I would then color the grid as I progressed through tasks. This worked great for about 5 weeks until I went on a week-long trip without my notebook, killing my solution to #3. Even before that however I had found that I wanted to make frequent changes and move things around, defer items, and change the colors, so it became apparent that I had another problem to solve; 4) allow for easy change. While I was on my week-long trip I decided to find a solution that account for all four of my problems, and it turned out that my solution was the solution to so many other problems… spreadsheets!

My ongoing tasks sheet

Above you’ll see a representational image that gives the basics of the task tracking. The rows correspond to tasks and the columns to the months. The white section on the left are the tasks details like category, name, description, and success criteria. The colored segments represent the state of the tasks regarding progress. The left-most colored column is the current month. Each cell is filled in before the month starts with high-level goals which are amended and modified as I make progress (or not). The meaning of the colors are:

And that’s the whole system. It’s easy to change and rearrange. It’s on-hand.17 I can see how I’m doing at a glance. Can track any number of simultaneous tasks. Perfect.

Enough of this meta-discussion… how did my plans for 2025 go?

Plans for 2026

2026 Tech Radar

My Zettelkasten stack
Have you heard of an AI?

People who inspired me in 2025 (in no particular order)

Yuki, Keita, Shota, Craig Andera, Carin Meier, Justin Gehtland, Rich Hickey, Nick Bentley, Paula Gearon, Zeeshan Lakhani, Brian Goetz, David Nolen, Jeb Beich, Paul Greenhill, Kristin Looney, Andy Looney, Kurt Christensen, Samm Deighan, David Chelimsky, Chas Emerick, Stacey Abrams, Paul deGrandis, Nada Amin, Michiel Borkent, Alvaro Videla, Slava Pestov, Yoko Harada, Mike Fikes, Dan De Aguiar, Christian Romney, Russ Olsen, Alex Miller, Adam Friedman, Tracie Harris, Alan Kay, Wayne Applewhite, Naoko Higashide, Zach Tellman, Nate Prawdzik, Bobbi Towers, JF Martel, Phil Ford, Nate Hayden, Sean Ross, Tim Good, Chris Redinger, Steve Jensen, Christian Freeling, Jordan Miller, Mia, Christoph Neumann, Tim Ewald, Stu Halloway, Jack Rusher, Jenn Meyers, Michael Berstein, Benoît Fleury, Rafael Ferreira, Robert Randolph, Joe Lane, Renee Lee, Pedro Matiello, Jarrod Taylor, Magdalena Useglio, Jaret Binford, Ailan Batista, Matheus Machado, Quentin S. Crisp, John Cooper, Conrad Barski, Amabel Holland, Ben Kamphaus, Barry Malzberg (RIP), Kory Heath (RIP).

Onward to 2026!

:F

  1. The video has similar vibes to Haruki Murakami’s excellent book After Dark.↩︎

  2. I’d love to try and write something about Corvo’s obsession with the Catholic hierarchy and the tenuous idea that it was a kind of occult architecture. This may be a bridge too far for my ability and knowledge.↩︎

  3. I have some of these books listed at bookshop.org if you’re interested in grabbing copies.↩︎

  4. A lot more Droodiana has been written since 1950 of course.↩︎

  5. The “move to the country” theme present in a significant number of pre-WWII fiction representing a reclamation of feminine power. I would love to find/create a list of books exploring this theme.↩︎

  6. Interestingly, this was a recommendation from friend David Nolen, who also mentioned another book that just barely missed this list, Benito Cereno which I think needs another read in the future.*↩︎

  7. If you’re interested in exploring an interesting new programming language that mixes interesting ideas, then I recommend Uiua that bills itself as a point-free, APL-style, array-oriented modern language.↩︎

  8. I was in a “junk shop” a couple of weeks ago and found both Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality and the Complete Vatican Recordings of the works of Alessandro Moreschi… two albums that couldn’t be more different. I suspect that one of both of these albums will get a lot of play in 2026.↩︎

  9. I could have also added Cregger’s Barbarian to the year’s best filmatic discoveries, but I would like another watch to really focus in on the depths.↩︎

  10. I also found a POD copy of the Nichureki, a 13th-century Japanese book containing the earliest written record of Heian Shogi… a topic for another day perhaps.↩︎

  11. I wrote an essay about Jacoby and its connection to the author M.R. James that is due to be published next year in the journal Ghosts and Scholars #50.↩︎

  12. This is strictly my work-life time. My total use of Clojure has been longer.↩︎

  13. While the Alto source code is certainly interesting, it’s unclear how the repository credits Douglas Engelbart’s NLS vision and Intellect Augmentation, if at all.↩︎

  14. My ultimate dream is to build a giant card-file and then build a Jack Kirby-esque relentless idea-collage universe along the lines of his “Fourth World” mythos tying together all of the concepts in said file… I may need another lifetime for this.↩︎

  15. Japanese stationary stores and thrift-shops are two of my guilty pleasures. Has anyone else noticed that in the States, there are more young people shopping in thrift shops than ever before. I would love to understand why. Is it a growing prevalence of Tik-Tok thrift-haul videos, an appreciation for retro, an economic indicator, all, some, or none?↩︎

  16. I put my best effort into the Techo, but I could never fully buy into the very Japanese view of the planner as a life-book.↩︎

  17. I’m already in Google Sheets all the time anyway, and can access it on my phone if needed. Really though, I’d love to see a device in the spirit of the TRS-80 model 100 to do this kind of work on the go… but I would still probably not get one. ¯_(ツ)_/¯↩︎

  18. You can see the current Juxt bibtex on GitHub.↩︎

  19. I would also love to read the complete work of the comic book creator Jack Kirby. There are some lovely omnibus editions of his work, but I don’t quite know how I feel about the fact that the comics industry is embracing this format. Certainly singles are a joke, but omnibuses have turned comics enjoyment from reading into weightlifting.↩︎

  20. The tension problem is also why I’ve found LLMs to be terrible at aiding tabletop game design. A prime characteristic of the kinds of games that I enjoy is emergent complexity, but if LLMs identify complexity at all, they have so far been terrible at deciding which complexity is useful. That is, LLMs have no notion of “delicious tension” nor how to devise it.↩︎

  21. A huge problem with LLMs are that they are by their very nature dependent on digitized information. While a larger proportion of scientific and computing information is available in digitized form, there are still whole fields of knowledge left on paper, so to speak. First, a large problem with this fact is that only a small fraction of total knowledge is available to training LLMs, leaving large gaps in the knowledge base exacerbating the problem of decoupled confidence and reality. Second, this is problematic because training these models on digital-data leads to an amplification of the biases inherent in the digitized records. This can be mitigated by the search-augmented and human-in-the-loop systems, but these are also incomplete sources of validation and even the validation itself has bias (e.g. SEO, status quo, liability constraints, etc.) and often reduce the traceability of an answer. A second informational downside of LLMs is that they take training data at face-value rather than inherent value. However, in my programming career I’ve learned a lot more from bad code than good code. Likewise, code input to training is heavily biased to work at all and the ingestion itself it geared strictly to work to build a plausible-continuation model. Good code works as exemplars of clarity, layering abstractions, maintainability, and sad-path security, but so does bad code. Heavily curated or contrasting training data could mitigate this to some degree, but at the moment, a lot of the code generated by LLMs is often lacking these fundamental code characteristics. This matches my actual observation of code generation, but I would imagine that the inability of the ingestion to distinguish valid examples from cautionary examples is more general problem. These are all technical points and do not take into account the societal problems that LLMs present… which are bountiful! These are evolving critiques that I’ll refine through more exposure.↩︎

  22. The Boox is a truly lovely device, but I’ve developed a diametric motivation to de-device myself. This was born from my perennial obsession with Cyberdecks and “minimalist” writing devices. Every so often I’m hit with a driving urge to build such things, but then I get turned off by the supporting communities around them, especially its gross fetishization of an “aesthetic of productivity” where the act of building (and buying of course) these tools supersedes and stands-in for their actual use.↩︎