You know, I did think about trying to slip in a quick blog post near the end of December, just to say “Haha look guys, I actually did it this time” but I ultimately just ended up deciding not to. I think every dev who’s made a blog knows that we often aren’t interested in actually blogging, we just like playing with different tech stacks and CMS setups, which was definitely the case here when I started. So, how was my 2025?
It was okay.
There have been some not as fun moments recently. I originally typed up everything that fell under this but on reflection I don’t feel like dumping that much out into the open. Suffice to say, things have been better, and I’m looking for new work for the first time in a long time. Despite that, some cool things did still happen this past year. I did some contract work with HTC and published Grappler’s Gauntlet to VIVERSE, my first solo-developed multiplayer flat/WebXR game. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, and even now I still need to do a lot more polishing work before resubmitting it to the Meta New Tab Page, but it did get released, which is more than I can say for just about any other project on my 2025 New Year’s post (the idea for this stemmed from “Grapple Gunners” if you saw the older post). I also started a worldbuilding project, which has been one of the few sources of levity I’ve been enjoying recently. It’s a sci-fi universe that’s essentially just our own, but with some slight adjustments and a lot more galactic history that’s played out before us to make things interesting. It’s a good excuse to learn and deep dive into various rabbitholes, building planetary systems and bioospheres and cultures and so on, and even got me into learning how to make a conlang. At some point I’d like to write some stories in this universe (I have the draft of one started already) but I’m in no rush. It’s one of the few projects I’ve started where I am making myself explicitly okay with taking it at its own pace and not ruining the enjoyment for the sake of “productivity”. I also rewrote a SmolNet browser called Breeze for viewing content on alternative protocols (Gopher, Gemini, etc) that was originally in OCaml into Rust, which I got decently far along with. Some per-protocol features are less complete, but it’s largely usable for a 0.0.1 release I think.
So what are my plans for 2026? Survive and recuperate, mostly. I’d also like to find a stable, full-time, remote position somewhere so I can stop worrying about my finances. I don’t think I’ll make any promises or plans beyond that for now. Maybe I’ll make another post whenever I manage to land new work. Until then.