2025 Roundup

I think it's probably a good sign that I'm writing this follow up to last year's post, despite there being only a couple posts in between the two on the blog. But the distance in centimeters between these two posts on the page mirrors the compression of time between the end of 2024 and 2025. It feels as though only a moment has passed. A few words, a few thoughts, some awkward shuffling and there it is, the year is done.  

Biggest news

House 

We managed to buy a house. It's a big deal, since we've been saving for close on a decade for it. It's terrifying, to be honest. Owing the bank so much money, in a world that seems on edge the whole time, working in an industry (software) that is actively trying to automate itself out of existence (hello genAI).

 

This, essentially, took up the bulk of my extra cycles for the first part of the year - it was a nightmare of admin and organization. Buying property in New Zealand is not easy or cheap or pleasant and I'm still unsure if it was the right decision, but assuming I can pay the mortgage for the next decade and a half, we'll at least have some kind of asset of worth.

 

Writing 

 

Despite being caught up with the house, I did manage to get some writing stuff done.

Perhaps the biggest is that a translation of my story "Brand New Ways" appeared in Science Fiction World's November "translations" issue. "Science Fiction World" is, by numbers, practically the biggest SF magazine on the planet - so this is likely the biggest publication I'm ever going to get. This was quite cool, if I do say so myself.

 

 

My story "Sulky" was recorded by "Tales to Terrify" and appeared as a reprint at HAWKEYE.

And I have, as of the last count, five new stories forthcoming in 2026.

Reading

My reading started strong this year and fell off fast around June.

I think that my favourite reads from 2025 were probably

 

Liberation Day - George Saunders

 

I absolutely adore Saunders, and while this wasn't (for me) his strongest work (nothing has quite reached the sublime heights of Tenth of December), the titular novella and "Love Letter" were really, really strong pieces. Perhaps the latter, though, only seems strong because it's so timely. Either way, it sticks out on reflection. When this historical moment is passed, I hope it'll seem to be only a period piece (and yet ... and yet ... there are always wolves).

 

Thinking in Systems - Donella H Meadows

   

This was something of a surprise to me. It was a recommendation from a speaker at the Auckland Cloud Native Summit and, honestly, I thought that it was going to be another stupid business book - but honestly, the concepts and, importantly, the mode of thinking (i.e. systems thinking) demonstrated in the book are massively insightful. I'll be looking into systems thinking more in 20206. A wonderful read. 

Last year's goals

 Let's recap 

 

Pick up at least two technical certifications in areas I'm not familiar with

 

While I didn't do this per se, I think I (arguably) made some progress here. I spent some time this year considering what the highest ROI for studying might be and I settled on finance.

Finance is interesting because it it weirdly interdisciplinary - drawing on accounting, economics, decision science, mathematics, etc. It's also useful in a bunch of contexts - from personal finance through to corporate decision making.

Here I took Massey University's "Finance Fundamentals" (essentially their finance 101) - and it was fantastic.

 

I'm also (currently, over summer school) doing their "Economics for Business" course, which isn't quite as deep as their finance course, but I'm learning a fair amount (although I would've liked it to have been more rigorous and mathsy).

 

So I'll take this as a win, even if it's not technically what I set out to do.

 

Write my Grade 5 Guitar Exam

 

Nope. I barely played music this year.

 

Record an EP with my daughter

 

Weirdly, I actually did this. We participated in February Album Writing Month, and while we didn't get 12 songs done, we did enough to be considered an EP.   

 

Write at least five new short stories

 

Indeed I did! I don't have the exact count, but it's about seven in total, including those I immediately trunked. 

 

Next year's goals

 Writing

In terms of fiction, I'd like to write three or four new stories next year. I realize that that's likely my limit in terms of putting out work that I'm actually happy with. Every time I've tried to push more words than that, I've ended up writing what I consider facile.

Further, on these three or four stories, I want to focus on rewriting and reworking them until they're as polished as I can get them. I want to seriously raise the bar for myself this year by producing logically consistent, emotionally satisfying, and (above all) compelling fiction.

 

There have only been a few times when I've written something where I can truly say "this is complete, this is good" - I'm going to chase that feeling where I can find it.

 

I also want to seriously start writing philosophy related posts here on my blog. I have a number of areas I need to dig into (philosophy of economics, cog.sci, philosophy of management, computer science, etc.) and without recording them, without going through the act of writing down the chains of thought, I'm losing so much of what I'm thinking to time (and, if writing is thinking, I'm losing the opportunity to think deeper).

 

Physical

Since around 2018/2019 I have tried to live healthy, to be fit, eat well. For the most part it has worked - even during covid, I only put on a little weight, but I (mostly) stayed the course. This year, for whatever reason, I fell off the wagon hard. I'm ending 2025 not feeling good about where I am, health wise. My eating devolved to where it was pre-2019 (well, not quite as bad), and my volume of exercise has dropped to about half of where it was at its peak.

Exercise is easy - I love exercise and always have. It's just about making time, and getting over my low grade anxieties about getting to the gym.

Eating is not as easy - I have struggled with overeating since I was a little kid and struggle to this day. It's entirely akratic behaviour, and makes me unreasonably angry at myself. Honestly, these drugs that target GLP-1 seem to me to be something like a miracle - I'm not considering using them (I would, if there were no other option), but the fact that we have something now that can (seemingly safely) address this is just astonishing.

Sans drugs, though, I am planning on controlling my diet more strictly in 2026. It's something I have to do for my long term health, as well as fitting back in my jeans (I refuse to pay for a new wardrobe!)

 

Education

One of the reasons I started looking into studying finance and economics is to broaden my knowledge of things. I'm sceptical of the extreme claims made by AI hype-bros, but I can still see that these technologies are transformative for a large swathe of the work done by programmers. I think there are a number of positives here, especially if we focus on being more ambitious, rather than using these tools to eliminate workers, there's a lot of potential here (as well as DANGER - which I'm sure I'll be thinking and writing about this coming year as well).

But it seems prudent for someone like myself, a programmer first and foremost, to become informed about other fields outside that which they're specialized in in order to become more ambitious.

So I will do more serious learning in economics, finance, and mathematics - all at Massey again. This year I go into intermediate classes, so this is where things start becoming really interesting, I hope.

 

Finally, I'm going to spend some time digging into areas of engineering I'm not yet familiar with. I'm not going to commit to any one thing, but rather, simply say that I'm feeling positive I'm going to learn some cool stuff this year and will try and record it all here. 

 

Signing off

I'm not aiming for anything big in 2026 - but I hope that, if nothing else, I can be more open to the world, to friends and neighbors, than I was in 2025. This year felt lonely, and it was nobody else's fault than my own.

Writing this, being as open as I can, is my first step.