In no particular order:

• Finally learned Elixir/Phoenix.
  • Wrote this blog engine, nóssa (which I’m slowly giving some love again), chog, and Pipa!
• Finally learned Kubernetes.
  • Went through about 3½ cluster topologies before settling on the current thing. etcd really is a temperamental baby, huh.
  • Wrote enbi, which ties up the [anything]–Nix→OCI–k8s trifecta in an unholy and altogether beautiful way. 5 months later and updating anything I run in my cloud is still just a matter of bumping a SHA and pushing to git; no manual messing around with a registry, building images, pushing images, any of it. It just keeps on running without a care in the world. k8s is the SharePoint you can really love.
• Learned to do simple CAD; designed and printed a bunch of things to improve our home.
• Authored 460 commits on Comrak and shepherded 107 commits from 25 contributors — thank you!!
• Played a lot of games! Long COVID means I have so much less thinking time in a day.
  • 100%’d a few games: Nova Drift, Hades, and Hades Ⅱ. I really recommend them. Hades Ⅱ was such an incredible follow-up.
  • Also got to 5BSC in Dead Cells and collected every outfit (except for Dracula’s because fuck him). Turns out it has an adorable live-action adaptation!?
  • Replayed Cave Story.
  • Started a new Stardew Valley save and actually reached the “end game”. (Year 3 day 1, all candles!) Previous attempts never made it past the first season.
  • Counts as gaming: did Advent of Code for the first time in many years. It was fun and stretched my brain a few times (except for the disappointment that was Day 12), and I topped the work leaderboard. :)
  • Got myself back into Silver in LoL in the first half of the year, largely pivoting into ADC! (16–7 on Ashe in S2025 :3 But also 43–36 on Nami.)
  • As so many others have discovered — the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here, and a lot of it is thanks to Valve! You can’t imagine my shock at some games running better on Linux on chipset graphics than an M3 Max. That which isn’t thanks to Valve is largely thanks to the two corporate competitors being determined to turn their flagship products into complete and utter shit as rapidly as possible. We can only rely on ourselves.
• Saved 512 bookmarks.
• Filed three police reports for theft u_u
• Visited Canberra for the first time.
• Quit medicinal cannabis — cost/benefit crossed the line — and spent months in medication hell figuring out a new way to make sleep possible. Made it, though (guanfacine).
• 25 doctor/specialist/test appointments. No improvements to overall pain incidence.
• Finished up at Radiopaedia. Did a pen-testing contract. Decided to try full-time work again, after nearly 6 years.
• Got a pushbike and used it a bunch!
• Watched quite a bit of 非诚勿扰, lots of LoL, and (new for me) a couple CS2 tournaments.
• Watched consensus reality go to hell.
• Loved my wife.

What’d I intend?

• Keep up Duolingo: did that! I got every monthly badge, meaning I did at least 600 “quests” in the year. I found that was a nice way to ensure I spend actual decent time learning.
• Daily meditation: I saw that through to day 280 or so, averaging 15 minutes a day.
• Home-cooked meals: whew. Mid-year was a bit heck for that, but we’ve been doing so much better lately!
• Deliver the Ava MVP: called that spike in February.
• Secondary project: ended up fielding a lot of those!
• Keep learning: really well done! (Not much from that list, though I did end up using Quint at work to elucidate problems with an existing design and prove a better one, and out of luck encountered a problem where I knew both (a) that an SMT solver would solve it generally, and (b) how to instrument one to do that!)

1. covid¹
2. the climate (we’re fucked)
3. societies’ attitudes to trans people
4. llms

Maybe one or more of these can let up in 2026 🤞

1. Still extremely a thing[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][20][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], but let’s face it, if you’ve given into peer pressure by this stage (and it was probably years ago that you did, given how extreme it’s been!), there is no turning that ship around now. ↩

Happy new year!

I guess I’m taking a slightly more laid-back approach to goals this year. Health issues have unfortunately progressed; whatever pain relief I was getting from the duloxetine (or otherwise), either that effect has worn off or the pain levels have risen to break through.

I’ve also encountered a new arrhythmia, so “sudden cardiac death” is back on the menu of dread. Holter monitor next week where I’ll try to reproduce that without dying. Rheumatologist follow-up appointment where I expect to be diagnosed with hEDS in … 12 weeks. So it goes.

Goals, then.

Keep up Duolingo.

866 days now; the streak isn’t the important thing, but it has been a really good lesson in proving to myself I can stay consistent with things given the right motivation. (In this case, being able to speak my partner’s native language.)

Duolingo isn’t for everyone, and the course quality varies wildly, but the Spanish course for English speakers is incredible, and if you spend 15-20 minutes a day on it, and let it be your fallback activity when bored, you will steadily but surely gain an extremely real facility with the language.

(This much time is also enough to reliably sit around Obsidian/Diamond league, and sometimes it can be a nice dopamine hit to make an effort to finish at #1.)

I have the benefit of being around a native speaker all the time, but the first year or so my level wasn’t anywhere near being able to use it casually without it getting annoying for both of us. By now, we can switch in and out pretty comfortably around the topics I’ve covered lexicon for.

I’ve also added Portuguese on the side, spending roughly half my time each day on each, and it works pretty well! I wouldn’t start two at once (especially closely related languages like these; too confusing), but being a few years in with one makes it an easy way to bootstrap another habit. Português é estranho, mas eu gosto :) It’s a much shorter and less developed course than the Spanish one, so I expect I’ll finish it this year and start another in its stead.

Daily meditation.

Planning to slot this in with my Duolingo practice. I’ve been an on-and-off meditator for 20 years or so now. I need the equanimity now more than ever.

Home-cooked meals.

This has been a real struggle over the last year or two, with energy levels so low (and no microwave in the Tallinn apartment!), but since moving into my new place back in Melbourne it’s been a key focus. Just need to keep it up.

Deliver the Ava MVP.

Charlotte’s been working non-stop on Ava BASIC (previously) since July, and hopefully we can get that into a complete MVP this year.

Secondary project.

Having an “off” project would be nice. This is a vaguer goal, but I get the feeling technical writing would be a good fit for us.

Keep learning.

So far I have an unsorted list of things I’d like to learn or improve at:

• Formal methods in digital design. We’ve played around with this a bit (e.g. with Robert Baruch’s Amaranth exercises; solving Sudoku with HDL and formal was a cool and unexpected twist), but not enough to usefully use it in actual designs.
• Likewise, something like Lean and perhaps Quint.
• Stenography with Open Steno.
• Training on the Africa Twin; I’ve been rebuilding confidence since a fall after a tyre replacement early last year, but I’d like some controlled conditions to push the envelope a bit.