Year In Review - 2025

2025 was a very busy year, marked by constant changes and several ups-and-downs. While I have been writing monthly recap blog posts for quite some time now, my plans to write an yearly review were left behind last year - I intented the first one to be about 2024, but only now I am able to catch up and write a first attempt at summarizing the year. I will try to be consistent with this, and follow up with one for 2026, 2027, and so on.

Highlights

I will not go deep into the details of each achievement, as that would lead to a very long post and the content would likely be redundant with other posts I did during the year. So, I will just arpeggiate them with a brief description.

Here were the main highlights of the year for me, grouped by their relevant categories:

Personal studies

As a direct consequence of participating in several technical book clubs at work, I took on a personal habit of picking books to study by myself, with the same level of attention that I give when attending a book club. I have been doing this since 2021 (so about four and a half years by now), and it has been an amazing source of personal growth for me. I aim to put around 30 minutes every working day in studying either a career-related book, or a hobby-related book.

This year, however, I was very inconsistent with how much time I was able to put into this. A mixture of going back to working on-site most days of the week, applying and moving to a new team inside my company and buying and moving into a new home meant that I was most often not doing these studies than doing them. Nevertheless, I was still able to go through a few books, here they are:

Studied The Captain Class

Great book about leadership, I started it in late December of 2024 and was able to finish early this year. I saw a lot of the Scrum Master role reflected in the Captain role that the book talks about, and was able to take several lessons about how I could be a more effective Scrum Master. I read this as part of career studies.

Studied Building Successful Communities of Practice

Short but useful book, which I picked up because I wanted to start some groups inside my old team as a forum for bringing improvements to what is a very, very old and static mindset. I ended up getting a position in a different team before I was able to stablish too many things, but I did set up a Code Quality forum that as far as I know is still going strong, so it served its purpose. I read this as part of career studies.

Studied The Prompt Report

Paper about prompt engineering, useful because I have been steadily trying to get more involved with AI Engineering these past few years (yes, before the crazy push we have right now for everyone to become an AI Engineer). I read this as part of career studies.

Started studying Fundamentals Of Software Architecture

Longer book which is an introductory-level presentation of Software Architecture as a field, with its responsibilities, history and peculiarities. I started it roughly in the middle of the year, but was not able to finish yet. So far it has been interesting, although nothing ground-breaking and seems pretty biased at times. I read this as part of career studies.

Started studying Rich Dad Poor Dad

The only hobby studies book I picked this year. I started reading it around August, and wasn't able to finish within the year. However, that should count in favor of the book, because it led me to start investing for the first time, and for several months all my personal time was spent in studying about different types of investment and structuring my finances. This book was really life-changing for me. While I have read several criticism of the book, and I do not agree with everything said in it (in fact, my personal interests and investment profile is very different than that of the author, and I would never want to make the same investments that he does), I still found the content very inspiring and educational. You do not need to blindly follow everything a book says to get value out of it. I read this as part of hobby studies.

Started studying AI Engineering

While I usually separate my studies in either career or hobby, the accelerating pace of AI led me to try a new approach this year. I started adding a technical book as well into the mix, effectively making it three categories. This did not go as well as I expected, I ended up having way too many tasks with less free time, and started skipping the studies for weeks at a time. In 2026, I plan to restrict it to at most 2 categories again. Regardless, the first technical book I picked up was AI Engineering, which is a foundational book for the most hyped type of development of our current times. I have not yet finished it, and so far it has been instructive but not particularly engaging. I read this as part of technical studies.

Started studying Beyond Vibe Coding

The second technical studies book I picked up was Beyond Vibe Coding, which tries to give some guidance of how to effectively incorporate AI development tools into solid engineering practices. This has been more useful than the AI Engineering book I mentioned previously, but it does have the feel of an extended blog post. It is unclear if the content in it will still be relevant 2 or 3 years from now. Nevertheless, I intend to finish it in 2026. I read this as part of technical studies.

Portfolio projects

I like to keep a portfolio of representative projects in my Github profile. These are not only public and open source, but also display, as much as possible, the engineering practices that I value: automated tests, automated CI/CD pipeline, good documentation, etc.

Each year I try to develop at least 1 new project, but I also keep releasing new version of older ones when I have anything I want to add to them. Most of the new projects are focused on exploring how to incorporate LLMs and other generative AI tools into software systems as more than mere chatbots.

Here are the relevant developments of 2025:

Several new versions of JenAI

JenAI was my first portfolio project around generative AI tools, and is basically a terminal chatbot (I have written a blog post about it). I use it extensively for personal purposes, and have built quite a bit of tooling around it for myself. It is intended to be a personal tool, so I have no plans of putting effort into making it generally useful to a large audience, despite being very fond of the project.

In 2025, I released two patches for it: v1.7.2 and v1.7.3, both to improve the sanitization of strings so that it doesn't break when exotic characters are used in the conversation.

Developed LLP (Local Language Practice)

Local Language Practice (LLP) is a system to practice languages through a roleplay chat with LLMs (I have also written a blog post about this one). This was my main project for the year, and it is around a topic that I really want to explore further in the near to medium future: generative AI applied to education. It is a project I have used quite a bit for real learning, but not as much as I wanted because I have had very little time to invest in studying languages this year, unfortunately.

I released the first version in April of 2025 (v1.0.0), and two more versions later in the year (v1.1.0 and v1.1.1).

Developed LicLacMoe

LicLacMoe was more of a fun project, one in which you can play tic-tac-toe against an LLM (as per usual, I have a blog post about this one as well). I like to think of it as "the most useless application of LLMs you will likely ever see". Despite the obvious silliness, it was also an interesting study about how to use LLMs for specific tasks, instead of a generic chat interface. It also allowed to verify the (admittedly obvious) fact that reasoning models are better at playing games with logical rules than vanilla models.

I also released three versions of this one in 2025, all of them in May (v1.0.0, v1.0.1 and v1.1.0).

Finished 4 first steps into AI Engineering projects

Back in 2024 I had started a series of four projects I called "First Steps Into AI Engineering" (guess what? I also have a blog post about this). These consisted of JenAI, Chargen, LLP and LicLacMoe. In 2025 I was able to complete the last two, and wrap up the series. This series was very useful for me to learn how to build systems around generative AI tools (not only LLMs, but also image generation ones), something that is likely to become the baseline of contemporary software development.

Created programming language learning projects curriculum

Late in the year, after moving to a new team that was using Go as the primary programming language (and having no prior experience or knowledge about Go at all), I saw myself having to very quickly learn a new language and tech stack, with the all-too-helpful but way-too-helpful assistance of AI coding tools. While I was able to very quickly become productive, I felt like I didn't understand very well the code I was shipping, and that annoyed me. So I set out to create a curriculum of projects for myself that covers most of the basic concepts I have used in my career, the purpose of which being that if you implement all the projects it contains in a particular language, you should feel very comfortable developing software in that language. I am currently applying it to Go, and so far it has been proving itself as useful as I intended it to be. (Of course, I have a blog post about that).

Developed Catcher Server project

In the end of the year I also developed the Catcher Server project (and wrote a blog post about it). It is somewhat of a break with the large line of AI-related projects I have been implementing in the past two years, but I think it is a nice little tool that already proved useful to me a few times. I also used it as an opportunity to apply full vibe coding in building something a little more complex than simple scripts - applying this to a simple and low risk project was very good to build experience for more challenging ones in the future.

Professional

I also had a quite busy year at work, being involved in a series of initiatives, moving to a new position and winning a few prizes.

Open Source Champion

I have been an Open Source Champion within my company since late 2024. However, the first months were mostly onboarding and ramping up in the topic and the role. In 2025 I was finally able to really make some meaningful contributions in this role. Beyond just Open Source, I have also been heavily involved in the topic of Innersource (applying Open Source concepts and techniques in the context of a private company). As part of this role, I presented the topic at internal developer conferences of the company, organized hackathon-style events and delivered workshops as part of some of our internal development curriculums.

Innoweeks as Dev Lead and MVP

At my company we have a month-long event called Innoweeks, in which we get together with customers to build an MVP that solves a real business project in a burst of short iterations. I had participated in 2019 and 2024, and I did so again in 2025. This year, I was the dev lead for the team, and received the MVP prize for my team at the end of the event.

Won third place prize at Innovation in my location

I work at one of the biggest locations my company has - we have over 3000 full time employees here. Which means we get to do a lot of cool events and initiatives based here. In 2025, the location offered prizes to the people who got involved the most in boosting innovation at the company. The way it worked was that each participation in innovation events or activities would give the participant a certain number of points along the year, and the people who won the most points at the end of the year would win. I was very honored and happy to be in the podium for this, I was the third person who contributed the most among the 3000+ employees we have.

Moved to a new team

I rejoined my company in 2024, but I did so in a team that was really not a good fit for me - it was responsible for a very old monolithic system and still operated with waterfall methodology, both of which I am strongly opposed to. After I concluded the one year that the company demands you stay in a position before applying to another one, I applied to join a new team working in building the platform that the company runs on. While I am enjoying the current technology stack, and our technical scope, much more than the previous one, unfortunately the new team also has several leadership and organization issues that I am trying to improve, little by little. But overall I am much happier now than last year.

Learned Go programming language

With the move to the new team, I also had to pick up the technology stack the team was using. In this case, it was mostly the Go programming language, with Kubernetes as the runtime. I am already quite familiar with Kubernetes, but I had never worked with Go before. So that was an opportunity to learn the language, and add another tool to my toolkit.