Retro #5: 2025, etc.

I waffled a lot about what to include in retros, and eventually waffled about writing retros at all, because I’m always re-evaluating how much to share about myself online. Sometimes I lean way into oversharing, as we probably all do, because it feels like a way to be vulnerable and connect with other people. Other times I share very little, especially when I’m considering all the audiences who might be reading: colleagues, acquaintances, family, strangers, friends, weird bluesky scolds, etc. I don’t there is a single “right balance” so much as there is always-shifting context, but I think a useful data point is that I always look forward to my friends’ most personal posts on my feed and read them first when they appear. This isn’t a professional tech blog and will not be anytime in the future, so maybe my answer is obvious and I’m just nervous about it.

I did actually start writing a 2025 recap a couple of weeks ago but it ended up being a weirdly mean-spirited essay and honestly, none of us need that right now. I’m now sick of reading and thinking about recaps, and I don’t know that I want to look back on my year in great public detail now that it’s very firmly January, but I will settle for a few bullet points for posterity:

• I quit the job that stack ranked us based on GitHub commit numbers and the like. This was the single most impactful decision I made all year. (I also learned about Goodhart’s Law.)
• I started a new job where so far nobody has tracked anything stupid.
• I logged 41 live shows this year (I played 6 of them) which is finally back to pre-covid levels for me, #blessed.
• In related news, my band played shows in Toronto, Montreal, Kingston, Ottawa and Sarnia.
• I read 45 books, including the 18-hour audiobook of A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I had had on hold since January 2022 and managed to borrow just before Christmas. I was still 800-something in line in the fall, but suddenly the TPL got more than 100 new copies!
• My boyfriend and I lived together for the whole year (he moved in in November 2024), and that was awesome.
• I finally set a new deadlift 1RM PR which I had not done since 2019. Satisfying!
• I got a new tattoo.
• The Jays went to the World Series and I barely slept for a month.

At one of the shows I played this year (at Refined Fool in Sarnia, ON), we got some really cool photos of us thanks to Jono of Remedy Collective. Here’s one of me and my “constantly multitasking” musical vibe.

(Join a band, you get an endless stream of cool photos of yourself and your friends!)

A bunch of stuff was less good, like my constantly recurring migraines, my alarming loss of mobility (working on it), brain bees, aimless lack of progress at work and the gym, the list goes on. It wasn’t an easy year. But I think the big positive changes—again, the job especially—made it a good year in the end, and a year is so long that it’s difficult to describe the whole thing with a single word anyway.

Things I liked recently

• This absolutely deranged 45x45 Connections game that consumed many hours of my life.
• This essay by Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, about breaking up with MJ Lenderman mid-tour and then having to record a love song about him, woof.
• This hat I made.
• This Jenny Odell series of conversations with writers and artists about the role of athletics in their lives. I obviously especially loved the one with R.O. Kwon about lifting weights, duh. “I feel like lifting reminds you that you have a body, but also that there are other parts of yourself that aren’t up for judgment right now.” Yes!