2025 in review

For a lot of people in tech, 2025 was a tough year. Mine was a mixed bag: a lot of good times with family, tempered by some significant work related stress¹.

Highlights

• 🏡 Converted part of the garage into a studio / home office. This means my partner and I now both have dedicated workspaces, instead of making do with the kitchen table or a desk in the lounge.
• 🏊 Swam 1600m unbroken. After struggling to find an exercise routine that wouldn’t aggravate my lower back and knee pain, I found swimming to be both enjoyable and restorative. I set an arbitrary goal of swmming 1600 meters non-stop and managed to hit it during my lay off from work.
• ⚡ Helped launch a couple of impactful new features at Evnex, including an integration with Amber Electric which allows customers to see the cost of the power they used to charge their EV based on real-time price data from Amber.
• 👷 Achieved a longer term engineering goal of mine to remove gRPC from our stack at Evnex. Carefully replacing all internal gRPC calls with HTTP before removing the gRPC containers was good practice for getting large, long term engineering projects completed safely.

Lowlights

• 👋 I was let go from Evnex after nearly five years.
• 🔍 A stressful three month job search.
• 🤒 I spent almost five weeks in a row with a continuous series of colds that pretty much laid me out completely.

Personal

Family

We spent New Year’s Eve with my partner’s family at the Marble Hill Campsite. We’d planned to be with my family in Nelson for Christmas day, but I picked up my third round of Covid shortly before we were set to leave and had to cancel the trip. I started testing negative on Christmas Eve, so we shortened and moved the trip to early January. We spent four excellent days with my parents, my sister and her family. I also managed a second weekend trip to Nelson later in the year.

Aside from those trips, most weekends involved hanging with the kids, and we had a visit or two from their cousins on either side of the family.

Home office build

In February, we broke ground on a project to convert part of our garage into a shared studio / home office space for my partner and me. The first step was me digging a trench and laying CAT-6 cable to the garage. On the 1st, work started on framing out the office.

TRhe rest of this project would turn out to take much longer than anticipated, largely because the bulk of the work was undertaken by friends as-and-when they had the time to do it. Finally, on October 11, I moved my desk from the living room, where it had been since the first Covid lock down, into the completed office. There was much rejoicing.

Work

Evnex

At Evnex, we had two big releases. We started with a large database migration and related app release that enabled customers to define more-or-less arbitrarily complex electricity tariffs and charging schedules. This was the culmination of several months of work and it went fairly smoothly. We were happy and customers were happy – particularly Australian customers who had been limited by the previous implementation.

Following that, the company launched a second charger in the E2 range. This was largely a hardware and marketing effort, but there was a bit of background work that had to be in place for launch day.

I also managed to safely transition our internal services which were communicating over gRPC to HTTP. Early on in my tenure at Evnex, the team had decided to try gRPC to make inter-service communication easier. We learned that this wasn’t a good fit, as AWS Fargate didn’t seem to play well with our gRPC servers – the ywould occasionally just stop responding yet not be automatically recycled by Fargate. We also improved a lot of the tooling around automating HTTP client generation for internal APIs, so the advantages of gRPC more or less disappeared.

It was very satisfying to have this ongoing side-project and see it finally completed this year, and I was pleased that my slow-and-safe approach was so successful. This felt like real engineering, rather than the feature-factory-grind that seems to be increasingly prevalent in the industry.

Unfortunately, the business had trouble raising enough funds in 2025, and at the end of June I was informed that I was being let go so that they could extend their runway. In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was. When the company took venture capital funding about 18 months prior, the focus of the business switched markedly from engineering to sales and marketing. The hard work I’d done to build a highly collaborative team was mostly undone as we were pressured to release more features more quickly, and the fundamental engineering work that I believed was important for the longevity of the business was always ignored in favour of more customer-facing feature work.

Despite this, I still felt secure because I was the most experienced software engineer on the team. I’d also been with the company long enough to have a lot of important institutional knowledge, and typically when there are redunancies it’s first-in-last-out. But the fact that I was the most senior member of the team actually worked against me in this case, since it meant I was also one of the most expensive. And as we had basically reached product-market fit, at least as far as the operational software was concerned, they decided they no longer had engineering problems to solve that needed my level of expertise.

Job search

I was let go into what was (and still is) the worst hiring market I’ve seen in my entire career. Being the sole provider for a family of four, my priority was to get back to work as soon as possible, so starting an independent business of some kind was not really on the cards this time around. So I spent the next three months applying to countless jobs and mostly getting no responses.

The recruiters I spoke with told me that my CV was excellent so I’m not sure why the response rate was so low. Where I did end up getting a response, there would be multiple rounds of interviews and positive signs, only to be dropped at the last moment.

Toward the end of this period, I spent nearly five weeks continuously sick with colds and flu-like symptoms. I suspect that after working so hard for nearly five years in a startup, and then being let go unexpectedly, my body just gave up having an immune system for a bit.

With three months of lost income and job-search stress, this was definitely the low point of the year. Thankfully, some friends and former colleagues advocated for me at the company they are now working for, and I managed to get a fixed term contract with them that would tide me over until the end of January 2026.

Reading

Most of my technical reading these days tends to be aimed at solving a particular problem, so I’m largely reading blog posts or skimming books for specific information, and I don’t keep a record of that. So most of the books below are fiction, or unrelated to technical topics.

I continued my reading of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, among other popcorn-like escapist fiction. This is probably not a complete list, but I don’t have good records for the entire year. Until I wrote this list up, I didn’t think I’d done all that much reading this year, but 22 is not a bad number.

• Midnight Tides, Steven Erikson – not my favourite of the series so far, but still a good read.
• The Hunger of the Gods, John Gwynne – Entertaining popcorn, a good escape.
• Terms of Enlistment, Marko Kloos – More popcorn, I won’t be reading any more by this author.
• Refuse to be Done, Matt Bell – interesting handbook on what the mechanics of writing a novel looks like (at least for Matt Bell).
• The Mercy of Gods, James S. A. Corey – start of a new series from this author: The Captive’s War. I enjoyed The Expanse series, and am looking forward to the rest of this one.
• The Fury of the Gods, John Gwynne – I wanted to resolve the story but I won’t be picking this author up again.
• Livesuit, James S. A. Corey (audio) – a pretty gripping novella set in the new universe of The Captive’s War.
• Lving an Examined Life, James Hollis (audio)
• Through the Dark Wood, James Hollis
• The Death of Ivan Illyich, Leo Tolstoy – I read this as a precursor to watching Ikiru, which was inspired by this book. I intend to read more Russian authors in 2026.
• Luna: Wolf Moon, Ian McDonald – I’ve been meaning to finish this trilogy for a while now and am glad I did.
• Luna: Moon Rising, Ian McDonald – McDonald is one of those authors any of whose work I will read. This series wasn’t his best but it was certianly not bad.
• Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler – I found the prose a bit unweildy, but I suspect I’ll be reading more of Nayler’s work in the future.
• Reaper’s Gale, Steven Erikson – one of the better entries in the series.
• Toll the Hounds, Steven Erikson – another high action entry as many different story lines and characters start to come together.
• Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold (audio) – this series is often recommended on r/scifi so I gave it a shot. The writing was a bit stilted and it hasn’t aged particularly well.
• Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold (audio) – gave a second one in the series a shot, bu I don’t think I’ll be continuing from there.
• Understanding the 4 Rules of Simple Design, Corey Haines – a short book on software design framed by a discussion of the Game of Life. Not earth shattering, but pretty decent.
• A System for Writing, Bob Doto – the best explanation of hot to Zettelkasten around.
• Encouraging Words, Robert Aitken – This book contains what seems to be mostly short excerpts from talks given during retreats. The chapters are short enough to easily read one every day and I benefited from the daily touchstone they provided. I expect I’ll read this again in 2026.
• Through Forests of Every Color, Joan Sutherland – a wonderful book on kōan practice.

Kids books

My kids are big readers (probably unsuprising given how much reading their parents do), and I read most nights to my eldest, who is currently 8. Some the highlights this year were:

• The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein – this was just on the edge of her comfort level for scariness, but she loved the adventure.
• The Mysterious Benedict Society #1, #2 and #3, Stewart, Trenton Lee – these have been real hits: clever kids solving mysteries with real stakes.
• The Village Beyond the Mist, Sachiko Kashiwaba – a charming, rambling tale, the magical realism was a hit.

This site

As part of my job search, I resurrected this site. I don’t have any particular goals for it, but I miss the small web, so here I am again. With my youngest child starting school this year, I’m hoping to have a little time to dedicate to writing here, but I’m not setting any expectations. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from having kids, it’s that plans tend to go astray.