This year is nearly done; here’s some of the things I’ll remember 2025 for:

• back into blogging: I’d been on a break from blogging since the start of 2023 due to work and other priorities, but in 2025 I published 5 blog posts
• a great holiday to New Zealand
• LLMs: in addition to on-device Ollama, the free version of ChatGPT came a long way in 2025 and is now a regular part of my processes of researching, code development and testing, and quick experiments
• I bought an EV
• had a 24kWh home battery installed
• set up a home NAS: still a work in progress - as at the end of 2025, the NAS stores 2.9TB of Time Machine, repo backups, documents and 20+ years of family, trip and nature photos
• also set up a mini rack and discovered Rackstuds https://www.rackstuds.com/
• switched from the competent (and free) Mylio photo library software to Lightroom Classic: Mylio requires a paid version to store a catalog on a NAS, meaning the time had come to assess other options to support my photo workflow
• edited & uploaded 56 photos to Flickr
• continued learning more about Docker: I’d previously dabbled in containerization, and I built on this in 2025 to learn about “Dockerising” my blog and R Markdown (among other things)
• started on Bluesky (@thomasswilliams.bsky.social)
• more Python: continued to learn Python, particularly integrating uv (replacing pipenv) and ruff (instead of flake8/black)

In 2026 I’d like to set up a home lab server and explore self hosting. I’m thinking of:

• Immich
• Portainer
• Traefik
• Homey