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2025 in review

last updated: Dec 31, 2025

coding

I didn't do that much work in the open this year, unfortunately. I made a few small tools and polished my workflow scripts quite a bit though:

review

I use my review script to get feedback from an LLM on a pull request before I submit it, or to review other people's PRs. I like this a lot more than tools that annotate a PR in github, because it lets me read it locally and privately, and decide for myself which of its suggestions are valuable.

As I wrote when I released the tool, I find that most of its suggestions are not useful, but having a list of suggestions to evaluate has proved a very valuable resource for me and has prevented me from making quite a few obvious errors.

worktree

My worktree script helps me use git worktrees in a large node.js monorepo at work without so much pain. This year I:

I did play with jj a bit this year, but I'm so used to git that it's not a pain point for me and it seems like a waste of time, though I remain interested in it.

time

My favorite tiny script of the year is my time script, which I wrote because I often have to compare times in different timezones with different time formats. For example, sometimes I'm reading timestamps from a log message in milliseconds since the epoch, and I need to know when that was both in my local time and in UTC.

It has two functions:

$ ,time
ts seconds: 1767193930.0
ts ms:      1767193930000
Local:      2025-12-31 10:12:10 EST
UTC:        2025-12-31 15:12:10 UTC



$ ,time 1756082819
ts seconds: 1756082819.0
ts ms:      1756082819000
Local:      2025-08-24 20:46:59 EDT
UTC:        2025-08-25 00:46:59 UTC

$ ,time Dec 31 2024
ts seconds: 1735621200.0
ts ms:      1735621200000
Local:      2024-12-31 00:00:00 EST
UTC:        2024-12-31 05:00:00 UTC

gp

I have the rights to push to the main branch of a bunch of git repositories, and I found myself occasionally pushing directly to main by accident instead of creating a branch.

To solve that problem, I replaced my git push alias with a script that checks if I'm pushing to a main branch by accident, and displays a message to the console with the ability to do the push if it was indeed intentional.

tools

I still spend most of my life in neovim in the terminal, and have no desire to change either of those.

I'd like to switch to ghostty, but it doesn't support opening hyperlinks in terminal applications (github discussion). I find this workflow incredibly useful and don't want to live without it, so I'm still using kitty.

I've been using Obsidian to make this website, and remain very happy with it.

I've updated the script that builds the website in minor ways throughout the year. It's slow and I dislike the markdown library it uses, but it also gets the job done and I don't have to think about it.

I added hacky callout support

But it was hacky and painful to do, so it goes

I switched from Firefox to Orion browser, which is working well enough though it definitely has some bugs. I tend to switch browsers every six months as I accumulate dissatisfactions with all of them.

games

For a long time, I've vaguely wanted to play games that are Windows-only, but I also refuse to install Windows and I don't have a Linux gaming computer set up. A couple weeks ago, I finally bit the bullet and purchased CrossOver and have started playing a few games that are Windows-only.

Some games I or my kids enjoyed this year:

travel

Working for a distributed company means traveling for meetups, and we had them in particularly fun locations this year. I was fortunate to travel to Colorado, Montana, and Mexico for work this year.

My family and I spent two weeks in Lecco, Italy, which was gorgeous. I'd never been to Italy before and it was great

visualization

I continued toying around with different visualizations of NBA data this year. My son asked me the other day if it was work, and I told him that I make graphs in the same way that other guys build models or go fishing

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