My Year in Programming: 2025

EricMesa

- 3 minutes read - 555 words

Since I started making my end of the year posts this is the year in which I did the least amount of programming. This was actually slightly done on purpose. When 2024 was ending and 2025 was starting I looked around and realized that I only have a few years until Scarlett is an adult and a handful after that before the twins are adults. I don’t want to get all Cat’s in the Cradle about it, but looking at my own life, I know that even if we maintain the best relationship, the kids will never have as much time to hang as they do now. So I prioritized playing with them - mostly TTRPGs, but also video games and whatever else they wanted to play. Programming is often a solitary pursuit and most of my utilities do what I need them to do anyway. I also spent of a lot of my weekends cooking and baking - again providing for the family.

Python

I have some Raspberry Pis around the house to monitor the temps and humidity. Each one had bespoke code based on some code I wrote years ago. So I spent a few hours making it more modular and deploying that to all the Pis around the house.

I also intended to do some updates on ElDonationTracker, but, given what I wrote in the introduction, I just couldn’t motivate myself to do what amounts simply to refactoring. It’ll eventually catch up to me, but until then I think the code is mostly “done”.

Go

As part of my goal of moving cron job scripts away from Python and into Go, I did a bunch of fixes to my lastfm code that posted my top weekly songs to my socials. Eventually this led to me creating a library called lastfmgo which supports the endspoints I care about, but could definitely be expanded to match the entire documented API. I combined my programs for posting to Mastodon and Blusky into lastfmSocials. It works and does what I need it to do.

Programs

I mostly used the same programs I’ve been using for years:

  • Github
  • gitea
  • git
  • nvim
  • Pycharm
  • Kate
  • VS Code

But this year I jumped into the hype for jj as a git replacement. It jives with my brain a bit more than git. How much I truly end up adopting it will depend on whether it ends up getting plugins for Kate, Jetbrains IDEs, and VS Code. But for my simplest projects I have already made the move without issues.

Also, I haven’t been 100% following the news, but it seems there’s a bunch of issues going on with it - maybe MS is ignoring it? (Like Amazon with Goodreads - which is why I’m giving Storygraph a serious try in 2026) I will have to see if I move to a public Gitea git forge. What stopped me before was that if I wanted people to be able to submit PRs or bug reports I would have to enable accounts, but that would mean having to deal with spam accounts and I don’t think I have the patience for that right now. Then again, other than ELDonationTracker, I haven’t really had any PRs for my projects. I’ll have to monitor the space and get back to you guys next year.