It’s the end of the year, no better time than now to look back on the things that happened.
Taking the time to make this post helps me realize what mattered to me the most, what makes the cut and deserves to be mentioned.
Started this site
I’m happy with the results and the effort I’ve put into creating this personal space.
In the past I had a personal site, waaaaay back from high school to college (like 20-15 years ago), but after that it was just the work website, nothing personal.
There was a need to organize and share some of my thoughts in a way that suits me.
Book tracking
One of the things that I wanted to incorporate into this site was a book section.
I was inspired by different sites, one of them being Cory’s website, to have a book section with ratings and a short list of ideas around that book.
I used Goodreads before and still use it to find stuff, but I didn’t like the idea of writing reviews there. That is not what this is. I wanted my own space where to write down my ideas about the books, how they made me feel and think, without any desire to make you want to read the book or steer you away from it.
It’s my way of getting the most out of the book. Putting down the ideas from the book helps me make better connections and remember it.
Finished 25 books this year.
Bike rides
This year I got to go to Fără Asfalt 2025 and Bikeathon 2025 Făgăraș.
I’d like to do something similar next year, if not, that bike is going to sit there just gathering dust. Bucharest is a bit of a chaotic city when it comes to riding your bike, it’s not the safest place to do that.
That’s why I prefer to go to some events to ride it or just go on mountain bike paths.
Visited Rome
At the start of July, during some of the hottest days possible, we were out visiting the Eternal City.
I liked it, despite the heat and the amount of people; I would definitely go visit it again. Especially since I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted inside the Roman Forum.
Here is me with a Brutus (great band) t-shirt in Rome.
Moved away for one month
After Rome, we went and stayed for 1 month in Brașov. It was our way of beating the summer heat and experiencing a new city.
It wasn’t the full-on vacation mood, work needed to happen as well, but it was a more relaxed atmosphere.
Linux as daily driver
My first experience was with Linux Mint on my personal laptop.
I loved it so much that I ended-up having a recurring donation for $20/month for the past 7-8 months.
Since then, I moved to Fedora 43 using KDE Plasma, mostly because I changed my laptop and it required the newest kernel to work with the new hardware it had.
The switch to Linux made me appreciate the open-source community and all the software pieces that are FOSS.
Got a new laptop
I switched from my Asus ZenBook 14 to a Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 Gen 10.
At some point during the summer, I got really annoyed with the performance while working with multiple Figma files and decided it was time to upgrade after 5 years.
I settled on the Yoga Pro 7 Gen 10 with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, 32GB DDR5, OLED screen at 90Hz refresh rate.
WordCamp Sofia 2025
I’m starting a little streak of going to WordCamp at least once per year.
Near the end of the year I went to WordCamp Sofia 2025. Sofia is just a few hours away and the dates matched with our national holiday so it was a long weekend.
Last year it was Brașov, Romania; this year was Sofia, Bulgaria; next year, probably Krakow, Poland for WordCamp Europe.
AI use
No way around it in my line of work.
I played a bit with some local LLMs, small enough to fit on my RTX 3080 10GB.
On the work side, I started using Claude and GitHub Copilot (with Haiku 4.5 or Sonnet 4.5 most of the time). Not going full vibe-coding, but I feel you can do a lot of the boring work with it. And it has to do with your experience: I have over 13 years of WP and PHP experience. I know what I want and how I want it to work, how the features should be created, where to be integrated, and what the common issues are, etc.
I guess you can vibe-code in a way if you know what the fuck you’re doing.
As of December, I started to use Le Chat (Mistral) to refine some ideas. I really like the Research feature that is included in Le Chat. If you have a very detailed idea, with a lot of thought already put into it, the Research feature can help validate it fairly easily.
I still hate AI on the content side: articles, publications. I don’t want to read an article that is AI-written. Same with video creation and images. I don’t like the amount of slop that was out there at the end of 2025.
Work
Old clients with new projects, old clients getting new clients to us, and I like that.
“Word of mouth” is one of the best ways to get clients in my opinion.
It got a bit hectic at some point with a lot of deadlines at the same time. This is something that needs to be addressed in 2026 to create a smoother experience for the clients, but mostly for us. I’d love to keep my mental health intact.
Fun
- Got a new guitar amp (Yamaha THR 10II).
- Finished a bunch of games: Frostpunk 2, Little Nightmares 2, Remnant 2, Forgive me Father 2, The Invincible.
- Still didn’t finish Elden Ring and Silksong.
Conclusions
2025 was a good year with some things that were left on the table and could’ve been done better:
- It could’ve had a little more travel time.
- Some actions need to be taken sooner.
- Focus on getting things out of the way when there is free time.
I’m looking forward to:
- WordCamp Europe 2026.
- Spend time in 2026 on 2 new side projects.