Recap 2025

What 2025 Taught Me

When I look back at 2025, I don’t see a year defined by big external changes. Instead, it feels like a year of internal alignment. A year where I became more deliberate about how I spend my time, where I speak up, and what I choose to build, or consciously decide not to.

Personal: Calm, Limits, and Ethical Choices

I’m still living in Hamburg. Life has been mostly calm and stable, with things feeling grounded. There were moments this year, a few weeks in particular, where I noticed the early signs of burnout. Not a collapse, but a quiet warning. That awareness mattered. It forced me to slow down, to accept that energy is finite, and that stability also requires care.

I didn’t travel much, and that felt right. I also made a couple of decisions rooted in ethics rather than convenience: I stopped using Vercel and Spotify, two tools that had been deeply integrated into my daily routine. Letting go of familiar platforms isn’t easy, especially when they “just work”, but it reinforced something important for me: tools are never neutral, and choosing alternatives is also a form of expression.

Formation: Accessibility as Practice and Presence

One of the most meaningful achievements this year was passing the Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) exam. Preparing for it fundamentally changed how I understand the web, not as a collection of techniques, but as a social space with responsibility attached to every decision.

After the certification, I actively tried to move from theory to practice. I gave talks, shared knowledge through posts, and helped organize internal workshops. A Special Interest Group (SIG) was created at work, focused on identifying barriers in our existing products and ensuring that new ones are built accessibly from the beginning.

For the first time, I also attended a large international conference and spoke there. At CSS Day in Amsterdam, I participated in the lightning talks, speaking about accessibility and CSS. It feels good to be part of the community in a more visible way.

Later in the year, I took part in Manuel Matuzović’s Advent Calendar, where I wrote about MathML, accessibility, and how browser and screen reader support has evolved over the past years. That contribution mattered to me not only because of the topic, but because it connected long-term standards work with real, tangible progress.

Work: Scale, Trust, and Learning to Say No

Professionally, 2025 was dense. Working in a large company instead of a startup showed me a different rhythm: more coordination, more long-term thinking, and more responsibility beyond just shipping features.

I was hired as a developer in a game department, something I still don’t take for granted. We’re moving steadily in that direction, and I’ve been trusted to propose ideas, experiment, and challenge existing assumptions. That trust has been motivating and grounding at the same time.

On the technical side, I dealt with some genuinely demanding tasks, including upgrading React and Redux from very old versions to modern ones. Work like that forces you to understand not just APIs, but history and trade-offs. Interestingly, over the course of the year, I became more fluent in Svelte than in React. That shift felt natural, almost inevitable, and it changed how I think about simplicity and expressiveness in frontend development.

I also decided to go selbstständig (freelancing) alongside my full-time position. This forced an important realization: time is extremely limited. I learned to say no, often and deliberately. Instead of taking on many clients, I focused on a small number of well-planned projects. I completed three projects I’m genuinely proud of, and I’m open to new ones next year, but only if they fit within a sustainable rhythm.

Hobbies: Building, Translating, Observing

Outside of work, I kept creating. The most significant personal project remains The Runic Edda, an RPG about Vikings built with Godot. It’s a long-term project where narrative, systems, and atmosphere come together, and where I can explore ideas without external pressure.

I also fully localized the game Dreamed Away into Spanish (Spain). That work was deeply satisfying. It reminded me how much meaning lives between lines, and how accessibility and localization often intersect more than we realize.

Alongside creative work, I started exploring quantified self practices, especially around tracking data with remoteStorage. Not to optimize every aspect of life, but to better understand patterns over time, like energy, focus, workload, and rest. It’s an ongoing experiment, but one that feels aligned with the broader theme of this year: awareness and intentionality.

On a quieter level, I also invested time in learning Vim more deeply. Not to chase efficiency for its own sake, but to feel more fluent, more intentional, more at home in my tools. But this is definitely a journey that will continue into next year.

I continued experimenting with Astro, Eleventy, and even PHP. PHP, in particular, surprised me with how effective and uncomplicated it can be for small applications: a reminder that complexity is often a choice, not a requirement.

Closing Thoughts

2025 taught me that growth doesn’t always look like expansion. Sometimes it looks like boundaries, like choosing fewer things and doing them better. It looks like speaking up when it matters, stepping back when it doesn’t, and protecting time as a finite resource.

I built meaningful things, shared knowledge publicly, refined my tools, and learned to say no without guilt. If 2026 continues in this direction, with more intention, more rest, and the same curiosity, that feels like more than enough.