I have never done one of these kinds of public posts, but saw a few from friends so I thought it might be useful!

This year I was simultaneously more focused on my technical craft than ever, but also had more of a "life" than ever. I took more random days off to go chill with friends, go skiing, etc., and had more time with family.

It is probably also one of the darkest years in world history as a whole. The worst humanitarian abuses in a century continue, encouraged and perpetrated by what is supposed to be the "free world." But enough ink has already been spilled on that and you don't need to hear it from me. And South Korean politics show that you DO have a voice. So make it heard, and let's focus on the good stuff.

Travel

I also traveled more than any year since COVID. In addition to my annual pilgrimage to Latitude59 in Tallinn, other highlights were going to Hong Kong for Rust Asia and London for Anjunadeep Open Air.

Surprisingly, this was my first time to visit the UK, and I have to say London is one of the few other cities I could actually see myself living in. Despite its flaws, London had a charming atmosphere, amazing public spaces, loads of greenery, great food and drink (I don't really get the hate... I thoroughly enjoyed all of my meals), and well-functioning public transportation. Overall it was a very "livable" city to me, and joins Tallinn and Seoul as one of the few places I'd really enjoy living.

Music

2025 was a great year for musical experiences. Here are a few of my highlights of the year (in no particular order) which get regularly stuck in my head:

• Kasablanca - Higher Resolution (Side B)
• Monolink - The Beauty of it All
• Der Bahn Song (niche bit of parody that I found hilarious)
• Estiva - Little Love (Icarus Remix)
• Perfume - Nebula Romance: Part II
• James Grant pres. Movement Vol. 3 (Live from Mount Agung, Bali)

Besides all the great albums and mixes, I enjoyed more live shows than I have in a very long time (probably since 2015 or so). The club nights and live bands in Tallinn were as amazing as ever. I got extremely lucky with tickets to a sold-out Fred Again tour show just 15 mins from home. That was probably the best live show I've ever seen; absolutely incredible production and musical talent! And Anjunadeep Open Air was great.

2025 also saw me get back into creating music for fun. I hadn't made much time for this in the past decade, but the time felt right. I bought myself an Ableton Push, and will probably upload something on SoundCloud at some point. Or not. I'm making music for me, for fun. I wish I could do house parties where I'm just jamming, but that probably won't happen in a Korean apartment anytime soon.

Community

I initially used "conferences" as a section heading, but it struck me that the reason I go to conferences, meetups, coworking, and online forums is the same: community.

As I do basically every year, I went to Latitude59 in May for the community gatherings. It was a great time, and I got an early look at how AI agents were being adopted.

The other international conference I attended was Rust Asia in Hong Kong. What a cool and diverse group of people! It was also great to be back in Hong Kong again for the first time in quite a few years. I really hope they do the conference again in 2026.

I also got to attend two local conferences late in the year: FOSS for All, and FOSS4G Korea. Both conferences wouldn't have been on my radar if not for some friends being involved organizing them.

FOSS for All is also a new conference, and the first edition was a huge success. It was far more international than I expected for a Korean conference, and a model for running a properly international, bilingual conference. I was somewhat surprised that I gave the only talk with a heavy focus on Rust. And I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the Korean FOSS community is active on Mastodon. I think I tripled the amount of Koreans I follow in an afternoon.

It was also a surprisingly good value for my company as a sponsor. I had something like 20 serious conversations with people at our table, which was something I didn't really expect (the conference was maybe 200 attendees)! I'll definitely be back next year.

FOSS4G Korea was also surprisingly great! I think I was the only non-Asian there; a few dedicated people flew in from Japan, which was awesome! AI was definitely a theme, and it wasn't the sort of slop generating 10x "productivity" sort of narrative. The talks were overall even more interesting than I had expected; better than the last international FOSS4G I attended! This was also the first time I fully participated in a conference conducted in another language. I'm setting a goal to give a talk in Korean next time.

And speaking of international FOSS4G, it seems the next edition will also be close by in Hiroshima! I'm very excited to go, after several years of them being quite far away. Guess I need to start working on my talk proposals ;)

Meetup-wise, I took over hosting the Seoul Rust meetup this year, and we did a lot more events than any year since COVID. We've had some great talks, and even started a YouTube channel, where we'll post recordings of talks in the future (provided that the speaker is OK with it). I also gave two talks at the Seoul iOS Meetup: one on Ferrostar, and another on Apple's new Foundation models. The iOS meetup also spawned a new, more general meetup called Dev Korea, which is growing really fast and has a great community on Discord!

Reading

I read a lot last year! I finally finished reading Dragonball in Korean. I had never read / watch the series before (because I grew up in relatively rural America without cable TV), but it came highly recommended. You can read about that in my other post.

Here are some other things that I read + highly recommend:

• Sarah Wynn-Williams - Careless People
• John Carreyrou - Bad Blood
• David Graeber - Debt: The First 5000 Years
• Joseph Cox - Dark Wire
• Geoff White - The Lazarus Heist
• John Bloom - Eccentric Orbits
• Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek - Life After Cars
• Karl Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies

Work

I probably talk about this enough elsewhere, but it was a really fun year work-wise, and we grew a lot too!

Ferrostar started as one of those audacious ideas which I just couldn't resist trying. It's now a healthy open-source project with weekly meetings of the core contributors, over 300 stars on GitHub, and 56(!!) forks. I think it's pretty safe to say that it's now regarded as the first choice unless you want to pay Google millions of dollars, or have an extremely simple use case. It's being adopted by large companies in the space, we're benefiting from contributions back upstream, and we're getting new business as a result.

I'm pretty proud of this as I think it's an example of how open source can balance community, collaboration, and sustainability. That last 2 points is worth emphasizing. All of the core contributors are working in a professional capacity, and find it valuable to work together on a shared foundation.

The other big achievement that I haven't written as much about is rewriting our geocoder, more or less from scratch, in a matter of months. You've probably heard of the second-system syndrome. The popular trope these days is for engineers to take something that works but is clunky / limited, and decide to rewrite it (maybe in Rust, like me 🤣), and never ship, or ship VERY late due to feature creep and wanting to get everything perfect. I'm definitely guilty of being a perfectionist, but I also believe you can get there gradually while shipping something valuable quickly.

I approached this rewrite with a clear set of things that I wanted to change, and focused almost all of the time initially on getting the foundations right, which would let me replace the higher layers in a more "agile" way (in the sense of the normal use of the word, not a specific methodology). It worked. Within a few months, I had replaced the existing API layer with a new one, which was serving 99% of our traffic. We didn't have any downtime, and I'm only aware of one accidental breaking change. This is a result of careful testing, including snapshot testing at several levels (using the insta crate), and oracle testing (simple Python scripts in this case which hit the current and next gen APIs and flagged any differences).

There will always be more improvements to make, but what's important is that we shipped, and we have a solid foundation to build from here. And not just that, we also have a v2 API with a bunch of improvements. And since the new API system is serving all the traffic, we even get to backport a lot of the improvements to v1! In fact, we have zero plans of deprecating our v1 API, since the internals are shared, and we can continue improving it within the limits of that API contract. This is an engineering achievement I'm really proud of.

The Year Ahead

I don't do new years resolutions per se, but I expect to work at a slightly less crazy pace, and make more time side projects like music and non-work-related tech. I've also decided on my next Korean reading series: Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'm currently on volume 5, and expect to finish that this year.