Yikes 2025

What happened this year for me?

NOT MUCH 😅

I’m kind of embarrassed about 2025 I barely hit 350 km of running for the year. So what else can I say about the year, but I do need to keep this once a year blog post going 👀…

Because I didn’t run this year I tried to hike. I did a number of day hikes and 3 small hiking trips:

  • A weekend of hiking around the Blyde river (winter camping was fun 🥶)
  • The Giant’s Cup Trail in the Drakensburg (but we did a luxury slack pack - this was very weird but anytime in the Berg is great)
  • The High 5 Trail in Mpumalanga (fun but we got very wet 🌧️)

Hopefully I’ll do way more trips in 2026.

Valley of Desolation on a trip down to Cape Town

I’m not a big sports or rugby fan. But I attended some local rugby matches at Emirates Stadium and Loftus which was fun. A notable Loftus match involved taking the Gautrain to Pretoria, switching to a PRASA train to get to the stadium and finally braaiing with a bunch of supporters at the stadium before the kick-off.

On the less note worthy side, I wrote a lot of code this year often with the help of AI. Towards the end of the year, I stepped back from my role at Kastelo and returned to freelance client work.

Some nerdy code stuff:

  • I got into python and Django this year big time. So hopefully I’m a more rounded full stack dev now.
  • Got a Home Assistant Green which really made my home automation setup really reliable (it just works now always). Running it off a Raspberry Pi was not brilliant (lots of reasons for this).
  • Went from Plex to Jellyfin, wow so much nicer without the bloat and upsell everywhere. A few years back it Jellyfin was very rough. But now almost everything plays and I rarely have issues.
  • Moved from Portainer to Komodo for container management on my home server. It’s also nicer without the constant upsell to enterprise all the time.
  • Services like Bezel, Dozzle and Uptime Kuma were very useful for my home and client work this year.

Some other things I can mention this year (I did so much 🙃):

A movie from this year I enjoyed was One Battle After Another. I was expecting a weird comedy from what I saw in the trailer. But it ended up being jarring, funny and serious at times. I suppose that’s what good art is supposed to be like? I enjoyed the soundtrack too. Then another fun rewatch I remember was an old movie, The Ghost in the Darkness. I watched this because on the High 5 trail hike, there was an area where they shot some of the movie. This movie really scared me as a child, so I was interested to see it again. I think this movie is great and worth a rewatch (and based on a real story 🤯).

For a series, my favourite is always Taskmaster every year 😅. There were probably some other hard hitting crime stuff I binged but can’t really remember.

I went to a school reunion - It’s really hard not to compare but wow I feel pretty far behind everyone. Yikes 😬.

Lets see if in 2026 I can get back into running and do some more daring or longer hikes.

Happy new year!