Here we are, the end of yet another year.
2025 was defined by work. It was interesting for me in that I took what many would consider to be a demotion but was, in fact, one of the better career moves I’ve made.
From January through July we really didn’t do much. My old job meant I could make no plans and I learned the hard way when I tried to do so. We missed concerts, games and other events we had bought tickets for and I didn’t even try booking travel. Instead the first 7 months of the year were filled with me just trying to keep my head above water.
In August things turned around. I took a new job with Fingerprint that came out of a conversation I had with Dav Glass, a friend I had first met way back when I was in grad school at SIU. He needed an engineering manager for a remote team at a company that had a product and knows what it wants to do with it.
At first I was a bit torn on whether to make the jump from VP to EM, no matter how bad my quality of life was, but in the end I went for it. Now I’m managing two teams as I try to build them both back up from shakeups that predate my tenure. I know my place. I know what I need to do and this time I have supportive management to make sure we can do it. I’m loving it.
Maybe one day I’ll look at an executive role again. I’m not against it. This EM role, however, is perfect for me right now. What I’ve learned through both companies is what I’m capable of and that I can perform well at the VP level or at the level of a manager and that’s been good for me. WP Engine gave my team so little support that I left there questioning my own abilities. SuperFile and Fingerprint have erased those doubts and now, at Fingerprint, I can push forward in the type of role I’ve been looking to do for a very long time.
With the new job it means we can actually plan things again and we started taking advantage of that in October with our first trip back to Carbondale since 2019. Oh how I miss that town. We were able to see a football game, walk around the campus and see friends we haven’t seen in years, including Mike Veselka who just happened to be in town that weekend himself.
It was great to get away. Going forward we have even more trips planned, but that’s for another post.
On the project front I started new projects and ended some older ones. The most notable project work is that I’m starting to learn Swift and I’ve completely stopped using WordPress for anything, including this site after once again moving back to WordPress in July and then back to Hugo just a week ago.
With the sunsetting of Kana that means I don’t have any active WordPress projects, not sites nor plugins nor anything else. In some ways that is a bit sad to me after spending nearly my whole tech career in WordPress, but it’s time. I left the community behind a year ago and was really only using the software out of nostalgia. That’s just not a good reason to use something that really doesn’t do a very good job for my needs, so moving on is the right move and I’m looking forward to building new things.
I didn’t read as much this year. As I write this I’ve only finished 75 books. I didn’t really get into any TV shows, movies or really any media. Where I did spend a lot of time was listening to podcasts and music. Apple Music tells you how many minutes you’ve listened over the year. My previous record was right around 38,000 minutes. This year, again as I write this, I’m somewhere around 95,000 minutes. Music has been my escape and I’ve loved every one of those minutes.
One area that I haven’t done well in this year is my health. I’ve walked and exercised far less, first due to my old job and then due to getting sick for a few weeks twice this fall. Add to that my old job brought in fast food daily for lunch and it took a toll with me again reaching over 200lbs. I’ve stopped the climb since leaving that job, but haven’t yet been able to start losing that again.
On the plus side with my health I have slowed and then stopped drinking again. I had been sober for 2.5 years until my mom passed. Since moving to Chicago I was drinking for roughly 3 months (once a week or so) followed by 3 months of not drinking. At SuperFile that increased to drinking once a week and has almost entirely stopped since switching jobs in August, a trend I really hope to continue for the foreseeable future.
One nice part of not traveling much and working in an office for a year is we have started to make new friends here in Chicago. We’ve found a restaurant and pub (with NA beers) near us that has become our Thursday night haunt and has introduced us to some great people. In addition, I’ve started getting out to conferences and other tech events around the area, even speaking in person at an event for the first time since 2020. That’s definitely been a win for us both.
In the end 2025 has, for me, been a tale of two jobs. That’s lead to a mostly quiet year, but not necessarily a bad one. Of course there are things I want to change (like the reading on the scale), but overall I can’t say it hasn’t been a bad year. Sometimes “adequate” is just good enough.