2025, in order
The year in one page: what happened, what mattered, and the three things that will still matter in 2030.
page 6
older dispatches from the README archive.
What I got wrong in 2025
Six predictions from twelve months of writing, graded honestly. Three were wrong.
The open weights year
Twelve months that took open models from interesting to unavoidable, and where the gap actually sits.
The postmortem that changes something
Most incident reviews produce a document and a ticket that never gets done. Here's the difference.
Rust 1.92 closes the year
More const, more stable APIs, and a language whose release notes have become pleasantly dull.
Log4Shell, four years on
The industry built SBOM tooling, VEX, and a lot of dashboards. Here's what actually changed and what didn't.
Advent of Code and what a puzzle is for
The leaderboard broke years ago. The value was never the leaderboard.
re:Invent and the year of the boring cloud announcement
Silicon, agents, and a keynote that mostly described things that already existed. That's a healthy sign.
The technical interview is measuring the wrong thing, again
Every hiring process eventually optimizes for the wrong signal. The current one has a new failure mode.
Claude Opus 4.5 and the compaction problem
A frontier release with a large price cut, plus effort controls and context compaction as a first-class feature.
Nvidia's quarter and the question nobody can answer
Another enormous beat, another set of concerns about circular financing. Both facts are real.
Cloudflare falls over because of a config file
A permissions change doubles the size of a generated feature file, which overflows a fixed-size buffer, which 500s a fifth of the web.
Gemini 3 arrives with an IDE attached
Google ships a frontier model and Antigravity, an agent-first development environment. The bundling is the strategy.
GPT-5.1 and the return of the model picker
Instant and Thinking as named modes, adaptive reasoning, and personality controls. The router lesson got learned.
SQLite in production, seriously
It is not a toy database. For a large class of applications it is a better choice than the thing you're using.
Estimation is a communication problem
You are not bad at predicting the future. You are bad at explaining uncertainty to people who want a number.
Rust 1.91 and the slow work of shrinking unsafe
More const, more stable APIs, and an ecosystem that keeps finding ways to need less unsafe code.
Node.js 24 goes LTS and the runtime wars settle into a truce
Long-term support for the batteries-included Node, plus a look at where Deno and Bun actually landed.
ChatGPT Atlas and the browser as an agent runtime
OpenAI ships a Chromium-based browser with an agent that can act on pages. The prompt injection surface is now your whole session.
us-east-1 goes down and takes a large chunk of the internet with it
A DNS race condition in DynamoDB's automation cascades across dozens of AWS services. The lesson is about coupling, not DNS.