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January 01, 2026

#2025 Retrospective

2025 was my first full year as a married man, and I've come to appreciate the "settled down" life. Nevertheless, here are some things I did this past year.

#Things I did in 2025

  • Held a belated wedding reception. Although I got married in 2024, my wife and I did not have a wedding reception in 2024, only a small ceremony in my mother-in-law's house with immediate family. In January 2025, we had a reception with extended family and friends at a local park. While renting the park's indoor ballroom would have been at least $1000, renting the outdoor patio for the entire evening was only $150, so we chose that option and scheduled the event for January in anticipation of cool weather. We decorated the day of, and brought Cuban food to be served potluck style. We were lucky enough that the weather was perfect. In the end, we were both very happy with the outcome.

  • Saw the Grand Canyon, Zion, Valley of Fire, Lake Powell, Antelope Canyon, and other things. For our honeymoon, we flew to Las Vegas, rented a campervan, and drove around Nevada, Utah, and Arizona for a little under 2 weeks as we hiked, camped at, and explored several national and state parks. We made plenty of stops along the way whenever we saw scenic places to stop. We also took about a day in Las Vegas to check out the pinball museum, and eat some seriously good Chinese food. Of all of our stops, Zion was my favorite.

  • Installed new blinds in the house. The office in particular had some awful old blinds that would let in way too much sun. I replaced them with cellular blinds from Home Depot. We ended up liking them so much, we bought the same blinds to replace the busted up blackout curtain in the master bedroom.

  • Did a rock-climbing course. Last year, my wife bought us passes to ProjectROCK to help me conquer my fear of heights. After a lengthy introduction to belaying, we belayed for several hours. It was physically demanding and I'm not sure I'm in the best shape to rock climb, but we had a ton of fun and ended the night with some Thai food.

  • Got a new job. Probably the biggest change of 2025 came with my new employment. In March 2025, I joined Skylight to work on a project for the CDC, which I had the privilege of visiting in Atlanta. I'm very blessed to still have a career in government contracting, and to work among very intelligent and inspirational people at Skylight.

  • Got an old Sony Trinitron for my retro CRT station. Along with getting a SummerCart64, I now have a dedicated little nook for CRT gaming in the office using an old CRT my uncle was throwing out.

  • Attended a Renaissance Fair. This was a first for me after many years of wondering what they were like. We saw jousting, a catapult demonstration, sword fighting, jester performances, and fire juggling. Food-wise, nothing impressive, but definitely a fun atmosphere to attend with friends.

  • Started practicing guitar again. For years I found a comfort zone on guitar where I would play chords or patterns I've learned from songs, or just noodle until I heard something pretty. This year, after many months of failing to stick to a self-learning regimen, I hired a guitar instructor from Argentina to give me lessons on lead blues guitar and some basic theory. Within a few weeks, I felt like I already made tremendous progress, and I'm excited to continue into 2026.

  • Joined a run club and ran a 10K. In early 2025, my wife found a local run club that meets at a park within walking distance of our house. The short walk made it hard to cheat going, so we began attending regularly to run 5Ks on each meet. After a few runs, I started to get addicted, and now I am a happy participant. I also enjoy the community that has formed around the club. In November, some club members informed us of a 10K, and after training for a couple of weeks, my wife and I successfully ran our first 10K.

  • Scored some retro goodies from Japan. This is less something I did and more received -- but my father traveled to Japan this year, and brought several of my favorite games he found in bargain bins at thrift shops. This made me feel like a kid again.

  • Laid new pavers in the backyard. As part of our ongoing project to revitalize our backyard, we found a contractor through a family friend who helped remove a large slab of concrete where an old extension to the house used to stand. We replaced it using a combination of reused pavers and newly bought ones. While we were not completely happy with the job, it came at a significant discount, and overall, it's a major improvement.

  • Deep-dived into SQLite. In 2024, I used continuing education funds to purchase an online course on SQLite. In 2025, I went through the whole course while applying its lessons to a SvelteKit application (which gave me a solid opportunity to learn a bit of SvelteKit!).

  • Switched my personal PC to Linux. While I've used Linux-based operating systems on my work machines for years, I never made the switch on my personal PC due to my love of video games. In 2025, after much encouragement from some friends, I made the jump from Windows 10 LTSC to Fedora KDE and couldn't be happier. The transition has been overall smooth, and software development on my personal PC is finally a joy after years of fighting Windows.

#Things I programmed in 2025

2025 was not an eventful year in terms of starting new open-source projects, but there are a few developments I could mention.

  • I began using Codeberg as my primary Git forge in 2025. This is something I had dragged my feet on for a while considering Github's popularity and the network effects. I still use Github for work and all of my NPM packages still remain on Github. Going forward, however, I intend to upload solo projects exclusively to Codeberg. My reasoning for this is Github's constant feature creep and performance issues, not to mention Microsoft's ownership of the platform, and hostility toward open-source.

  • I created a bootable image of Alpine Linux for the RK3566 chip and RG-Arc handhelds. While I have yet to clean up the repository for Codeberg, I hope to polish this and upload it in 2026.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/arkive - I got arkive to an MVP level I was comfortable with, and even hosted it on my personal server for private use. However, I eventually discovered linkding which was already miles ahead of arkive in feature set, simple to host, and performant enough. I may return to developing arkive, but in the meantime, I've been happy with linkding.

  • https://github.com/kevinfiol/beancms - I built a micro-CMS using Redbean. This is a single-file web application with multiple user support for simple, lightweight, Markdown-based blogging. In 2025, I wrote a blog post about its features and expanded on the reasons for its existence. It was well-received by the Redbean community, and even got starred on Github by Justine Tunney, creator of Redbean -- which made me happy. :)

  • https://codeberg.org/kevinfiol/quilt - I wanted a quick way to create a fullscreen, tiled, slideshow similar to the iTunes Album Art screensavers of old. This was a quick and dirty attempt again using Redbean.

  • https://codeberg.org/kevinfiol/braindump - A work-in-progress I hope to resume development on again soon. The idea behind braindump was using Redbean to create yet another single-file web application. This time, I am hoping to create something of a minimal Obsidian-alternative for "digital garden" style notebooks.

  • https://codeberg.org/kevinfiol/utils/src/branch/main/sqlite - A work-in-progress wrapper for node:sqlite and @lukeed/hrana to unify the API for interacting with local SQLite files, and remote Turso (Hrana API) databases. The code that is here is quite outdated, partly because I've been working on...

  • A personal issue tracker - A couple years ago, I stumbled across this article by Will Blanton about using Github Issues to organize personal chores. The idea worked pretty well for myself using Gitea issues, but after a while of doing this, I felt the idea could be improved with a dedicated application, backed by SQLite. Currently, the repo is set to private since I'm also using this project as a learning opportunity for my cousin.

#Things I did NOT do in 2025

Here are some things I said I planned to do in 2025 that I did not get around to.

  • Install an irrigation system and place new sod in the backyard. Unfortunately, the landscaping work we had planned for our backyard had to be put off until we had finished installing the pavers for our new patio. Now that that work has been completed, I hope to have this done in 2026.

  • Deep-dive into Postgres. I put this off in favor of doing a deep-dive into SQLite. For the moment, I'm content exploring SQLite for much of 2026 as well since it fits my needs for the moment.

  • Get back into gamedev. This is the one that hurts the most. Game development has been the single most difficult study wishlist item for me to stick to. I intend to try to focus on a single tool (Godot) in 2026 to help me make progress on this, and may even spend some money on video courses with my tech budget allowance from work.

#Things I plan to do in 2026

  • Travel to Spain. My wife and I are planning to travel to Spain in May-June. My wife has wanted to see a Spanish-speaking country for several years, and I suggested Spain as a great place to start. The last time I had been to Spain was 2018, so it would be nice to revisit. I also have a few cousins who live in Barcelona, and it would be nice to catch up.

  • Get back into gamedev. As mentioned earlier, I hope 2026 is the year I finally get comfortable with game development as a hobby.

  • Install irrigation system and place new sod. As mentioned earlier, I hope 2026 is the year we can build the front/backyards of our dreams.