mjt91

Year in Review - 2025

[ life career ] · 9 min read

Reviewing my 2025 Goals

✅ Work: 2025 was a successful year professionally.

I still feel the work I do provides value to others and fulfills me. When writing this, I came to an important conclusion: Okay, it fulfills me, and so on, but is it fun? And indeed: it is also fun. The team is great (made some good friends along the way). The topics I work on are not stale, often not boring at all.

One thing, that stuck with me, was the professional coaching I did back in the summer of 2025. We conducted a timeline approach-like past/current/future situation review. It was very helpful to find a way forward (professionally and personally).

One thing, I wanted to do, but did not: Visiting a convention. Reason is simple: nothing good was available in Germany. I am interested in digitization, advanced analytics, machine learning, forecasting, et cetera, but I feel like those topics are slept on in Germany (maybe even Europe?). The music plays in the US mainly (see LLMs, the labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, …)

Since I am already talking about the big AI labs: I would say I am quite a semi-heavy user of AI and transformer based tools (read: agents). In my work I do a lot of developer work (programming, etc.). My workflow changed quite a bit. I used the pro licence of ChatGPT, but later switched to Claude Code from Anthropic which I still use. At work I use Github Co-Pilot (since Claude Code is not supported at my employer). In Github Co-Pilot I prefer the Codex Model (occasionally Opus 4.x). My development workflow moved over to be more and more cli only (not even entering the IDE anymore), which feels a bit weird sometimes, because I often find to be difficult to leave the agent alone (not having any control over what is being written). I still need to learn how this might change the way I work, for now I go with the flow (progress > control). Here is a list of influential articles:

Addendum: One shout out to a wonderful tool I cannot live without anymore: Excalidraw Whiteboard. I found myself to be drawing so much (system diagrams, process & data flows, …) in the last year, that I seriously consider buying a drawing pad from Wacom.

Personal, Health and Fitness Goals

🟠Health & Fitness: Health and fitness-wise the last year was an up and down. The year started of strong, with quite some lifting, swimming and hiking. I was caught by very heavy cold in March, which required us the cancle our vacation at north sea. My wife needed to drive me to the hospital, where I spend almost two weeks recovering. All this ruined my fitness progress and felt devastating.

It was not easy to fight back, but discipline and a strong will (and the support of my wife) helped me to get back on track. I let go of lifting for now (we both tried to get a routine going for 5x5 stronglifts, but the work schedules made this not possible, maybe soon?). So I focused on swimming and made quite some progress. I exported some data points and use Anthropic’s artifacts feature to host a simple dashboard displaying my achievement: I linked it here https://mjt91.url.lol/swim-progress

My current routine:

  • ~7k steps per day
  • sleep 6-7 hours
  • Cold water with 5g Creatine first thing in the morning :)
  • TI swim 2x per week
  • lift / workout training occasionally
  • Follow slow-carb under the week, with cheat days as required by (social) obligations

🟠/✅ Vacation: As I written above, the first vacation to north sea we needed to abort (hospital time). Not nice. But what came after was way better: We made a trip to Lisbon over my birthday, which was a wonderful experience. Lisbon is a great city. My wife planned a food tour and we were the only ones who booked, so in the end it was a private tour from a lovely young lady. I can only recommend to visit Lisbon at least once, I found nothing negative about the city at all! On my birthday we we took part in a baking class and baked the local specialty: Pastel de Nata (see our work below):

==TODO add image from the baking session==

Later in 2025 we (again) visited some close friends in southern Germany (Bad Reichenhall). We stayed in Hotel Graseck, which was our second time and I still can only wholeheartedly recommend the hotel to everyone who want to enjoy a luxury stay in the mountains (food is also excellent, they got their first Michelin Star in 2025, so expect prices to be rising).

❌♟️Chess: Again I wanted to improve my chess (and rating on chess.com), but failed to do so. I almost played no rapid games (10+0 or15+10). So my rating still stagnant little bit below 1300. What I did play was a lot of blitz games, but without the seriousness and will to improve (aborting / leaving matches / playing when waiting on something).

🟠📖 Reading: I did not deliver on my goal to finish more books. Most of my reading was during our vacations. It was okay, but no non-fiction books at all. One of the more influencing titles was “Was Sie schon immer übers Klima wissen wollten, aber bisher nicht zu fragen wagten: Der Klimawandel zwischen Lobbygruppen und Wissenschaft” by Axel Bojanowski – Wikipedia.

✅Wealth: I did increase my wealth by [redacted]. I am quite happy with my finances. My wife and I bought our second flat (same building as the first one) and found a new tenant (lovely old lady) quickly. We are still happy with her. Financially, our plans look very solid. Monthly savings rate is satisfactory and not restrictive. Most of it goes towards [Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF (USD) Distributing A1JX52](https://www.justetf.com/en/etf-profile.html?isin=IE00B3RBWM25#uebersicht).

✅Outside Interests: I stepped into local politics (started late 2024) and was voted into my cities council as part of an independent party. As such my main role does fiscal political manners. It is demanding, but also a very fun activity. It was a great step forward and I feel like I can grow and that: It demands me to think about problems in a wider range, while also thinking strategically on how to approach and communicate solutions.

Things I learned

I often said that curiosity and willing to learn is a staple in my life defining who I am. I always try to find new things to dig deep into.

Next to my political involvement and learning to bake pastels de nata I bought a new Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen™ AI 300 Series and installed a wonderful new OS Omarchy — Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH. I am quite sick of windows and especially windows11 (and all its bugs).

Projects

My Zettelkasten: I doubled down on writing my notes with obsidian. My vault grows and grows.

My personal blog and writing: I did not write to much on my blog, but want to get into it.

Mission Statement

I wrote about my mission statement first here. I think it is a good plan to revise this together with my review of my goals. So here is an updated version:

  • I cherish my wife, family and nearest friends
  • I try to find fun in everything I do
  • I am not religious, but if someone asked me who my God is, I would answer: chance
  • I follow the teachings of Stoicism
  • I think analytically
  • I am a life-long learner / I am curious
  • I form opinions based on facts
  • For me, things are not just black or white
  • The thought of people remembering me as incompetent is horrifying
  • Physical and mental fitness are very important to me
  • I generally look positively towards the future
  • I am not easily impressed
  • The list of those who truly inspire me is very short
  • I am an early riser
  • I am honest and direct
  • One of my mottos is “Hate the game - not the player”
  • I don’t believe in free lunch
  • I go through life with the attitude that if you truly want something, you must be honest with yourself, unafraid to pursue it, and have fun along the way
  • Hard work is important to me (“Put in the hard work!”)
  • I am very competitive
  • My thought process is driven by “framework thinking”

Top Memes from 2025

I am a big fan of memes. Here are my top 3: TODO

  • MR JAPAN ![[Pasted image 20260227104924.png]]
  • Grok Think For me Meme
  • Dust2 wake up meme