It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Describe your 2025 in tech or tools

… to which I am going to answer with a picture of my Github contribution graph:

If you know you know, but if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. Github is a code repository. It is like a cloud drive for computer code that keeps a hyper-detailed change record of writing software with the intended use cases being collaboration and tracking for software development. It is like a little library tool for writing and publishing and bookkeeping for code. Any time you are happy with your code, inasmuch as it runs and you want to snapshot something you built in case you break it or need to share it or just make a record of that work, you make a “contribution” to the repository. 

I made 687 contributions to my repositories last year. 

That little chart is a kind of heat-map of when I was writing code… or at least when I was saving something I wrote to a permanent record of development.

In among those green boxes are:

• a video game I’ve been developing
• my personal social media feed app
• two public wordpress plugins

And what you don’t see there are:

• a couple of private professional projects (…which probably account for another 300 or so contributions) 

All in all, I would guess I submitted to Github repositories (albeit my own) about a thousand times in 2025… which is to say I wrote a heckuva lot of code in 2025, kind of equally split between Rust and PHP.

That’s not trivial. 

I wish I could tell you that I wrote a thousand stories in 2025 or drew a thousand sketches in 2025. I cannot.

I can tell you that I sat down at a keyboard and wrote out tens of thousands of lines of intricate computer code, some for myself and some for professional work, that turned into functioning software. I can tell you that my 2025 was a year of making, and that I am coming out of this year in a state of having made interesting and useful things in computer code that a year ago were either ideas or maybe not even that much.

I just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and made over a hundred posts to my own micro-feed app, a lite-cms that I have been writing for three years and honing for the last few months.

I have a game that is still deep in development but it runs on my SteamDeck and I have logged a few dozens of hours play-testing it and it is not terrible.

I spent multiple weeks spread over five months writing code for professional clients under the flag of my new corporation and that code has now all been deployed and (I am assuming) helping those clients run websites and business operations.

That has been my 2025 in technology: highly coded, and contributed, and there is a neat little graph that marks it all in a record of progress right there as a series of little green squares.