2025 Year in Review

I'd like to start doing a yearly review post. As something to update people who are interested, and something to look back on to see how much life changes over time.

Here is what happened in 2025!

Japan in February

It's hard to summarise this year without looking back on our month-long holiday in Japan. Helen and I spent all of February overseas, and enjoyed our second trip to Japan two years after our first!

We skied for a week in Nozawa Onsen, and enjoyed heavy snowfall every day, which made skiing incredible. We even tried our hand at some cross-country skiing for a day. I wrote another post about our time in Nozawa Onsen, so if you want to read more, check that out.

Since we hit the classic tourist destinations (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka) on our last trip, this time we visited some less-trafficked cities. We bathed in Yokohama, thrifted in Takayama and visited the park in Kanazawa.

We finished with a few days in Seoul, South Korea!

I also wrote more about both Japan and Korea in separate posts if you want more detail.

As an aside, it was easy to do some accounting after our trip and figure out how much we spent because it was simply "how much we converted to yen" + "flights". The total cost of a month in Japan for 2 people, without skimping on nice ski accommodation, or really depriving ourselves of anything really, was $12,000 AUD. I only add this because I'm quite proud of how thrifty we were, and it might be fun to look back on these prices after 20 years of inflation. We got ~96 yen to the dollar.

Getting Married

In a way, our trip to Japan was a pre-honeymoon. Helen and I got married on the 25th of June 2025!

It was a clear, cold, and windy Brisbane day. We had the ceremony atop the Powerhouse overlooking the river, and the reception down the road in at a restaurant called Industry Beans! Helen's sisters made custom flower vases, and filled the white room with lots of colourful bouquets. Anna made an awesome cake. It was an absolute blast! Helen and I were both so thankful for our wonderful families who helped out so much on the day!

After the wedding, we had a small 3 day honeymoon at a small AirBnB west of Toowoomba on a farm, where we ate an incredible amount of cheese and soaked in a hot tub under the stars.

Leveling up Dinner

Helen's Mum gave us an air fryer as a wedding present which has unlocked some new meals we've been eating a lot. Air fried chips with custom ChatGPT seasoning ground with the mortar and pestle. Reheating homemade sausage rolls. Frozen pies. 🤤

I'm honestly surprised I didn't put on more weight this year.

Living Location Struggles

Although most of this year went fantastically, there was one main lowlight. After renting our cute apartment at 47 Cordelia Street, South Brisbane for 4 years, the unit was sold for a whopping $970k and the new owner decided to move in. This created a fair bit of anxiety about what we should do come our March deadline to vacate. We considered saddling ourselves with a massive loan and buying a house, and inspected a few. We considered buying an apartment and inspected a few of them too.

Since I'm sneakily writing this from 2026, I can tell you that we managed to find another apartment to rent in the same building for a reasonable price, and we're very happy with it. So perhaps to our parents chagrin, we'll delay purchasing a house for a little longer.

Knee Pain & Running Decline

Another unfortunate 2025 event occurred when we got back from our Japan trip: I immediately went on a speedy run and hurt my knee! I won't drone on about it, but after running almost 1200km in 2024, I didn't even run 400km in 2025! Very sad, but it feels mostly better now, so maybe we'll see a resurgence in 2026, who knows!

Dark Forest Research

It would be remiss not to talk about employment at all in my "year in review" when it's the singular activity I spend most of my waking hours doing.

I stumbled into the mining industry as a software developer during COVID in 2020. Since then, I've learnt a lot about mining, going through an acquisition from a small to a large mining consultancy, and then ending up at BHP, the largest mining company in the world. I could fill a seperate blog post with comments about those five years, but they weren't in 2025, so this isn't the place! At the end of 2024, I decided I wanted to try something different, and left my job without anything lined up just in time for Factorio 2 to release. (A coincidence I swear).

Around this time I was introduced to (my now good friend) James, an ex-Sydney ETF trader, who wanted some help writing code for his company Dark Forest Research to trade crypto and manage risk around a very interesting Concentrated Liquidity Pool trade.

2025 was a fantastic year for learning. Without bloated corporate bureaucracy stopping me from writing code, I spent most of the year pumping out good code at maximum speed. I learnt loads about Ethereum Virtual Machine based blockchains, submitting on-chain transactions quickly, and market making. I learnt how to deploy with Ansible, and use a Grafana stack for logging, metrics, and dashboarding.

In software engineering, I thoroughly enjoy creating complex state machines, especially when they're more complex than you'd originally think. Take this previous post about a small match-3 game I made as an example. My biggest accomplishment of the year at work was probably the most complex state machine I've ever built. It was a fairly simple market making bot that would emit platform independent buy/sell events which could be configured to trade on a few different exchanges. It might sound simple, but the number of unique edge cases you can encounter when talking to an exchange is truly mindblowing, and I built a system that traded millions of dollars of various tokens and never managed to lose it!

James landed some contracts and brought some money in, but in December, facing an immenent eviction in a housing landscape where renting an apartment similar to our current one would cost just shy of $50k a year, I turned back to corporate employment, accepting a new job at Amazon in Feb 2026.

Sadly in Brisbane in 2025, it feels like taking a lower-paying role at the ground floor of a startup and maintaining any realistic path to home ownership are mutually exclusive choices. It feels like an example of how housing pressure can stifle innovation.

Reading Resurgence

2025 was a fantastic year for reading! As a child, before the internet existed in its current form, I would devour books by the dozen. With the advent of Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, etc, that dropped off significantly. In a huge win for 2025 I read more than 10 books this year. I took a leaf out of my mate Calum's book (pun not intended), and figured that since I like sci-fi books, I should probably just pick something from a list of the best sci-fi books ever written.

I read a whole lot of interesting books this year that I even felt compelled to review. Helen and I even attended a midnight book release at a bookstore down the road! Something I hadn't done since Harry Potter came out!

Games

I played a bunch of Victoria 3 this year. Enough patches have dropped that it's fairly different from the original game launched in 2022. I love the systems the game has created to model economies, trade, geopolitics, unrest, standard of living, employment, migration, etc.

Also since I roleplayed Prussia in most of my playthroughs, with a goal of unifying Europe (and dismantling the Austrian Empire) I found myself reading a lot of Wikipedia articles about European history, and it makes me want to visit Berlin and Vienna so I can see the lands I fought over (virtually).

Sketchrank

And of course, I loved making Sketchrank 2025, even though I get beaten by Helen every year.

Final Thoughts

Let's hope 2026 is just as good or even better!