2025-12-22 08:00:00
I can say without any shadow of a doubt that 2025 has been the craziest year of my life. There were many changes for me, and those changes were huge. Like, ocean-sized huge.
For the past 6 years, I’ve been writing retrospectives about what I did, learned, felt, watched, played or listened to. It’s a great way to reflect on things and figure out ways to make the next year better.
If you’d like, you can read my posts for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
First, let’s have a look at how I thought this year was gonna be like a year ago, when I wrote last year’s post.
Well, first of all the plan for 2025 is to move. We’re moving out of Brazil to give living abroad another chance.
✅ Yep, that happened alright.
Another not-as-big-but-still-big goal is to actually go ahead with my website’s redesign.
✅ One more I got right! This year I finally worked on the big redesign, which I’ve been refining ever since.
I definitely want to continue with the monthly links and adding some non-blog content to the site (like the movie quick reviews).
✅ That’s 3 for 3! While I actually wrote less articles on the blog compared to last year, I now have so much more stuff in here, with dedicated sections for Quick Reviews, Cool Links and even Photography.
Who would’ve thought that the secret to getting new year predictions right is to predict easier stuff?
This September, my wife, my dog and I moved from my hometown in the south of Brazil to Italy. It had been something on our minds for a while (I even mentioned it being the plan on last year’s retrospective), but I don’t think any kind of planning we had back them would do justice to the amount of work and stress it is to move across the globe.
First, the moment you start planning such a big change, your life already changes significantly. When you go out and see a cool piece of decor, furniture or anything that takes up space, you start remembering that you’re not gonna make use of it, and everything you have is one extra thing you gotta get rid of soon.
Then, you start going around the area you live and see all sorts of nice things. But you have in mind that it might as well be the last time you check out that place, at least for a while.
Friends and family make plans for next year. They include you out of habit, and you wonder if it’s a good idea to remind them you won’t be there, or if it’s better to just nod. You wonder if you’ll be able to stay in contact with those people.
And as the move date draws closer, you gotta actually do stuff. You gotta figure out what to do with all the things, clothes, furniture, apartment you have. What should you bring with you? What do you wanna keep safe at your parents’? What can you sell? What can you donate?
You also gotta start figuring out what to do once you get to your destination. Luckily for me, my brother was already here, so I didn’t have to worry about finding a place before even getting into the plane.
It is a long, taxing process. At least it was for me. The week before the move was also very bittersweet; seeing everyone once more before the move is nice, having no idea when you’re seeing them again is not.
Getting to Italy, I was finally able to see my brother after 3 years. He’s moved to Italy back in 2022 and has been enjoying life here. We’ve always been extremely close, so these past 3 years apart have definitely been hard. We stayed at his place for a little over a month, while we looked for a place of our own to live.
And we found it! We moved to an apartment (which we actually found the online posting for while we were still in Brazil) in the city of Lecco. It’s a very scenic city situated right between the Alps and Lake Como, so you have an amazing view no matter where you are in it.
Lake Como held some meaning to my wife and I because we spent our honeymoon in Bellagio, also around the same lake. So the fact that we live in a place that amazed us so much a few years ago is dreamy, actually. I love walking around here.
There’s definitely been some hard moments, but they were hard, not bad. We are settled now, slowly rebuilding our home and experiencing firsthand what life halfway across the world is like. The idea was never for this to be a definitive move - it was always about having this experience. And if we like it better here, then yeah, it might be definitive. But it’s too early to tell.
Besides the move, we did some traveling this year as well.
We lived in Brazil all our lives, but we had never been to Rio! It was fantastic to live the “genuine” Brazilian experience. The incredible natural beauty, friendly people, great food, sunny weather and good music - it was all there!
We went with two friends for the legendary free Lady Gaga concert in Copacabana. We were somewhere amidst those 2 million+ people!
Our trip was unfortunately too short to see everything we wanted to. Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf) and Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) were definitely highlights though.
Kind of cheating, I guess, but now that we live in northern Italy, we have a lot of amazing places nearby to sightsee in.
The cover image of this post was taken in Varenna, just 30 minutes away from here by train. A beautiful medieval-like Italian village right by the lake.
Another highlight is the city of Breuil-Cervinia, which is a mountain town right next to the Matterhorn mountain. The famous pictures of the Matterhorn are taken from the Swiss side of it, but the whole area on the Italian side is also breathtaking!
This was another good year for the blog! In total I only had 9 non-cool-link posts but added a bunch of new stuff to it.
First of all, it finally got a new coat of paint in June, with v5 being launched! I’m really proud of the result and I’ve been tweaking it ever since, adding new sections and moving the menu to the left (on desktop) to accommodate those.
The fact that there’s posts in 4 different sections also means you gotta open 4 different pages to see if there’s anything new (unless you use a RSS reader). Which is why my plan next year is to add a unified timeline feed around here.
I still happily work at Useful Group, where I launched a couple of big projects this year and worked on a bunch more. I’m still incredibly grateful to be able to work with such amazing people, both professionally and individually.
No side projects this year except for one I’m working on right now: an iOS version of Phanpy, the best Mastodon client, which is originally a web app. I’m not doing any real development here, mainly just wrapping the existing web app into something that works better on iOS, but it’s still taxing to go through the App Store process. The app is currently in review and should be available sometime soon. I’ll definitely write about it here.
[!info] This year, I’ve started writing Quick Reviews for a lot of the things below, so definitely check those out for more context.
Lots of things were good for distracting from the overwhelming responsibilities this year. These were the best of them:
This year, we went to two Lady Gaga concerts! The first was in May, at her legendary concert in Copacabana. It was right on the beach and free for everyone. There were over 2 million people there! The concert was amazing and the energy of the audience was incredible, but we mostly watched it through the big screens since we were far from the stage.
So, back in October, we went to another concert, in Milan! It was largely the same concert but with a larger setlist, but we were able to stay right in front of the stage and saw everything up close! Both experiences were amazing.
I want 2026 to be a very chill year; I definitely need a break after so much happening in 2025. But I don’t think that will happen. Firstly because we’re still getting settled here and there’s still so much stuff to get sorted. Bureaucracy is never fun or relaxing. Secondly, because we are right in the middle of a lot of cool places. We definitely want to take advantage of that and sightsee a lot. And we most definitely will.
For this blog, I envision 2026 being a year I write a lot more, probably more personal stuff than usual. Which is something I’ve been wanting to do for years and only partially succeeded.
I’ll definitely launch the iOS version of Phanpy too. Though that’s probably happening in January already, which means it’s an easy guess to make!
And since I already have the Developer License for the year… maybe I could come up with some other interesting app idea to launch? We’ll see.
One thing I’m grateful for every year are the people out there who write about cool stuff and share their knowledge for free, for everyone, here on the internet. I learned so much on both professional and individual levels from them, and it’s always been a goal of mine to do the same for others with this blog.
So, thank you for reading this and giving me this opportunity. This kind of human connection is what made the web great years ago and it’s what still makes it great now.
See you next year!
2025-12-13 23:42:56
Sunset in Varenna
Photo taken on Sat, 06 Dec 2025
Really proud of the lighting in this one.
2025-12-11 19:31:00
Size of Life, by Neal Agarwal
Another great page by Neal Agarwal; this one lets you see life in all its different sizes.
2025-12-09 23:12:09
This website is so cool! It’s the kind of thing that you’d imagine was a personal website, but it’s actually a marketing page! A marketing team actually sat down and planned this out! I thought no such thing as fun marketing existed. Glad to be proven wrong.
2025-12-09 20:48:01
CSS Wrapped 2025, by The Chrome DevRel Team
CSS is my favorite language and 2025 was amazing for it! The Chrome team built this page highlighting all the new exciting stuff that happened to CSS this year. I’ve used some of it but sadly still have to wait for other browsers to catch up before doing it on any serious work 😭
I recommend opening this in a Chromium-based browser so you can try it out firsthand, but there are video recordings of the features in case you’re unable to.
2025-12-09 08:01:15
Neat little daily browser puzzle game where you use clues to find out who’s a criminal and who’s innocent.
