Martin Hähnel

2025 - Year In Review

Published:
Tags:

Health And Fitness

I joined a gym this year and managed to go for 14 weeks in a row - 39 workouts in total - before losing interest, or rather, before burnout hit me. This was mostly in the beginning of the year. I have severely mixed feelings about the whole gym thing. Aspects I liked: getting out of the house and having some me-time. But otherwise I am really not sure. Going to the gym in the morning was hard because my days are bookended by walking the dog and my need for some do-nothing free time. So making it to bed on time so I could get up on time felt akin to a perfectly executed heist in a movie: It rarely worked without tremendous effort. Going in the evening meant not having time to do chores like cooking, and it also meant spending less time with my partner. Not good either.

A screenshot from the fitness app Hevy showing that I did 39 workouts this year. Most of it was done in January and February with three workouts per week. Starting in March, only did two. The following months, April to June, I only did a workout once in a while. And after that there were no workouts.

I think what I've learned is that I don't like the gym rat's ethos. Fitness gurus (i.e., on YouTube) all look and behave weird to me - even the nice ones. And I can't help but think about this one thing I've heard somewhere - I don't remember where - that taking lifting seriously means being in pain basically all the time, because otherwise your muscles don't grow. In short, going to the gym was mostly an exercise in doing a thing for 14 weeks and a bit that I actually didn't want to do.

I still have the gym membership as we speak - it is up for renewal in January, and the reason I haven't canceled it yet is because I might want to go for a run. This, the running, was my second attempt to get some more exercise into my life and also, coincidentally, my second attempt to finish the Watch to 5K workout program. I failed again just like last year. Nonetheless, I actually do enjoy running and plan to get back on that horse, which is why I think I'm going to keep the gym membership for another year: I live in the somewhat northern city of Oulu (Finland), and even though other people seem to be just fine running around here in snow/wind/ice and freezing temperatures - and I wouldn't call myself a softie in that regard either: I moved to Finland of my own accord - it's just a fact that I barely have the right running equipment for this weather. So my calculation is that I could spend the money on winter running gear - at least: pants, jacket, shoes - or pay the ~350 euros per year and have a warm place to run pretty close to where I live. I am definitely deceiving myself a little here, but I barely get out for a run as it is at the moment, and it seems that I'd rather run in the gym on a treadmill than outside at this particular juncture. There is a chance (albeit very little) that I would like to do something with weights again, and so I am keeping my options open here. This might be my last hurrah when it comes to gyms, though.

I turned 39 this year, so I am very aware that taking care of my health should be a priority. But health is not only physical health, and grinding like a crazy person to make time for 30-60 minutes of running/lifting is a big reason why I didn't do it as much in the later half of the year. If you have to control your life so goddamn tightly to make room for exercise, then it will inevitably weigh on your mind. I have no good answer to this conundrum yet. Working out from home is not an option, as there is really no space (physical and me-time related) to do so in an authentically enjoyable way.

I also used Lose It to lose some weight. 7 kilos. That ain't nothing! But this also had non-negligible downsides. Like, I ate a lot of the same stuff simply because it made tracking easier. But eating like that really wasn't very fun at all. I probably have regained most of the weight in the last quarter of the year, but I don't really mind, at least right now. Tracking calories is not exactly "hard", especially if you only track calories (and not also "macros", i.e., protein, carbs, and fats) and figure out what app others in your country use (as to benefit from other people's product additions; in Finland that seems to be MyFitnessPal or Lose It). But it not being hard doesn't mean that it doesn't introduce friction, and it is definitely just one more thing to remember, to think about, and to make decisions about. It's not free at all. This non-free-ness is true for everything: health-related or otherwise.

Even the simplest things take effort and time, and adding even only one more thing like this can mean my house of cards I call "life" may topple. At least it can lead to burnout, because all these little things add up. I think this is the main reason why 2025 has been so exhausting to me: death by a 1000 "(presumably good for me) added habit" cuts (additions).

Finances

I am still using Actual Budget to keep track of my finances and have been pretty good about keeping track of my expenses. Tracking finances seems to be more and more important to me and helps me keep sane: the type of "envelope budgeting" I'm doing is a good way to categorize expenses without it getting overwhelming. That being said, my priorities are bound to shift next year and in the years beyond, so I'll probably have to try and free up some money somewhere.

I am hesitant to go into too much detail here - although I also do think it's important to talk about money. What I can say is that I am very grateful that I have a job and that I am able to save money but also to give money to causes I care about. I have pared down my subscriptions and rely, if I can, on apps that either offer a more traditional model where you pay for a version of an app (recently Godspeed[1]), buying a lifetime plan (Lose It) of a service, or just living with the ad-infested version (Overcast). This sometimes means more investment up front, and I am not sure if I am once again deceiving myself or not, but it certainly feels better to not be beholden to too many monthly expenses.

Let's see if I can give a rundown of my subscriptions (these are rounded/estimates per month, some of these are paid yearly, some subs that are paid for by my partner are not included, etc.):

In the grand scheme of things - meaning my salary and where most of my money is spent - this isn't that bad, but it ain't great. There isn't much stuff that offers obvious savings either (except maybe for the gym membership, but as I wrote above, I intend to keep this for another year).

Hosting is another thing that could probably be optimized a lot more, and I could save 5-10 euros (possibly more like 25 if I built my stuff on the laptop). But I intend to move more and more things to this server, and since I run Coolify on it and the builds for that run on the server as well, the burst load is kind of heavy. It is kind of insane though that to achieve a similar experience as I had on Cloudflare, I am now paying 30 euros/month when I paid 0 euros before.[2]

The Blog And Other Projects

Since I tried to be much more active this year, the "year of the quarter" (see my recap here) I also tried to get more involved in a community.[3] This happened to be the OMG.lol community and in particular its "chat network" (a bridged IRC/Discord hybrid). It was very fun, and I had a pretty good time for most of my stay.

I started a little community-focused side project called didyoudoit.lol (an accountability forum) with the help of a community member.[4] I even let the awesome Andy Carolan design a logo for the forum!

In a series of unfortunate shortcomings of internet communication, I ended my involvement with the community over what I would now call a misunderstanding on the one hand and my increasing overwhelm with the whole "being part of a community" thing (amongst other things that are not this thing) on the other: so I withdrew myself from the community (which regrettably itself sparked hurt feelings). To some I've probably taken the wrong lesson from this, but regardless, I am better off admiring (or loving) from a distance, I'm sure of it.

That being said, it's probably no coincidence that I have carved out some money to give to charity regularly (having lots of people around you with great values makes you want to try harder), and I am happy when I think about the many meaningful interactions I had over those few months.

In other news, I moved my blog off of Cloudflare. This was quite the undertaking (which is still ongoing in some ways), but I am happy to not be using them anymore. Another thing that can probably ultimately be traced back to being involved with the OMG.lol community, btw.

I had some failed starts with a project I'd really like to get going, but it seems that I don't have the time or energy to really get far into the weeds with other projects without neglecting other parts of my life. Because, of course, the one thing I'd like to do is too involved to do it in one weekend...

But yeah, I plan to continue working on the blog in a Write Like Ron Jeffries style. And even though I didn't write as much as I maybe would've liked, the fact that most of my substantial reflection writing is done on the blog (as opposed to my private notes) makes the blog a very important part of my life, as it combines reflective writing with (not for the job) coding.

Work (and LLMs/AI)

I didn't write much about work on the blog this year. Or if I did, then indirectly. What really helped this year was reading how the lead dev at Puzzmo uses Claude Code. Here's the important point:

To me it seemed that Orta Therox knows a lot and cares a lot - maybe less of doing every aspect of software development by hand - but definitely about the craft in general. And say what you will, but having these perspectives is valuable. I appreciated that he shared chat transcripts and also full-blown PRs. This is the kind of vulnerable writing that I would like to see more of. I have seen a lot of skeptics just dismissing the whole topic and a lot of boosters that don't care about the craft. But reading this actually made me feel like you can be interested in the craft and still find LLMs and how they are going to influence the thing you care about interesting without sounding like you're crazy.

I had experimented with different coding agents and "AI" tools throughout the year, mostly finding again and again that they are working well when used in dialogue form, controlling their output relatively strictly. But doing so through the Chat - as agent modes were a little too quick to implement some shit, which really got much better throughout the year, IMHO - disconnected from the code made the process slower than it needed to be. Using ChatGPT Codex, Copilot in VSCode (the PHPStorm version is still lacking in some respects), and Google Gemini-cli in the four or five months or so really helped to unlock the potential of these tools for me, and this in turn helped me work with the legacy code bases I work with at my job.

Using Codex et al. helped me to rebalance my work situation significantly. I now regularly stay within the estimate/budget, am able to add tests/refactoring as part of a ticket, and stress levels have mostly decreased to a manageable level.[5]

I have lots of empathy for people not wanting to use these tools, and I am exposing myself to their arguments (I guess in an attempt to steelman) every day, but in my opinion, the job is to figure out a way to make these better going forward by engaging with them, as these tools - although we're most certainly in a bubble - will not go away tomorrow. Another (longer) quote from my Puzzmo commentary:

As far as I'm concerned, "AI" - flawed, yes, of course, I'll stop saying it now - are sticking around and are going to make a huge difference going forward. A "huge difference" here is meant as a matter of fact. I don't ascribe positive or negative values directly to huge differences and neither should you. Neither am I liking or disliking the fact that they are here to stay. I do not have crystal ball either to tell what "sticking around" means. Does it mean forever? Does it mean 20 years? 5 years? I'm pretty sure they are still here in a couple of years though. Their importance might rise and then sharply drop (e.g. because nobody can pay for this stuff) or it might plateau or it might continue to eat the world. I don't know that. And none of these options are in themselves a value judgement. But. We will have to content with them and their influence somewhere in between maybe 5 years and forever.

In an unpublished article about LLMs[6] I wrote:

[H]ere's my main point: If LLMs are going to stick around then people capable of critical thought and engaging in empathy and seeing the bigger picture ought to engage with LLMs in all dimensions of the concept/tech.

It is similar to the car industry, to the fossil fuel industry and many others. Leaving these jobs to unthinking, uncaring people is indeed worse than to engage with those industries. I don't know how far this argument holds exactly, but my assumption is that apart from actual societal tabus most things would benefit from people that have strong progressive values who care. Don't you think?

Will this radically change anything? No. Will performatively writing purity based arguments against LLMs do anything, though? No. But there is an important difference. Being open to the idea that LLMs could be changed ever so slightly to something better could do at least something.

I'm quoting that here to make two points:

  1. AI/LLMs are not going to vanish tomorrow. A bubble will need time to deflate, and it's unclear if there is nothing else in it but hot air (it seems to me there is some value here)
  2. Since they are going to be here for a while, active engagement is our moral responsibility.

I want more people actively (but critically) engaging with these tools and unfolding the simplistic for/against LLMs we so often encounter online.

More generally, though, work was work and consisted of ups and downs. I have to keep an eye on my hours a little better in 2026, as I somehow managed to always work a little extra (like 10 to 30 minutes) basically every day. Add to that days with 9 or 10 hours instead of 8, and you end up with way too many overtime hours. This for sure is also a contributing factor to the burnout I felt this year: this year it wasn't so much the work itself that burned me out, but how little time I have to do things. Delays, interruptions, double-booked time, etc., all added up to a yearlong tightrope dance where finding a moment to catch one's breath was hard to find.[7]

Media

I still watch lots of YouTube - it's my way of winding down and also my background noise for working or just doing things (I'm having a video on as I'm writing this). I have not really changed what I've watched in this regard. Last year I wrote:

I did spend many hours watching Youtube this year. Mostly Baarlorlord (Slay The Spire Twitch Streamer) and Cracking The Cryptic (Sudoku-Channel). Everything else was watched way less. Jorbs (Twitch Streamer), Adam Ragusea (Food), Technology Connections (How does a freeze dryer work? How about a coffee maker?), MKBHD (tech), A Better Computer (apple tech) and some others. Most recently I have discovered Ali Abdaal (Productivity).

And this is mostly still true. I watched even less/none of Cracking The Cryptic, Jorbs, and Adam Ragusea, more Technology Connections; and added Gone Fishing to my rotation.

I watched again very little amounts of movies and series. We watched 911/911 Lonestar, a German crime series called "Der Alte" and some other stuff, but most of it didn't stick in my head, and almost none of it ended up in my notes, so I don't even know what I watched this year, tbh. Most was kinda forgettable. I continue to be not interested in linear media where you're not supposed to do something on the side. I really liked A House Of Dynamite though.

If YouTube is what I spent my time on when being tired, video games are what I spent my time on when having brain cycles left. Highlights of the year include The Roottress Are Dead, The Rise Of The Golden Idol and Cyberpunk 2077.

I was also listening to podcasts, although not as much as in recent years: Greatest Generation/Greateast Trek, TCGTE and Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding were my main listens.

When it comes to books, two books that really resonated with me were Meditations For Mortals and The Let Them Theory. I read a bunch of other stuff this year, but most was forgettable. I also stopped reading kind of a lot of books because I didn't like them.

In total there was a lot of stuff I consumed (at least partially) that didn't resonate with me this year. I guess that happens.

Real World Things

Notes & Setup

I have gone through both a heating and a cooling period as regards both my notes and my task-management system:

I have landed on the following at this moment in time:

I don't even use Godspeed all the time or organize it particularly well. If the daily list is in order, I don't care about the other stuff.

  1. You'll have to mail them about it for some reason. ↩︎

  2. Not exactly the same, as this server is meant to handle many more things going forward, but still... ↩︎

  3. I had left micro.blog because I wasn't satisfied with their stance on things that mattered to me - like trans rights - and was looking for a "tribe" that shared my values. OMG.lol somehow just fit nicely. ↩︎

  4. I never wrote a real announcement post about it, but A Personal Note On My Interest In LLMs includes some more detail if you're curious. The forum's dead, btw., so no need to try to sign up for it anymore. ↩︎

  5. I gotta admit that this also is telling about the current situation in smaller companies, where you all but have to use these tools, as this situation for me as an individual is of course just a reflection of the companies situation and in turn of an industry's situation. In theory people ought to be working in a team composed of developers in different career stages. Budgets ought to be cut in a way that there is time to learn, to test and to refactor. To theory build (PDF). The mental health of the workers should be taken into account. Alas, we're not living in this world at this point in time (doesn't mean we shouldn't want it or fight for it or whatever). In any case, I adopted the tools that make work, such as it is, a passable and sometimes even an enjoyable activity. Using AI in the context of coding - at least as a senior - doesn't necesarily need to lead to the vibe-coded mess people complain about online so much. ↩︎

  6. I lost the nerve to finish it, because I felt vulnerable around it. At least I'll quote my main point from it here... ↩︎

  7. This shows up in a fun way in the stats my Oura ring reports: I have been less stressed and slept better when I was having regular old workdays vs. when on vacation. And I was also less stressed while at work vs. when work got interrupted and things got spontaneously wild. I slept worse on weekends compared to the workweek. I think all of this is only half true in the sense that not every kind of stress is negative, but it does fit with my subjective experience in that "boring and regular" (predictable) tends to be better for my overall feeling of being rested/relaxed. ↩︎