52 things I enjoyed in 2025

February 1, 2026

Hello! It took me a while to get here, what with the new job and all, but I’ve managed to whittle down 52 things I enjoyed in 2025. This year I had a very systematic way of capturing them as I went along, so I had a lot more source material, which I’m not sure was a good thing. Again it was nice to revisit little threads and holes I’d been down during the year, but it was a much more fragmented one than last year which felt it was a lot more about the classic web and blogging. I purposefully excluded AI posts from this list as I had so many and a lot were fleeting. I might do a separate list of those for posterity.

So here it is 52 things I enjoyed in 2025. I hope you find one or two that you enjoy too.

52 things I enjoyed in 2025

These 11 Laws of Showrunning made me think a lot about being a leader, having a vision, and trying to create that vision through the neccesarily imperfect medium of work.
30 minutes with a stranger is not only a set of brilliant insights into what happens when strangers talk to each other but also a lovely webpage, thoughtful, different and well fitting to the content.
The core idea of preaching to The Choir, by Rebecca Solnit stayed with me a lot over the year—how activating the people who agree with us is often more powerful than trying to persuade those who don’t.
Nice insights in these nine charts that explain what’s going on with London transport. I’ve used “Wednesday is the new Big Night Out” as a tagline a lot.
Paul Krugman’s been writing about inequality and it’s really good.
I love love loved Colm Tóibín talking about the new Pope, the old Pope, and Jannick Sinner’s perfect game of tennis.
I again listened to (nearly?) every episode of Oxide and Friends this year, my favourite episode was probably this one about a multi year migration but there were loads of good ones.
This interview with Na Kim—book designer turned painter—is so good, I love her bluntness, “Right, but why start writing to be a bad writer? That’s so stupid.” Couldn’t agree more.
This In Our Time episode on slime moulds got me briefly wistful about not studying biology.
A super thoughtful analysis of why North England is poor, hard to validate but a lot of the reasoning resonated with me.
Turns out 1952-1967 was The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils as competing companies tried to create the perfect pencil (and you can still pick one up today).
Giles Turnbull wrote some great posts tihs year and I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate this one about evolving strategy through enquiry into my everyday work. (He’s also shared everything he’s written about ‘working in the open’.)
We’ve all come across this one right—programmers have a strange tendency to imagine living a rural lifesystle as an idyllic alternative to their current situation.
I came across this old Deb Chacra on post on the idea of abudant, decentralised energy and found it chimed with my views a lot—we should pursue the goal of green energy for the abudance it brings. It seems that we on that road though as South Korea begins building world’s largest 108 MW hydrogen power plant and Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity.
I really wish I didn’t read this sort of thing and just nod along so wholeheartedly but from the conversations I have with the women I work with, it’s worth everyone knowing these survival tips for women in tech. And worth men thinking about why they exist and what we’d have to do for them not to.
A clear and pratical guide to typography. And a cool font inspired by Indian truck lettering to go with it: Honk.
Sarah Perry has taken a great deal of time, thought and theory to expound the virtue of deep laziness and capture something that I am often trying to explain to people about how my mind works; I feel like there are harmonies that when you find them have enormous leverage over what you are trying to achieve. Rather than forcing them, you need to sort of seek out the right vibrations, to understand the flow and then adjust yourself to be carried forward by it. Anyway she explains better than I do (or maybe Bruno Gianelli put it best with his sailboats).
An interesting variant on open source licensing—including the requirement to “show how you used it”.
These lovely 4 panel comics remind me of the gentler ones in “A Softer World”.
Two unconventional ways to arrive at mathemtical proofs: one from a comment on a 4chan Post and the other by 17 year old Hannah Cairo, who found home schooling suffocating and sodropped in on some graduate classes at Berkeley. I love the illustrations on Hannah’s transparencies — I wish I’d had the wherewithall to illustrate my problem sheets at uni.
There were many great Ask Pollys this year and Do You Prioritize Status Over Joy? really resonated. Something subtle changed in me a few years ago when I realised I could prioritise seeking joy in all parts of life.
Hamonshu: A Japanese Book of Wave and Ripple Designs.
I was reading and enjoyin this poem I Wasn’t Always This Ugly by Roque Dalton and then saw it was translated by Natasha Wimmer who has translated a bunch of my favourite books—so do I love the poet or the translator?
I love a good bowl of Pho, so it was cool to learn its origin story.
Lovely detailed illustrations of racoons were a feature of PC Connection magazine for many years. The beautiful cute pictures naturally make you wonder whether our current dominant visual language is overly serious and bland—what would the racoons of today look like? Would they be taken seriously at all? Would that matter?
It’s so cool to find old things from the internet that you’ve missed, like this hypertext sci fi novel written in the 1990s about all the passengers on a tube train.
And another one I missed at the time a dude who cooked all the recipes from the Big Fat Duck Cookbook. This is the kind of thing I could have seen myself doing (pre-kids!), though I doubt I’d have the stamina for it.
I love a story of an organisation that runs itself in a different way to the prevailing business models of our day, like iconic French glassmaker Duralex being taken over by a workers’ cooperative. It also made me vividly remember the brown Duralex mugs my grandparents had that we’d drink our afternoon tea out of.
This has been doing the rounds, and rightly so. A great exploration of what we lose when we make a system accountable for decision making rather than people.
Earlier in the year there was a major blackout of the power grid in Spain and Portugal and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what happened. This also led me to trying ti understand the challenges of starting a grid back up from total collapse.
Joan Westenberg has been an interesting new (to me) voice this year writing on work, I enjoyed a lot of her pieces but particularly this one on how smart people stay stuck by mistaking optimising for the system they are in with actual impact.
This is a great list: What Makes for a Healthy Society?.
Spend an hour with Wes Anderson hearing about the evolution of his thinking about his films, and the choices he made along the way to develop his particular narrative style. I’d love to hear an hour on Rushmore alone to be honest.
I’ve really enjoyed these visual maps to help you learn the core concepts of an area of software development like frontend development.
Take yourself back to the early 2000s and get lost in this deep repository of information on riding a bike safely on the road.
There’s a weird bird call in a Charlie’s Angels movie and you can bet someone tried to track it down.
A detailed analysis of the economics of running a successful YouTube channel and why it doesn’t often add up.
There is an official list of cocktails, from the International Bartenders Association, so of course someone drank them all. This also doubles as a study in cocktail bars and what you are looking for when you go out for a drink in one.
You didn’t know that you needed this root cause analysis of why Kevin got left home alone but you surely do.
Trees make rain, and chains of trees make chains of rain.
Amongst his other talents, George Orwell also nailed how to make a nice cup of tea.
Science fiction is a fertile source of weird and wonderful interfaces that have something to teach us about the interface choices we’ve made and the roads that we haven’t taken.
the web needs more weirdness. and more excitement. and more personality.
This is hard to explain but I promise you, worth your time. 7,000 words on pansharpening (“…an image fusion task in satellite image processing, used on most of the satellite imagery on commercial maps…”) that takes in the ontology of picture, trade offs in software design, what people buy and what they do not, images as a guide to history, the point of data, and more. All in a markdown file, somewhere down the file tree of a pansharpening model. If you have a few minutes, the readme isn’t too shabby either.
Two stories of how poverty can have an invasive and all consuming effect: how childhood financial insecurity can imprison your financial thinking for life and the story of someone surviving on the poverty borderline, and trying to hide it.
Panic Studios created a small handheld gaming device (with a crank!) called the Playdate and did a really lovely series of podcasts about what it is like to go from being a software company to trying to develop hardware. But the best episode is about how some irregularities led to their financial controller becoming an investigator and chasing down some opportunistic thieves.
‘No One Else Has a Bike Like Mine’.
The story of the first linux user in India—floppy disks, 1kb/s download speeds and people who won’t take you seriously because they have a site license for some enterprise software.
We’ve all heard how LLMs love em dashes, and had our own feels on the topic, now the em dash responds to the AI allegations.
I have a long affection for the 76ers from the Allan Iverson years (see last year’s list!) and have been fascinated by Joel Embiid’s continual quest to carry the team to the finals essentially by himself. It turns out he is carrying a lot more and has put up significant walls to protect himself.
Craig Mod had a good year with a book out and putting together a slow online community but I enjoyed his classic regular muses on travel and society the best, like this one about the point of small businesses and what happens when overtourism hits.
You made it to the end! Well done! Reward yourself with the superb Tiny Desk concert from C. Tangana from the pandemic, a dream of how to live a lovely musical life.