My annual recap of media and products I enjoyed over the year.

Music

Getting Killed and Heavy Metal – I’m on the Cameron Winter and Geese train along with everyone else.

The Thief next to Jesus – Spiritual stuff.

Manning Fireworks – MJ is a talent.

Dream River – I’m catching up on all the Bill Callahan.

Strange Love – My kind of supergroup.

Here is my 2025 playlist of songs I enjoyed throughout the year.

TV Shows

The Pitt – My show of the year. Bringing back the medical procedural.

Task – Tight and sharp.

Andor season two – Smart Star Wars.

Invincible – I watched all three seasons. It’s violent. It feels like a comic book show in a good way.

The Eternaut – Strong start. Faded a little.

Department Q – The plot shouln’t work and yet it does. Team Akram forever.

Adolescence – Incredible achievement. Brutal watch at times.

The Studio – Made me giggle.

Movies

Sinners – Loved it.

Black Bag – Slick.

Anora – Decent. Can’t believe it won the Oscar.

One Battle After Another – Made me laugh.

Predator: Killer of killers – I enjoy seeing good takes on the Predator universe.

Killers of the Flower Moon – Evil pricks everywhere. Too long. Still good.

The Wild Robot – Beautiful art. Pulls at the heartstrings.

Books

I still don’t read enough books.

Project Hail Mary – Like a science puzzle. Second half picked up steam. Good fun.

The Wager – A mad story of survival.

Count Zero – Getting my old school Gibson back on.

Products

Gozney Arc – Gas fired pizza oven.

Dictador 20 year old rum – Good booze.

Didgeridoona cooler bag – Good for transporting booze.

Huski Champagne Flutes and cooler – Good for drinking booze.

I finished my black and white photo a day in 2025 project yesterday.

I only had one close call when I forgot to take a photo but still managed to find one on my phone camera roll that I could use.

I enjoyed how the project forced me to practice shooting more often.

I think I’ll get the photos printed up into a book.

It’s a lovely time of year to be walking the streets. Clouds of purple everywhere.

I find the 24 hour news cycle exhausting and unsettling.

So, these days, I mostly opt out of it.

Instead, I check the news once a week, usually on a Sunday, and see what’s lasting that has risen to the top.

Kagi News and the Economist World in Brief are my main sources.

I start with local news and end with international news.

I find this approach provides a calmer experience.

Luke Plant:

The “pile of technical debt” is essentially a pile of knowledge – everything we now think is bad about the code represents what we’ve learned about how to do software better. The gap between what it is and what it should be is the gap between what we used to know and what we now know.

Mathias Verraes:

In DDD, we reason like this: The engineers need to build, maintain, and evolve secure and performant systems that serve the company. To do that, the engineers need an understanding of the domains and of the software systems. To achieve that, we leave the domains as the organisation sees them, and we draw our own Bounded Contexts to serve our need for understanding. The Bounded Contexts exist primarily for the engineers, and for the engineers’ communication with domain experts and other business functions.

Will Larson:

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.

My trip to visit the Blue Mountains was tops.

Mountain Culture brewery put on some great beers and wings.

The walks around the Three Sisters are well worth it.

We even went for a lap around the Mount Panorama track in Bathurst.

Also, the people of Katoomba wear sick hats.

Sometimes there are pretty things underfoot.

Pasha Malla:

I hope that between us we can keep the lines of communication open and continue to share strategies that seem to work. My feeling is that there’s no team that is completely unbeatable, even if their star transforms into a werewolf before every game.

A story of persistence.

Lea Verou:

Treat user effort as a currency. To create a product users love, design the tradeoff curve of use case complexity to user effort with the same care you design your pricing scheme.

…

Incremental user effort cost should be proportional to incremental value gained.

A list of patterns worth understanding from Jason Yip.

Catherine Wu (via Sachin Rekhi):

Step 1: Idea → Prototype Got a feature idea? Skip the spec. Build a working prototype using Claude Code instead.

Step 2: Internal Launch Ship that prototype to all Anthropic engineers immediately. No polish required—just functionality.

Step 3: Watch & Listen Track usage religiously. Collect feedback actively. Let real behavior, not opinions, guide decisions.

Step 4: Data-Driven Prioritization

• High usage + positive feedback → roadmap priority
• Low engagement or complaints → back to iteration

I’m increasingly of the opinion that focusing on prototypes first cuts through a lot of what ails many product development processes.

Kagi:

Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then use AI to distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.

I’ve wanted something like this for a while. I like how the daily update cadence debounces the signal.

I’m keen to see how it works in practice.

We spent last week in Sydney.

The weather was perfect and it was a lovely time.

The beach walk from Coogee to Bondi is well worth it.

Taronga Zoo and Luna Park were both hits with the kids.

When the sun is out, Sydney is absolutely top tier.