I have never done one of these kinds of public posts, but saw a few from friends so I thought it might be useful!
\nThis year I was simultaneously more focused on my technical craft than ever,\nbut also had more of a "life" than ever.\nI took more random days off to go chill with friends, go skiing, etc.,\nand had more time with family.
\nIt is probably also one of the darkest years in world history as a whole.\nThe worst humanitarian abuses in a century continue,\nencouraged and perpetrated by what is supposed to be the "free world."\nBut enough ink has already been spilled on that and you don't need to hear it from me.\nAnd South Korean politics show that you DO have a voice.\nSo make it heard, and let's focus on the good stuff.
\nI also traveled more than any year since COVID.\nIn addition to my annual pilgrimage to Latitude59 in Tallinn,\nother highlights were going to Hong Kong for Rust Asia\nand London for Anjunadeep Open Air.
\nSurprisingly, this was my first time to visit the UK,\nand I have to say London is one of the few other cities I could actually see myself living in.\nDespite its flaws, London had a charming atmosphere,\namazing public spaces, loads of greenery,\ngreat food and drink (I don't really get the hate... I thoroughly enjoyed all of my meals),\nand well-functioning public transportation.\nOverall it was a very "livable" city to me,\nand joins Tallinn and Seoul as one of the few places I'd really enjoy living.
\n2025 was a great year for musical experiences.\nHere are a few of my highlights of the year (in no particular order)\nwhich get regularly stuck in my head:
\nBesides all the great albums and mixes,\nI enjoyed more live shows than I have in a very long time (probably since 2015 or so).\nThe club nights and live bands in Tallinn were as amazing as ever.\nI got extremely lucky with tickets to a sold-out Fred Again tour show just 15 mins from home.\nThat was probably the best live show I've ever seen; absolutely incredible production and musical talent!\nAnd Anjunadeep Open Air was great.
\n2025 also saw me get back into creating music for fun.\nI hadn't made much time for this in the past decade,\nbut the time felt right.\nI bought myself an Ableton Push,\nand will probably upload something on SoundCloud at some point.\nOr not.\nI'm making music for me, for fun.\nI wish I could do house parties where I'm just jamming,\nbut that probably won't happen in a Korean apartment anytime soon.
\nI initially used "conferences" as a section heading,\nbut it struck me that the reason I go to conferences,\nmeetups, coworking, and online forums is the same: community.
\nAs I do basically every year, I went to Latitude59 in May\nfor the community gatherings.\nIt was a great time, and I got an early look at how AI agents were being adopted.
\nThe other international conference I attended was Rust Asia in Hong Kong.\nWhat a cool and diverse group of people!\nIt was also great to be back in Hong Kong again for the first time in quite a few years.\nI really hope they do the conference again in 2026.
\nI also got to attend two local conferences late in the year: FOSS for All, and FOSS4G Korea.\nBoth conferences wouldn't have been on my radar if not for some friends being involved organizing them.
\nFOSS for All is also a new conference, and the first edition was a huge success.\nIt was far more international than I expected for a Korean conference,\nand a model for running a properly international, bilingual conference.\nI was somewhat surprised that I gave the only talk with a heavy focus on Rust.\nAnd I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the Korean FOSS community is active on Mastodon.\nI think I tripled the amount of Koreans I follow in an afternoon.
\nIt was also a surprisingly good value for my company as a sponsor.\nI had something like 20 serious conversations with people at our table,\nwhich was something I didn't really expect (the conference was maybe 200 attendees)!\nI'll definitely be back next year.
\nFOSS4G Korea was also surprisingly great!\nI think I was the only non-Asian there; a few dedicated people flew in from Japan, which was awesome!\nAI was definitely a theme, and it wasn't the sort of slop generating 10x "productivity" sort of narrative.\nThe talks were overall even more interesting than I had expected; better than the last international FOSS4G I attended!\nThis was also the first time I fully participated in a conference conducted in another language.\nI'm setting a goal to give a talk in Korean next time.
\nAnd speaking of international FOSS4G, it seems the next edition will also be close by\nin Hiroshima!\nI'm very excited to go, after several years of them being quite far away.\nGuess I need to start working on my talk proposals ;)
\nMeetup-wise, I took over hosting the Seoul Rust meetup this year, and we did a lot more events than any year since COVID.\nWe've had some great talks, and even started a YouTube channel,\nwhere we'll post recordings of talks in the future (provided that the speaker is OK with it).\nI also gave two talks at the Seoul iOS Meetup: one on Ferrostar, and another on Apple's new Foundation models.\nThe iOS meetup also spawned a new, more general meetup called Dev Korea,\nwhich is growing really fast and has a great community on Discord!
\nI read a lot last year!\nI finally finished reading Dragonball in Korean.\nI had never read / watch the series before (because I grew up in relatively rural America without cable TV),\nbut it came highly recommended.\nYou can read about that in my other post.
\nHere are some other things that I read + highly recommend:
\nI probably talk about this enough elsewhere, but it was a really fun year work-wise, and we grew a lot too!
\nFerrostar started as one of those audacious ideas which I just couldn't resist trying.\nIt's now a healthy open-source project with weekly meetings of the core contributors,\nover 300 stars on GitHub, and 56(!!) forks.\nI think it's pretty safe to say that it's now regarded as the first choice\nunless you want to pay Google millions of dollars, or have an extremely simple use case.\nIt's being adopted by large companies in the space,\nwe're benefiting from contributions back upstream,\nand we're getting new business as a result.
\nI'm pretty proud of this as I think it's an example of how open source can balance\ncommunity, collaboration, and sustainability.\nThat last 2 points is worth emphasizing.\nAll of the core contributors are working in a professional capacity,\nand find it valuable to work together on a shared foundation.
\nThe other big achievement that I haven't written as much about is rewriting our geocoder,\nmore or less from scratch, in a matter of months.\nYou've probably heard of the second-system syndrome.\nThe popular trope these days is for engineers to take something that works but is clunky / limited,\nand decide to rewrite it (maybe in Rust, like me 🤣), and never ship, or ship VERY late due to feature creep\nand wanting to get everything perfect.\nI'm definitely guilty of being a perfectionist, but I also believe you can get there gradually while shipping something valuable quickly.
\nI approached this rewrite with a clear set of things that I wanted to change,\nand focused almost all of the time initially on getting the foundations right,\nwhich would let me replace the higher layers in a more "agile" way\n(in the sense of the normal use of the word, not a specific methodology).\nIt worked.\nWithin a few months, I had replaced the existing API layer with a new one,\nwhich was serving 99% of our traffic.\nWe didn't have any downtime, and I'm only aware of one accidental breaking change.\nThis is a result of careful testing, including snapshot testing at several levels (using the insta crate),\nand oracle testing (simple Python scripts in this case which hit the current and next gen APIs and flagged any differences).
There will always be more improvements to make, but what's important is that we shipped,\nand we have a solid foundation to build from here.\nAnd not just that, we also have a v2 API with a bunch of improvements.\nAnd since the new API system is serving all the traffic,\nwe even get to backport a lot of the improvements to v1!\nIn fact, we have zero plans of deprecating our v1 API, since the internals are shared,\nand we can continue improving it within the limits of that API contract.\nThis is an engineering achievement I'm really proud of.
\nI don't do new years resolutions per se,\nbut I expect to work at a slightly less crazy pace,\nand make more time side projects like music and non-work-related tech.\nI've also decided on my next Korean reading series: Neon Genesis Evangelion.\nI'm currently on volume 5, and expect to finish that this year.
\n", "summary": "", "date_published": "2026-01-03T00:00:00-00:00", "image": "", "authors": [ { "name": "Ian Wagner", "url": "https://fosstodon.org/@ianthetechie", "avatar": "media/avi.jpeg" } ], "tags": [ "reflections" ], "language": "en" } ] }