And just like that, it's the end of the year again. We did not expect to make it to the South for Christmas this year. Getting a passport for a newborn is a painful, bureaucracy-filled process, especially for a Portuguese-Italian baby born in Denmark. But somehow—magically—the Italian embassy came through in 2 days (looking at you and your 4-month wait, Portugal). And so we flew down and surprised everyone.
Lisbon. It's loud, dirty, well-known for all the wrong reasons, but it's home. I couldn't be happier to bring Allegra down to spend her first Christmas with the family.
It's the end of the year, before we get to the regularly scheduled Retrospectiva, let's talk a bit about 2025.
2025 look back
2025 was an eventful year. On the personal side, one of the most eventful years in a while. We got married and managed to put everyone we love in a single place. We travelled just the right amount. I've read just the right amount of books - and started reading more fiction.
As for running, it was a transition year. I used to run two marathons every year. Recently, I decided to tone that down to just one. This year I ran the Oslo marathon, and a half-marathon across the Øresund bridge. No clean training block for neither of them. I did try to keep my mileage relatively high. As I'm writing this, I've ran 1937 km this year. Pretty close to my 2000 km target for the year. Maybe I can still make it.
2025 was also a challenging year for our family. I won't get into details. A lot of unexpected things happened. Thankfully, we all managed to pull through. The year finished with a bang and 'Legra is here with us now.
In what regard work, the year was busy. The stakes were higher, and more was expected. Larger scale, more challenging problems, and lots of new problems. Two main themes that I'm noticing. The first is that LLM-backed applications are growing more than ever - but most don't really know how to measure and improve them. The second is the great cleanup - which is a topic for a future post.
Now, in the end of December, we take a deep breath - stop to think - and put some goals in the board for 2026.
Using
Oura ring (link): For years I've been a happy Garmin user. 10-day battery life, great for tracking my running. But there's one thing that always annoyed me: sleep tracking. If I wake up at 4 AM and get back to bed, it doesn't mean I slept 5 hours. Also, Garmin has a passive approach to giving me insights. I can go and browse the graphs - but they won't proactively tell me how I'm doing. I hate subscriptions. The Helio Strap was good. But still passive - so I sold it. The Oura delivers. The app is well designed, the sleep tracking is accurate, and the insights are actually actionable.
Bimby TM7 (link): I used to cook the exact same pasta dish every single day. Food is important - I just never cared. Cooking was just always too abstract. A "spoon" of this, a "pinch" of that - what the hell do you mean? The Bimby has removed any and all friction in getting an actual dish ready. You can browse through thousands of recipes and I don't need to think, I can just follow the instructions. The iOS app is also great - and warns me when I need to come back to it and do something. Its stupid expensive - but we are incredibly happy with it.
OpenCode (link): I've told you before: at this pace of change my editing workflow changes almost every week. In the past few weeks I've caught myself ditching Claude Code and Codex more and more for OpenCode. The terminal UI is beautifully. It's 100% open source. It allows me to use any model I want. This means any OpenRouter model, or - even better - any model already included in my GitHub Copilot plan. I don't need another subscription. Especially for something closed source.
Neovim Pack (link): I live mostly in the terminal. Not because I think it's cool. But because that's where I'm more productive. For the past years I've used LazyVim for my config, but something started to feel bloated. Too many things going on, too many bells and whistles I don't need. I want to get in, change, get out. Neovim now has a native package manager, and I've started building my own minimal config with it (currently 100 lines of Lua- and work in progress).
Reading
Old Man's War - John Scalzi (link): Still working my way through this one. I knew Scalzi wouldn't let me down. I love his direct, no-bs writing style. Nothing beats ending the day with a book set somewhere very, very faraway. There are some interesting parallels to our world right now. Everyone's got their own personal AI assistant (which the main character nicknames "Asshole"), everyone has to sign a user agreement to use their new body. It almost feels like non-fiction.
LLMOps - Abi Aryan (link): My technical read for the holiday season, the next on my technical book backlog. I've been a reader of Abi's ModelCraft newsletter, and have high hopes for this one.
Listening
I've been listening to a couple of different music "areas". I don't think we can call them genres.
The first one is Italian indie alternative. One of my favourite things about speaking another language is that you get to immerse yourself in the culture that speaks it, which includes - obviously - their music. I've spent the last few years exploring most of what the Italian scene has to offer, but lately it's been a mix of irossa, some weird things, and Marco Castello.
The second one I call jazz ambient. When I play music (almost always), I tend to play it all over the house. Recently, both Nala Sinephro and cktrl have been on heavy rotation. They surely put me in the Christmas spirit.
That's it for this month's Retrospectiva. See you in 2026!