Abstract
It's another new year, and it seems like as good a time as any to reflect on some of the things that I got up to in 2025.
Professional / Social Events and Conferences
It's been many years since Covid, and happily many conferences and meetups have been starting up again. I'm trying to attend and support these events, because I want the South African software development community to flourish.
This is a weekend away with various smart people in the software industry, with a focus on having conversations rather than the 'traditional' conference approach of having a single speaker and many attendees.
I have attended several times before, but in 2025 I volunteered to co-hosted the event together with Mercia Malan.
I am very happy that the Johannesburg Rust Meetup is running again. I am now taking part as a more of a participant than an organizer.
In 2025, I presented a session on the various ways to have parallelism in Rust code.
eyeo company offsite
I have been employed by eyeo since 2021, but up until recently had not actually met most of my teammates in person. Initially we were still in Covid times and so travel wasn't an option. When travel opened up again, I wasn't ready to travel internationally because my children were still very young.
In 2025, I finally went to the yearly company offsite, which this time was in Norway.
DevConf is sort of the 'big' yearly conference for South African software developers.
I have presented at DevConf previously, but this year I was just an attendee.
DataConf is a conference for South African data practitioners. This year, my role at eyeo shifted such that I needed to be more aware of broader data concerns in the company, so I attended DataConf to get a feeling for what's happening in the data industry.
Software Side Projects
My main software project is the work I do for eyeo, working on Adblock and Adblock Plus. However, I also have some side projects developed in a personal capacity this year.
The Localhost Podcast CLI Tool
This is a CLI tool for helping to sync media files to my phone, by creating a podcast feed.
I published a browser extension to help myself to make 'exercise cards'.
It works quite well for my current use case, but I'd like to expand the functionality in 2026.
Learning Elixir
This actually started late 2024, but continued in 2025. I spent some time learning how Elixir works, and even using it for some simple code challenges.
In order to cement my knowledge however, I need to do a proper side project in Elixir. Depending on which projects come up, this may happen in 2026!
What does 2026 hold?
I don't really know yet. But I'm hoping to make it amazing!