My 2025 review & plans for 2026

It's that time of the year when it feels appropriate to look back at the past 12 months and make some kind of summary of how I spent them and what I achieved. I think it makes sense if only because after looking through my projects, I see there's been quite a lot more of that than I had thought. I think we often quickly forget what we spent time on and it might feel like a lot of it was wasted on nothing, but it turns out there's a lot of that nothing 😅

It's also a good time to look a bit forward on the new year and think about what I want to do during that time, to not lose sight of some things.

For comparison, see my 2024 review from a year ago (imported from micro.blog).

Just to quickly look at the last section there:

What's next, in 2025? I… I really think I need to work a bit more on work-life balance (sideproject-life balance?) this year. I feel like I'm doing way too many things. But I have no idea if that's going to happen. I think at least I should try to do a bit more project finishing and a bit less project starting.

Narrator: he did not improve his work-life balance after all 🫠

First of all, I can't wait to get out of this transitional state with that main service running on three different databases in parallel. I think I'm really close now (though I've been saying this for weeks).

I did finish that one, around March.

Then, I have all of the above to maintain, OAuth to add to Minisky & Skythread, things like better documentation and tests to add to the open source projects. I have a few ideas for longer blog posts to write, e.g. some kind of architectural introduction to ATProto.

And also… I'd really love to write an AppView one day (but yes, I know, less project starting 😛).

I didn't add OAuth anywhere yet, but I did start working on tests and documentation, I wrote a bunch of blog posts, and I managed to resist starting to build an AppView…

Feed service

Handle Directory

Blog(s)

https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/ External Link • mackuba.eu

Ruby gems

Another thing that I started doing on that front is that I've been trying to turn this loose set of gems into a bit more of a single "SDK", even though it isn't and won't really be a single whole like e.g. Marshal's Python SDK is. I've built a new shared documentation site for all gems (using Vitepress), which includes each gem's readme & changelog in one place, and where I moved all the code samples from existing repos' example folders (+ refreshed some of them and added a few new ones). I'm also working on adding YARD/RDoc-generated API documentation there, and I slowly started improving the currently abysmal test coverage in the gems (with some help from Codex).

https://ruby.sdk.blue External Link • ruby.sdk.blue

SDK.blue

https://sdk.blue External Link • sdk.blue

Skythread

Lycan

I launched this small Ruby service in October – it's a "search engine" for your Bluesky likes (and reposts, quotes, and old-style pin bookmarks). It lets you search for keywords in any post you've liked, shared or saved previously, which is really helpful for finding that thing you've seen a week/month/year ago that someone built or posted but you really can't find right now.

The code is open source, and my instance runs at lycan.feeds.blue. The service is API-only, and the UI is built as a separate page in Skythread, see "Archive search" in the menu in the top-right (note, the first time you want to use it, you need to tell it to start an import and wait a bit for it to finish).

Tootify (Mastodon cross-poster)

Other random things

Plans for 2026

So, what's next? Probably more of the same ;)

Looking forward to a very "Atmospheric" 2026! 🌤️