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where am I for 2025? work, projects, life...

January arrives, bringing with it resolutions, hopes, and frustrations. I thought it would be fitting to make a short post about what I want this year to look like in three areas: personal life, side projects, and work.

On Personal Life

(If you're only interested in tech, skip to Projects)

I'm getting married in 2026. Not this year, but it will occupy a good chunk of my mind. There are plenty of preparations to make, including finding a place to live once we're married (we believe in that, yes).

I want to visit my friends who live far away at least 5 times this year. Normally, I only manage two or three visits a year, but I don't want it to be like that. At the end of January, I'll make the first visit, to Madrid.

I want to combine my 3-4 hours a week of wrestling training with yoga and other workouts to improve flexibility and avoid injuries; I've already started this. I've had to cut back a couple of hours of judo per week for this, but I think it will be worth it.

I've committed to recording the entire Vulgate version of the Bible in Latin. I've made a calendar that ends mid-2026, with daily prayer and reading of at least three chapters. I'll start a YouTube channel just to upload this, one video daily for at least 3 or 4 years, I've calculated. For 2025, the goal is to improve my flexibility, learn to avoid injuries, and prepare the path for black belt courses in 2026.

On Projects

Here I'll be briefer: my main goal this year is to build a drone from scratch. To do this, I need to learn a ton of stuff:

For most of the items on this list, I have an ESP32 kit with around 100 projects, the book "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective", blogs on aeronautics and drones, and the help of an exemplary community.

On Work

At work, it seems like in 2025 I'll be taking on more responsibilities in my project. I work at what would be the equivalent of a Fortune 500 in Europe, a German listed company but not particularly focused on technology. My role here is to build the new general data archive that will replace the IBM legacy system they've used for 20 or 30 years. It's a project from scratch, all in-house, relying on AWS for the backend with the usual modern stack for the frontend. It's a complex and very large project.

I consider myself a 'junior'; I've been in tech for less than two years. My job is a place of learning, and as long as it remains so, it will continue to be my employment.

On another note, I'll continue teaching fundamentals of programming and other basic subjects in the same master's program I taught last year, in Madrid.

If you've made it this far and have questions about your career or job search, you can write to me directly on x.com, and we can chat for a bit, totally free.

With that, I hope you have a great year, achieve your goals, marry that girl (or guy), land that job you're looking for, pass that tough exam, and find God in all of it.

cheers, Daniel.