Yearnote 2025

Welcome to 2026. It sure has been a year already in terms of world events. Nevertheless, I’m going to talk a bit about how my 2025 was, the same procedure as every year.

On the photos: there’s one photo for each month, in chronological order.

Professional life

I make my living by working as a software engineer. It’s a job that I really enjoy: building software is a lot of fun.

Early in 2025, I left my job and ventured out as an independent consultant. Most of my year was spent with a big corporate client where I worked on modernizing the tools and the infrastructure for orchestrating their data processing jobs – classic data engineering work. It was a nice project and I really enjoyed working with the team. All in all, I’d consider my first year a success.

That said, it’s not like I have figured this business out. I found the big gig by bumping into a friend at a party. That was lucky, but now I need to do it again.

I’ve been struggling a bit to explain what it is that I want to do and what it is that I excel at. In lieu of a focused pitch, here are a few things I do:

• Got a Python backend that is a bit slow? Would you like to make it go faster? Maybe some Rust would help? Hit me up.
• Are you using Amazon S3 or another object storage in anger? Need someone to dig deep into the details? Hit me up.

If you get me on your team, I’ll also fix your development environment¹, make your GitHub Actions pipeline’s cache work, be endlessly patient with AWS IAM problems, and foster an enviroment where it’s okay to not know things.

Now I’m again open to new engagements. If you would like to work with me, send me an e-mail or connect on LinkedIn and let’s talk.

Software engineering community

My main way of engaging with the software engineering community was public speaking.

• I gave a lightning talk at HYTRADBOI about Why S3’s conditional writes made people excited (see also the the companion blog post).
• In May, I gave a talk about compressing floating point data with Gorilla at Helsinki Python Meetup.
• In September at PyCon UK and again in October at PyCon Finland, I gave a talk about using Python and Rust together. I also wrote a post on setting up uv and Maturin so that they work together.

It was fun to give the talks and I’m hoping to continue it this year. I have at least one idea for a talk about data storage.

Other life events

I bought a home. I wasn’t planning for it, but the landlord decided to sell the apartment I was living in and after taking a look at the housing market, I ended up buying it. Now I get to renovate it. It would be amazing to finally live in an apartment with a dishwasher. Wish me luck.

Outdoors life

It was a weird year for me. I had no big adventures (apart from sailing from Scotland to Norway), which feels a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I climbed more than ever, skated more than ever, and ran more than ever.

It was a year of courses. I took a tour skating course, two kayaking courses, two climbing courses (introductions to lead climbing and climbing outdoors), and two first aid courses. I also acted as an assistant teacher on an introductory kayaking course.

I tend to take courses too late, so that I already know the stuff they’re going to teach. Still, the social element of learning together is enjoyable.

I did publish a couple of posts on my outdoors newsletter Small Rapids - see the archive. The most popular one was the one about ditching Spotify called You can still listen to .mp3s.

In 2026, I’m going to do a big hike again, that’s for sure.

Best of 2025

• Best new album: Neko-a-Sekai by Tinyhawk & Bizzarro. They play groovy instrumental rock. It’s both a lot of fun and it leaves me in awe of their skill.
• Best book read: Matara by Matias Riikonen. It’s about a group of boys spending the summer playing society that just so happens to resemble Ancient Rome. I enjoyed Riikonen’s rich language and how the book takes play seriously. (The book has not yet been translated to English.)
• New favorite writer: Anne Carson. Have you read Autobiography of Red? There’s surprisingly lot to it considering how little it is.

Traditional commentary on Finnish politics

In each yearnote, I express (lack of) surprise at the current cabinet of the goverment of Finland.

Like I predicted, prime minister Petteri Orpo’s cabinet held together through the whole year. It wasn’t because lack of scandals! However, Orpo has his eyes on the ball and will get through every crisis to reach his party’s policy goals.

Nevertheless I believe that the cabinet will fall apart before the parliamentary election of 2027. The cabinet has already got massive policy changes done and there’s always a chance to score a few points in the eyes of voters by breaking up. As the election approaches, I bet both True Finns and Swedish People’s Party will get anxious about their popularity. Thus it’s more likely than not that the cabinet will break up before the year is over.