What happened in 2025
I somehow managed to miss publishing a 2024 review. No grand reason. But here we are.
☕ Community
At the beginning of the year, I joined the torc.dev community. That decision set the tone for a lot of what followed.
Over the summer, I started a podcast: bas.fm — conversations with people in tech. No growth hacks, no "content strategy", just honest discussions with people I find interesting. By the end of the year, 26 episodes were out in the world. That alone still surprises me a bit.
I also attended Commit Your Code Conference in Texas, which was a refreshing reminder that flying across an ocean to talk to people in real life still beats any Discord server or Slack workspace. On top of that, I went to several local meetups — smaller, less polished, but often more meaningful.
Key takeaway:
2026 (and probably the years ahead) will be about personal connections more than ever.
We barely finished processing "the virus" years when AI slop arrived and flooded our timelines. Genuine connections to real people feel scarce — and therefore valuable.
⛰️ Stelvio
In spring, I joined Michal Martinka to work on Stelvio.
Stelvio is a Python framework for defining AWS serverless infrastructure in pure Python. No YAML, no DSLs pretending not to be programming languages.
Over time, we made solid progress and are aiming to move the project from alpha to beta early next year. One of the features I’m particularly excited about is the ability to run Lambda functions locally while they’re still part of real AWS infrastructure — no emulator required.
A lot of the work wasn’t just writing code. It was pair programming sessions, long discussions, trade-off analysis, and occasionally realizing that AWS has opinions you only discover once you trip over them.
For me, Stelvio has been a great way to stay involved in open source while also digging deeper into the less glamorous, more intricate parts of AWS. The parts that don’t fit neatly into blog posts or conference talks, but matter a lot in practice.
⚕️ Health
The growing attention around Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" initiative—where he spends millions each year biohacking his age, complete with monthly colonoscopies—has made any talk of "biohacking" feel a bit cringe these days.
Still, I stuck with my supplement and workout routines. Winter made that harder than I’d like to admit, but nothing derailed completely.
It’s now been three years since I last saw a doctor for anything other than routine bloodwork. I feel fitter, stronger, and more energetic than I did ten years ago, which is still the only metric I really trust.
Key takeaway:
"Physical health is the foundation for everything that follows." I wrote that in my 2022 retro, and it still holds.
Tools used: whole foods, gym, supplements. I’ll probably write a separate post about the exact protocols at some point.
🌠 The Future
Work on Stelvio will continue, and I'm planning to focus more on sharing knowledge about AWS, especially tailored for Python developers. I'll keep going with the podcast, get fully back on track with my workout plan, and make a conscious effort to take more time off—just to do nothing.
🔮 Predictions
Some thoughts that will almost certainly age badly:
- Europe will continue to underperform economically compared to the US.
- AI and robotics will peak in late 2026. We already have powerful LLMs and humanoid robots making strides, but we'll likely hit a wall next year.
- Expectations around AI will keep bouncing between hype and disappointment, especially when it comes to "general" intelligence.
- On the brighter side, AI will get much better at structured tasks, like coding and accounting.
- Attention spans will keep decreasing, and some form of AI-induced brain rot feels inevitable.
Bigger picture: Society and economies in the EU and US will shift significantly. The value of traditional knowledge and university degrees might decline further. Chinese EVs will become mainstream. Europe will face mounting financial troubles with welfare budgets. The US will continue grappling with de-dollarization trends. Asset and precious metal prices will rise, opening the door to potential financial bubbles. Overall, it feels like the cards are being reshuffled—populist movements rising in Europe, globalization hitting the West harder, non-Western economies gaining ground, job insecurity growing, and longstanding values like traditional education coming under real pressure.
None of this is new. It just feels more visible now.
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