2025 Retrospective

2025 Retrospective

2025 has come and gone and this is the first year I have actually sat down and done somewhat of a review of the year. I feel like the year went so quickly and at the same time it seems like the beginning of it was so long ago. Below are the highlights of 2025 and where I want to lean going into 2026.

Highlights

Major highlights for 2025, I was a Torc Ambassador and part of one of the most amazing communities in tech. Seriously, the amount of people that are in this community sharing and helping each other is amazing and I honestly would be a lot worse for wear had I not found this community. Being an ambassador and sharing the message and meeting new people was a major highlight of 2025.

My favorite thing I built in 2025 was the Torc community Discord bot. Its small and isn’t world changing technology, but it has an entire communities input into it. We probably could have easily installed one of the regular bots and just used whatever it comes with but this one had some extra love put into it. It started with Taylor mentioning he needed a summary of what happens in the Discord because it was hard for him to keep up. I dug into building a basic bot and then integrated AI tooling so that it could take the messages and summarize them so that anyone could call the bot and get a quick summary of the conversation and be caught up on the happenings. This then expanded into a weekly roll up of the entire server to capture the week that was of conversations. Set that up on CRON so it was automated to run and just happens. Also built in a reminder function so that users could set up reminders if they wanted to. There are some helpful commands for the Torc team internal so they can utilize the bot for gathering information that assists with events and other things like that. The latest addition is the one I am really proud of and can’t wait for it to be in the normal rotation. Since this is a community of like minded people and lets face it, most of us are introverted and shy. I added in coffee chat pairing functionality that pairs up members of the community to get together and have a coffee chat. However long the people want, it doesn’t even force it, just a quick little pairing and sends a DM to the pairs letting them know they were paired up and to reach out. Takes some of the leg work out of it and hopefully will lead to more networking and community building.

I helped co-organize a virtual ServiceNow conference, nullEDGE in October and oh my that was huge. What started as an idea thrown out by Jace became a whole major conference in a matter of months. Working with Jace and the others while putting together the website for it was a major accomplishment. Working full time and doing this as a side hustle to get things organized and presented in a way that was easy to navigate was a challenge that forced me to remember web development outside of ServiceNow which was definitely fun. We had over 1K registered attendees for the conference and it went amazing. Met amazing people within the ServiceNow ecosystem and now we are planning more events in 2026 which has me stoked.

Lean into 2026

What am I looking for in 2026? More community focused content and building in public. I really let myself down in 2025 that I did not do more building in public and sharing stuff. I had wanted that to be a thing that I pushed for and I just never sat down and actually did it. I am planning on changing that and hopefully will be able to stick to it this year. I am going to take a more focused approach and slow down a bit so that I can actually put together a plan and follow that. I need to be more intentional with things and follow a laid out plan so that I don’t get sidetracked and forget things.

Work focus, trying to do anything and everything for my project that helps us succeed as a team. We have been going strong for roughly 4 years and have slowed a bit with less customization to our project as we lean more into setting things up for the future so its easier to maintain things. We are looking into migrating to a more integrated service portal and that requires a lot of documentation and building out POCs so this year is looking up for quite a bit of work that we will be hustling to get through. I have an amazing team that I work with and have the best lead supporting me every single day. I wouldn’t have made it this far without Cielo being there allowing me to fail and learn and grow. She has been amazing at guiding me in the right direction while also allowing me to provide my input to guide areas of the project as well. Truly blessed to have her on my team and making things super easy for me.

2026 is shaping up to be an amazing year as long as I focus and continue being there when it counts. Happy New Year and hope that at the end of the year I can return and summarize things again with even more successes.