2025 was an interesting year for me because it seemed like I hit a reset on various aspects of my life. My past/recent hobbies were taken over by the joy and stress of parenting a 1-year-old, which meant I had to be more selective about how I spent my time. I shifted focus towards projects I found meaningful or exciting, along the way discovering a lot of new content that inspired me.
Here are some of the articles, talks, research papers, and software tools that I found particularly impactful in 2025.
Talks
- Systems that run forever self-heal and scale by Joe Armstrong.
- 1000x: The Power of an Interface for Performance by Joran Dirk Greef.
- Designing for Performance by Martin Thompson.
- Interaction Protocols: It's all about good manners by Martin Thompson. Highly recommend this. Ignore the title and watch it. Maybe it'll spark your curiosity about software engineering and further reading.
- Engineering You by Martin Thompson.
- Intuiting Latency and Throughput by Cassey Muratori.
- How CPU Memory & Caches Work - Computerphile by Matt Godbolt.
- Architecting LARGE Software Projects by Eskil Steenberg.
Articles
- If Not React, Then What? by Alex Russell. The subtitle says it all: "Frameworkism isn't delivering. The answer isn't a different tool, it's the courage to do engineering". This article really resonated with me as I reflected on the state of frontend development and the over-reliance on frameworks. I've been part of various teams in the past 4 of 5 years and got tired of the status quo where people used Next.js (previously React + Webpack + Redux Thunk) for everything. No thought went into whether it was the right tool, or if they're building the right thing. This seems to get worse as a lot of people have moved towards "vibecoding" and have taken the phrase "ship fast and break things" to a whole new dimension. It further encouraged me to think critically about when and why to use certain tools.
- Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail by John Gall. This classic article (and book) provides an insightful look into the nature of complex systems. It reminded me of the importance of simplicity and the pitfalls of over-engineering, especially in an era where complexity seems to be the default.
- A couple of articles from Seth Godin got me thinking hard about my work, career, and forging forward with the current technological and economic shifts:
On Systems and Systems Thinking: My knowledge of thinking in systems expanded, as a result of reading "This is Strategy" by Seth Godin, with a lot of references to Donella Meadows' work on systems thinking.
Research Papers
- Scalability! But at what COST? by Frank McSherry, Michael Isard, and Derek G. Murray. This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that scalability is always beneficial, highlighting the trade-offs involved in designing scalable systems. It made me reconsider how I approach system design, especially in the context of concurrent programming and distributed systems.
- A Plea for Lean Software by Niklaus Wirth. This 1995 classic is a biting critique of "fat software" and the industry's tendency to let rapid hardware advances mask undisciplined engineering. Wirth’s core observation—that software slows down faster than hardware speeds up—is a sobering reminder that true performance comes from a "return to essentials" rather than feature bloat. It reinforced my belief that engineering excellence isn't about how much we can add, but how much we can simplify while remaining effective.
Software
ZeroMQ - A high-performance asynchronous messaging library that has been a game-changer for building distributed systems. Its simplicity and efficiency have made it a favorite tool in my toolkit for inter-process communication. I used it to implement a distributed event emitter for Node.js that I found useful in a couple of hobby projects. I find it to be much better than more popular tools (like Redis Pub/Sub or Kafka). I think it's not as popular because it's not a managed service, and some of the common patterns (like message persistence) have to be implemented by the user. However, for low-latency, high-throughput messaging, it's hard to beat ZeroMQ.
TigerBeetle - A high-performance, fault-tolerant ledger database that has impressed me with its speed and reliability. It's designed for financial applications, but its principles can be applied to any system requiring robust data integrity. What I'm most impressed about is their engineering philosophy and approach to building software. They focus on simplicity, correctness, and performance, which aligns with my renewed values as a developer.
What's Next?
2025 was a year of r relearning, reflection, and rediscovery. I read a lot more than I had in previous years, and wrote less code. Interestingly enough, a lot of the content I found impactful this year revolved around themes of simplicity, performance, and thoughtful engineering. As I move into 2026, I plan to continue exploring these themes, applying the lessons learned from these articles, talks, papers, and software tools to my work and personal projects.
Those were a few of the things I read in 2025. I've got a lot more planned for 2026, including writing more about my experiences and learnings. My goal is to do a monthly round-up of the things I read/watched and found interesting, alongside interesting facts from my experiments and hobby projects. Subscribe using the form at my website if you'd like to get notified when I publish new content.
Feel free to reach out if you have any recommendations or thoughts on topics I might find interesting!
2026 mantra -> Less is more. Build with purpose. Engineer with care.
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