2025 has come and gone... I thought it might be worth looking back on all that I accomplished in 2025. Early in the year I stumbled upon self-hosting and was immediately interested. So much so that I built my own home server. I began hosting my own media, be it movies and TV shows to music. I dropped Spotify and began using Plex Amp to listen to my own music files allowing me to drop a subscription. Not only that, but I didn't stop there, I also replaced my cloud reliance by switching to Nextcloud, another self-hosted service. Along the way it has been a lot of fun just playing with and diving into the world of self-hosting. It feels liberating in a time when so much of our lives is no longer private.

I continued and by the Summer I had the urge to start a blog. I began with the traditional approach of looking for some site that I could use to help create a page, think Squarespace or Wix. All of these options felt counter intuitive to the self-hosted philosophy. I would have to rely on some big corporation to provide access to my site and I would give up a lot of control and customization. My solution ended up being somewhere in the middle. I did entertain the idea of hosting my blog on my own hardware but for the sake of keeping things somewhat reliable I chose to host the site on GitHub Pages. A free service that GitHub offers, but that was only part of the solution. I needed someone to help me get the web-page up and running. The code lives on GitHub, but Netlify is who made the system complete. All I had to do was spend a couple of hours getting it setup, I went to a site called porkbun.com (I know, a great name) to purchase my domain name. I settled on ByteByBite, a blog written by a person that does not work in tech but is passionate about it and this page was born. I should mention that using LLM's was the key part to this success, without Claude and Gemini I would have never been able to implement as fast as I did. It was great, yes there were things that I did not fully understand that the AI was doing, but who cares. It's a blog, not NASA. Not only did it speed me up, it also taught me things that I would not have learned otherwise. I continue to use AI to help me developed my site and is a key part of my workflow.

Not only did I choose to create this site. Self Hosting also got me interested in networking and I began studying to take my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam. I have not taken the exam yet, but I have covered around half of the material. It is challenging but also rewarding. To be honest the last couple of weeks I have fallen out of the routine of studying so the first of the year I plan to get back to it.

As if all of that is not enough, I am also in the process of purchasing my first home...and I am excited to have a new playground to play in. We are also going to have a 3D printer for the first time, so I am excited to see how that will enable some fun projects. Overall 2025 had some rough spots for me in my personal life, but these projects have been a place I can come back to. It is easy to beat yourself up, I would have liked to have done more blog posts, I thought I was going to finish my CCNA, and many other self-appointed deadlines were broken. But reflecting on the year has me realizing that I actually made a significant amount of progress in my abilities and I even had fun while doing it.

My goal for this next year is to try and slow down some, I naturally move through life quickly, it's just the way my brain functions. I have to intentionally slow down...the tech world moves incredibly fast. This can lead to a sense of feeling overwhelmed followed by the fear of missing out.

Purchasing my first home I will get to really stretch my technical skills with what I can do around the house. Everything from the server, to smart home devices, air quality sensors and much more. Not only will this give me plenty to do, but also will provide good material to write about. I am not a professional and everything I write about here is from the perspective of someone that is the average person that is just interested in this stuff.