2025 Year in Review Back to Journal →

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

If 2025 sounded futuristic at the start of the year, it feels remarkably lived-in now. Somehow both quick and full - the kind of year where I look back and think, "all of that happened in twelve months?"

The short answer is yes. And the slightly longer answer is that 2025 was a year of paying attention. To food, to places, to the people sitting across from me, and to the small shifts that make ordinary days feel less ordinary.

Here are some highlights:

• I leaned further into solo dining as a way to explore Philadelphia’s restaurant scene - using it as a litmus test before bringing Kileen along. The success rate was absurdly high, and we ate very well this year.
• A good French meal in Rittenhouse turned into a trip to Paris. Ate at L’Amour Vache and confirmed that inspiration is useless if it stays theoretical.
• We returned to Amsterdam after many years, and the canals reminded me that cities designed around water and green space do something quietly good for the nervous system.
• Kileen’s siblings visited Philadelphia and gently wrecked our routine in the best way - borrowing pumpkins from a bar, finally trying Rita’s Italian Ice, and reminding us to see our own city with fresh eyes.
• Thanksgiving brought us back to Connecticut and Rhode Island, where a board game called Hues and Cues taught the table that most misunderstandings come from seeing the same thing through different lenses.
• I walked through Georgetown in spring and felt the old wisteria-lined streets remember me before I remembered them.
• The Sazerac recipe is now dialed. A few simple ingredients, a little focus, and an ordinary evening becomes something worth slowing down for.

At work, I pushed a concept with our team about being a thermostat rather than a thermometer - not just measuring what’s happening, but actively adjusting and influencing outcomes. It felt like the right year to practice what I preach.

And honestly, the thread running through everything this year was refinement. Less accumulation, more subtraction. Bill Atkinson deleted 2,000 lines of code and made QuickDraw six times faster. I didn’t do anything quite that elegant, but the principle stuck with me: sometimes real progress is what you remove.

I head into 2026 feeling present, well-fed, and grateful for a year that rewarded showing up and paying attention.

Past Years in Review

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020