Last year, a New Years' resolution bingo trend was circulating the internet. My wife, some friends, and myself decided to participate, each creating a 5x5 bingo card that (of course) included a free space in the middle (mine was to learn something!). Now, it's time to see how I held up to my goals at the start of 2025.

When I first set out to make the card, I didn't want an entirely goal-oriented card. Part of the fun of a bingo was including some RNG -- gambling -- into the process. I thought that was a good idea at the time, because it would allow me to invoke some introspection on my year when I eventually got around to this side of the calendar. Really, I think it just maligned my chances at actually completing the bingo and took up valuable real space toward cultivating my personal development. Still, fun to include them and I'll do the same this year, just at a lower rate. My achievements don't also just hit what's on this scorecard. I've contributed to some great projects at work, helped to improve our team's processes, and stayed on top of developments in the field. I've learned to snowboard. I consistently ran 5Ks and got my time below 30 minutes. I watched the Star Wars prequels for the first time! I'll try not to get into everything here.

Okay, last year:

We'll start with the bingo line:

• Abs + Geta Sandals Summer
• 2 Great Programming Projects
• Someone tells me I've inspired them (real)
• 200k Words Written
• Have an amazing birthday party

This line is a combination of some good, quantitative goals (2 programming projects!) and some looser goals. I think this line became a bingo because luck was less of a factor in these qualitative goals compared to the other qualitative goals on the bingo sheet. I'll mainly review these bingo-winning goals.

2 Great Programming Projects

I didn't want to include projects from Andgo here. We do lots of interesting work, scaling up our system, building some new integrations, refactoring away from a monolith, but I wanted the focus to be on development outside of paid labor. I needed to feel some passion.

The first of those projects is this website. Really, retooling this website. It used to be written in python/flask and HTMX, but I just found myself wondering -- why? Mostly, why am I paying all of this cash? That also gave me the opportunity to do some re-styling. The final result is a simple, static site built with a custom static site generator, some custom MD processing, and just a generally cleaner structure than before.

The other project is the GDLlama project. I wrote about this project earlier, but GDLlama is a ground-up re-write of another developer's godot-llm project. This tool allows Godot, a game development engine, to interact with the powerful llama.cpp tool. That allows a user to create LLM-powered games in the Godot engine. You could, for example, generate NPC dialogue, or automagically generate quests. I think the system works very well, with a few key enhancements still in development. It taught me about the whole world of MLOps, and efficiently processing raw output from LLMs. I learned about logits, token parsing, modification of input/output with embeddings, C++ development, the Godot ecosystem, systems design work, and so on and so on. This project continues to pay dividends and I love the continued effort I lay on it.

This project also allowed me to achieve the "Someone tells me I've inspired them (real)" goal. We do a biweekly demo or showcase at Andgo geared toward R&D, and so I did a showcase at one of these when I felt the project was in a "1.0" state. After the demo, a junior dev reached out to me. They chatted with me, told me they were interested in game development, and were excited that I had worked on something so interesting. Because of my showcase, they were inspired to use Godot, played around with it, and (hopefully!) enjoyed the engine. That was a very cool moment. I really hope they are doing some game dev!

Other Line-Winning Items

"Abs + Geta Sandals Summer" was achieved in two ways:
- I (spoilers) finished a triathlon early in the summer and had a lower body fat percentage than normal
- My wife bought me Geta sandals for my birthday

I should have a photo to prove this, but I do not. This was always sort of a nebulous goal, but it did give me something concrete to work with. I jokingly referred to the 2025 summer as my "monk summer", which I think would have been more accurate had I hit my meditation goal.

I did end up writing 200k words, which surprised me, but between some sparse blog posts, docs at work, some creative writing, docstrings (maybe a little cheaty?), and other docs I'm sneaking over the line.

As for the birthday party...

Camping, Hiking, and Doing a Triathlon

Arf arf! Here's me right before getting in the water at my first triathlon. Wow, did this event destroy me. When I eventually got to signing up, I looked at the sprint triathlon, saw the swim distances and thought, "hm, I could do those easily." So, instead of reasonable and selecting the sprint triathlon, or the half-distance, I selected the full distance. Unfortunately for me, there were two more events after the swim; should've stuck with the half-distance! No matter.

The training and discipline I had to accumulate to achieve this was incomparable, and the lessons learned from this process, I think, were more important than the triathlon itself. Truly, I love what this has done for me. It has reignited my passion for sport, brought me around on the health and fitness of my body, and set me down a virtuous path. Without this single event, my achievements later in the year fall apart. I don't think there'd be a GDLlama. I don't think I would've camped as much as I did. I wouldn't have a bingo right now!

My next update should include my goals for next year. If you are reading, and I don't know if anyone is, have a happy new year!

To see next year's goals, click here.