The state of affairs (2025)

We have once more come to the end of a year, and as is traditional, I must once more write a retrospective piece for the past year and discuss the new one. I'm sure you know what's coming more or less: this year has been shit for everyone, and it has been a spectacularly awful one for me in particular. I thus intend to hiss the old year out, say good riddance and talk a bit about hopes for the year ahead.

As is always the case with these, I spend a lot of time talking about myself. Oh well: I'll get back to proper work soon.

Life

... holy shit. This was not a good year. We started, as a household, with my partner's mother dying after a long illness: she was suffering and it was time for her to go, but as far as inauspicious beginnings to a year go, it's pretty hard to top that. The period after that was largely spent in sorting funeral stuff and everything that has to be dealt with after a person dies, and that kinda put a seal on the year, unfortunately.

I think I spent the next few months, from memory, writing (which was good) and burning myself out trying to find contract/consulting work (not so good, because I spent too much effort on it when it's something that I'm really not great at). It wasn't a complete dead loss, but between that and the state of the economy in both New Zealand and worldwide, I really didn't get as much work as I needed, meaning a certain level of savings depletion and simple loss of energy: I ended the year absolutely exhausted and burnt out.

And then, of course, we had the health issues and the accidents: my partner ended up in hospital with an inflamed gall bladder that came quite close to perforating, and I got hit by a van while travelling on the motorcycle, totalling the thing and causing fairly extensive soft tissue injury. Between that and the stress, our health and fitness took a real hit.

The politics didn't help: it seems that Trump's election has not only put the lives of many of my trans friends at risk, it also seems to have empowered almost every ignorant chucklefuck out there to show their transphobia to the world. Now, for example, we have Simeon Brown and Winston Peters banning the prescription of GNrH agonists for delaying puberty in trans youth, simply because they've cooked their brains enough to convince themselves that established medical practice is somehow "woke" and that expertise is something that they can just trample over.

And then finally, I managed to once more catch a rejection from a full-time senior engineering role where my application was, by the admission of the hiring managers, very strong, for reasons, once more, of "team fit and experience" (subconscious transphobia). Had I been in a better space overall, this might have been more or less fine, but after this year, with fourteen of these kinds of rejection where I have clear evidence that my application was actually really strong happening over the last two years, it really did break me. I simply don't know whether or not I'm actually employable in a full-time role at all any more, and that's a pretty bleak thought.

... suffice to say I'm very glad that the year is over.

I will say that it's not all been bad: I've been lucky enough to be a part of a very strong and startlingly accomplished professional and intellectual community over the last year, and I'm increasingly being taken seriously as a commentator on tech and culture, which is nothing if not gratifying. It turns out, as it happens, that people who are themselves clever and accomplished think you do good work does wonders for a girl's self-esteem. I've also learned something from this year, even though the suffering was gratuitous: I am capable of surviving some truly terrible shit, and even if I take some damage, I will endure. Also, I should put more effort into self-care.

My intention for this year is to prioritise my health and well-being quite a lot more than was able to this year: I'd like to find enough work to at least be able to not fret so much as I have been this year, and to be able to go away for a holiday, even if it's a cheap one. I also want to start swimming again, get regular cardio in and just generally get back to a healthy routine. My hope is that if I can do this, I should also be able to build on the things that I have built this year and see some of the effort that I've been putting in start to pay dividends.

In short, I'm glad I lived through this year and I have some grounds for hope in the year to come, but holy shit, that was not necessary.

Writing

As much as most of this year has been quite regrettable, my writing has been pretty successful. My main gripe going into 2025 was that my writing lacked unity and that I didn't really have a clear voice, and while I still write about quite a wide range of topics I think I'm starting to develop the outlines of a voice and a general thrust for my writing. The fact that my blog currently features both content marketing stuff and long-form essays is a little odd: I don't mind it exactly, but I'm considering mirroring some of the more marketing-oriented stuff on a website with nothing but that so that people who wish to work with me can be funnelled to the correct place more effectively. But I don't know...

I produced a decent volume of essays this year (roughly one per fortnight, I think), and a fair few of them seem to have landed quite well. They're also, on the whole, becoming both longer and more complex, which I suppose is good for my academic audience but that is probably bad for developing wider reach. Writing more in-depth analysis is a lot more satisfying than some of the shorter vignettes I was doing earlier, and it really does seem that that is, for better or worse, kinda my voice. While my writing is a lot better than it was when I started, I still get irritated by some of the clunkier and less felicitous sentences that I wind up producing. We can only hope that either this goes away with time or that I start earning enough to be able to afford an editor.

Looking at the year-end accounts, I've passed 100,000 unique visitors, and by quite a bit (I don't have exact traffic numbers due to a bit of data loss, but oh well). I currently have 268 people on my email list (my audience on social media and RSS has also expanded significantly), and I've even been lucky enough to have thirty or so people support me via Patreon and Liberapay and even more support me through one-off donations via Stripe. Aside from the fact that this has helped keep the household afloat during what has been a very hard year, knowing that people, for whatever reason, like my work and think it's good enough to support is a remarkably effective motivator. So, sincerely, thank you to everyone who has supported me or my writing in any way over the last year: I cannot stress enough how much you have helped.

My most popular articles

An essay on wank

This was probably the big stand-out of the year. It started out as an attempt by me to pinpoint exactly why so many political positions that I nominally agree with really annoy me when generally expressed. The line of argument I took was that a lot of what is said is, in fact, an elaborate form of self-soothing mechanism disguised as objective political positions, which I decided to call wank, as the word is already somewhat associated with self-indulgence and irritation in general.

This one seems to have struck a nerve: it's recently passed 45,000 page views, did the rounds on social media and has led to a noticeable increase in the size of my audience. I have to admit that I was a little surprised by this, as it still has some clunky constructions and a fair few sentences that don't flow as I'd like, but I guess the content of the thinking must have carried it across the line. Of course, it's also now permanently shifted my perspective of what a successful article looks like, and I'm likely to spend much of this year chasing that high again.

What a CTO should know about tech

This was originally written as a content marketing piece, of all things: the article used the lens of military theory to discuss the extent to which CTOs do or don't have to be "technical" as such. It initially did good but not unusual traffic, then a few weeks later it got picked up by the tldr.tech newsletter and blew up a little bit. Another article that I wrote in the same vein seems to have done quite well as well, and given the particular audience that this article is catching the attention of, I might do worse than to write another few of them. It helps that they're quite a bit easier to write than the long-forms too, as they don't take quite so much research or analysis.

Keeping up appearances

Coding in a material world

These two were written at what felt like the low point of the year in terms of American politics and tech, when the AI boosters were at their stupidest and it felt the most like they might actually fuck things up permanently. Together, they discuss the obsession of most of our tech leaders with status and image at the expense of substance or actually doing things right, which is, of course, still a massive issue that we're suffering from.

New things that I tried

Altman's Schwarzgerät

This article was me attempting to do some more explicit writing about art and suchlike: I make a fair number of implicit references in most of my stuff because that's just the kind of girl I am, but I do want to talk more about literature and music in general (which means I really need to read up on some music theory). This article thus had me look at our modern LLM tools through the lens of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It was, to be fair, a bit of an acid trip and is aesthetically lacking in some ways that irritate me, but it's also done some things which I think were quite new and interesting for me, and that I'm keen to explore further.

R the Software Way

I've also, as of last month, started a book project! I'm of the view that given that I've attracted a fair number of academics to my audience, and that many of them use R as a statistical tool day-to-day, I could do worse than to write a book that teaches experienced R users how to write R in the style of a software engineer. This has obvious benefits reputationally in that it will (hopefully) mark me out as being a properly excellent engineer, and one can hope that it might lead to the production of some useful marketing collateral as well.

Beyond that, writing a textbook has actually been quite a lot of fun: figuring out what it makes sense to teach first and what skills are properly vital for writing good software has been a really interesting exercise, and beyond that, I'm finding that the process is actively making me a better developer as well. If you ever want to get really good at a technology or a set of technologies, I can wholly recommend writing a book on it.

Goals for 2026

I'm going into 2026 with a fairly solid foundation for my writing and a number of exciting projects planned. My first two long-form essays are intending to be one about kitsch in software and the aesthetics of software more generally, and another about substance and accidents in the career sphere. I've also obviously got the R textbook in progress, and I want to pull together some more of the kinds of things that your smarter kind of executive finds edifying: after all, a girl's gotta eat, and if I can write some things that land with them, this might help considerably towards that goal. I'm thinking that a buyer's guide to consulting and contracting software engineers might be a fun first one to do.

I'd like to write more about art and culture as it relates to tech, and in particular about music this year: it's fun work, it says interesting things and it seems to be quite popular with my audience. As you can see, I already have the kitsch piece lined up in this vein, and I think it might be fun to write at some point about how learning Latin made me a better programmer.

Thinking more broadly, I'd like to be able to get a few pieces published in more established publications: Liberal Currents is one in particular that I have my eye on, and if my readers have any other suggestions for where to look, I'd love to hear them! The hope is that this will do both my reach and my reputation as a writer some good, and help me grow my audience further.

Finally, I've mentioned above that I've had some success with people supporting my writing. While I am quite frankly hoping that the new year will bring much contracting and consulting work because making a living as a writer is a right headache, I think it would still be wise to build up my existing writing as a secondary income source. I've managed, as noted earlier, to roughly quadruple my income and email audience over the last year: if I could repeat that feat in 2026, I would be in the territory of writing income covering between a third and a half of my income, which in these difficult times is quite a significant thing. I'm thus aiming to see if I can pass 1,000 mailing list subscribers and 100 regular financial supporters this year, which given last year's data seems as though it should be mostly achievable, if ambitious.

Work

Work in 2025 was a definite struggle. While I had a few small contracts come through, I can't exactly say that I earned enough this year to be properly comfortable, and the goal is definitely to get more coming in this year. Part of this is no doubt thanks to the somewhat parlous conditions for the tech industry in 2025 and the associated mass delusion that LLMs seem to have prompted in tech leaders (because of course they hate workers enough that they'll see the world burn before paying us what we're due). I also, as you might have surmised if you're a regular reader, have certain personality traits that make marketing and selling myself more difficult than it could be.

Fortunately, I got my hands on some of April Dunford's books over the holidays, and I have consequently been able to reframe my marketing and sales pipeline in a way that, mirabile dictu, actually plays to my strengths rather than forcing me into my weaknesses (the basic argument is that sales is first and foremost education, and whatever else I am, I'm a pretty damn good educator). This will hopefully significantly improve the amount of work that I get coming in, so watch this space, I guess?

After the fuckery that this year has presented me with, I'm disinclined to actively look for full-time roles unless someone presents me with one on a platter, so I will be looking first and foremost at consulting and contracting in the data and infrastructure spaces. The small Shopify contracts that I did this year were fun and I'm not against them, exactly, but I don't think actively hunting them down is a good strategy for me. Still, taking Dunford's framing-first approach into account, I have a decent framing that I think will work for some more solid contracts. One that I can turn into infographics, even!

On the smaller-scale end, I've had some success last year with private coaching for people who want to elevate their engineering practice. I wasn't initially hugely specific, but my hope is that this year with the R the Software Way project as a marketing tool and focusing in specifically on R users, there is hope that I'll be able to fill up my mentoring slate a bit more. Between that and writing income, that should at least bring in enough to keep me afloat.

Final thoughts

The watchword for 2025 was something fucking ghastly: the watchword for 2026 is "I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win". This year has been horrific: it's done lasting damage to all of us, including me (though I still feel like I got of lightly compared to a lot of people), it's going to take years to repair things and there's likely more pain to come before things start to become good again. But still, we're alive. We may look like we've narrowly survived a close encounter with an unusually large bobcat, but we're standing and we've managed to hold on to at least some of what's important. Now we can stand up, repair the damage and, by-the-by, start to move forward again.

Forward the armies of woke! May the retribution of woke 2 be swift and brutal!