2025: London, Level 69, and Learning to Build with AI
If you'd told me at the start of 2025 that I'd end the year at Duolingo level 69 with a 567-day Spanish streak, I probably would've laughed. But here we are.
This year wasn't about grand resolutions or five-year plans. It was about showing up consistently, saying yes to experiences, and building things that mattered. Some wins were professional. Some were deeply personal. All of them reminded me why I love what I do.
The London Chapter
In spring, I took my oldest son to London for his 16th birthday. I wanted to give him a taste of city life, something different from our usual routines. What I didn't expect was how much I'd learn from watching him navigate an unfamiliar place.
We hit the classics - Tower of London, British Museum, Tate Modern (my absolute favorite), and traditional English cuisine in Bath. We rode double-decker buses and I taught him how to navigate the Tube. By the end of the trip, he was leading the way through station transfers with confidence. A true "student becomes the teacher" moment.
The highlight? His fascination with the differences in Coca-Cola (theirs is objectively better) and discovering the subtle variations at local Sainsbury's and Tesco stores compared to grocery stores at home. Sometimes the smallest observations are the most delightful.
Watching him move from uncertainty to confidence in navigating a complex system reminded me of onboarding users to new interfaces. You need clear signage, intuitive patterns, and room to make mistakes without consequence. Good UX design, whether it's the London Underground or a dashboard, is about building confidence through clarity.
567 Days of ¿Cómo estás?
Somewhere along the way, my casual Duolingo habit turned into a 2-year streak. Level 69. Every single day for 567 days.
Learning Spanish taught me something about consistency that translates directly to craft: progress isn't linear, and showing up matters more than feeling motivated. Some days I'd breeze through lessons. Other days I'd barely scratch out the minimum. But the streak kept me accountable.
There's a parallel to building products. Launch momentum is exciting, but it's the daily commits, the incremental improvements, the small wins that compound into something meaningful. You don't ship great software in bursts... you build it in iterations.
The AI Deep Dive
Professionally, 2025 was the year I stopped treating AI as buzzword noise and started actually using it.
I spent months exploring HuggingFace.io, training and working with open-source models. I built a system using Mistral 7b to parse company documents, storing them in a vector database, and prompting the AI to surface relevant information and generate summaries. I used Llama.cpp to create a ChatGPT-like interface that made it accessible for non-technical users.
It had been years since I'd touched Python in any meaningful way. This project brought me back and reminded me why I fell in love with programming in the first place: solving real problems with tools that didn't exist before. The learning curve was steep, but the ability to fine-tune prompts and work with local models felt like unlocking a new superpower.
For 2026, I want to go deeper. I'm planning to build a personal local server and really explore what AI agents can do. The potential for augmenting development workflows - not replacing them, but making them smarter...feels massive.
Shipping SportsFest Dashboard
The other big professional win was launching the SportsFest Dashboard, a multi-tenant SaaS platform that powers SportsFest's annual corporate beach team-building event.
We built a user-auth system where organizations can create and manage teams, with built-in tools for generating interest within their company. It's the kind of project that touches everything: authentication, multi-tenancy, state management, real-time updates, and user flows that need to work for both organizers and participants.
Watching real teams use something I built, seeing organizations rally around the event through tools we created, that's the validation that keeps me building.
What 2025 Taught Me
Looking back, the throughline is clear: consistent effort compounds.
Whether it's 567 days of Spanish practice, iterating on AI models until they actually work, guiding my son through an unfamiliar city, or shipping a SaaS platform, the wins came from showing up even when it wasn't glamorous.
The tech industry loves to celebrate overnight successes and dramatic breakthroughs. But most of what matters happens in the daily grind: the commits you make when you're tired, the lessons you struggle through, the problems you chip away at incrementally.
2025 was a year of building! Software, skills, experiences, and memories. Here's to more of that in 2026.