I find the exercise of looking back on what you’ve done in a year very difficult. It’s easy to try to remember what the major events of the year were and then just think that I didn’t accomplish that much. I know I could always do more, but I also want to just take the time to be proud of what I did!
That’s what I want to accomplish in this post.
In late February 2025, I decided that I wanted to write a lot more and paint more miniatures, so let’s start with those two goals.
Writing
I wanted to write one blog post a week, and I’ve ended up posting 26, so half the initial target. But… this is a big improvement on the previous year! I wrote 20 posts in 2024, with 7 of them being simple puzzle solves, so 6 fewer than this year, and simpler ones.
The pace ended up being an average of one post every two weeks, but I’m glad I set up an ambitious target, it kicked me into gear to start writing consistently! My main trouble is still finding topics to write about, especially since I want to write more posts that are not related to tabletop games. I’m still often hesitant to write when I don’t feel qualified enough, but this is changing a bit.
My favorite post of the year is probably the one speaking about the no bug policy, the first software practices blog post. I’m really happy about this one because I felt a bit out of my depth when posting it. Am I competent enough? Were my justifications clear enough for others? It ended up being my most-read post of the year, with quite a few comments. Most of the comments were talking about how it wasn’t realistic in the real world, but there were just enough positive comments to also make me say that writing it was super worth it. And hey, if one junior dev ended up reading it and realized that maybe, just maybe, sometimes it’s ok to fix a bug without waiting two weeks for a prioritization meeting, then it would be even greater.
I really liked the Warhammer posts I wrote this year. I posted two battle reports with a custom layout for the last one, it’s still not stylized, just a layout so far, but I intend to turn it into a sick ass theme once I play a third game next year. I also have two entries in my Warhammer Army Project series, Symfony of Suffering, where I picked my army and painted my first 10 battle sisters, and No Pain, No Gain, where I added 9 penitent miniatures to my army. For this year, I hope to add at least two entries to this series! All of those posts are a blast to write because I’m such a fan of Warhammer, and writing one of those means that I either played a game or made good progress on my army.
I wrote two short novels in French: La couronne de Pharon and Le manoir maudit after some tabletop RPG games I played in. And published the scenario for a super small murder mystery one-shot I ran for a few friends. I DM-ed quite a bit this year, and I want to find a way to share some of my prep on my blog, even though I’m not sure how reusable it is for other DMs (my prep depends a lot on the players’ characters).
Painting
I was aiming to paint 5 minis a month, or 60 minis a year. And I smashed it! 92 miniatures painted this year! I’m really happy with that even though I thought it would look bigger in the picture tbh!
All the miniatures I painted this year (except one that I gifted).
I had an okay-ish start with my Warhammer army, but during the summer, I painted almost nothing and was heavily behind my target. So I decided to just paint something easy, some ladders for a board game I wanted to play again this year. It motivated me a lot! I painted 22 little scenery pieces for that board game, and I used the momentum to then paint 11 monsters for my Witcher board game.
I think that when I finish a painting project that gave me some difficulty (hard to paint, not satisfied with the results, trouble finding inspiration), I often don’t want to start something else after, and that’s what kills my progress.
Once I managed to start painting again, I ended up painting a few minis for 3 different games here and there, one gift for a friend’s birthday, and tons of scenery for my next Warhammer games. I even did a small rush to paint 13 barbarians and 10 fences in a few days to get ready for a game.
So I think from now on, every time I don’t have a painting project started, and I don’t seem to find the motivation to start anything, I’ll just grab a few very easy miniatures and do them, which should help me make progress on the rest.
This year, I’d like to paint at least as much. 90 miniatures will be the new target. I’ll focus on:
- my Adepta Sororitas army
- Monsters from The Witcher Old World
- and miniatures that could be useful for RPG games, if possible, from games that I play often (OrcQuest, Assassin’s Creed, or some Warhammer quests ones)
Miscellaneous
That’s it for the two big things that I wanted to improve on this year, but I did more than just write 26 posts and paint 92 miniatures!
This year, I was pretty regular with physical activity. I climbed quite a bit and started running more consistently. I want to continue on this trend. I think I can improve a lot by just being intentional in my training. Right now, I either just run or climb. I’m not practicing or targeting a specific skill with intent. To help on that front, I registered for a 10km race next month, so this gives me a good objective for the start of the year on the running side.
This year ended up quite poorly, programming-wise. I worked a bit on my blog and finally completed my cyberpunk-themed project page, which I like a lot! On top of that I did a small website to log my miniatures collection. But that’s pretty much it, no new macOS app or Chrome extension, not a lot of flashy things to share on this side.
I want to do more of that next year. I think I’ll start by reviving my board game logging app, and I want to finally create something for tabletop role-playing games. I already have a few ideas, and I think I mostly need to start and dedicate some time to it.
On the tabletop RPG side, this was a good year! I played in 2 or 3 intense games that lasted two days each and were super fun. I ran 2 short Warhammer adventures as a DM and played a few regular games as well, good stuff. I also organized a Murder Party event for a birthday with 18 people, which was really fun and took me a good chunk of December. I already have a few games scheduled in 2026, and I want to keep spending a lot of my time on that.
Time
Depending on your own schedule, you might think that I’m either doing a lot or not doing anything, but in all cases, this might look like I’m just adding a bunch of activities to do this year that I didn’t do last year, so where is the time coming from?
The secret is that I spend too much time on my phone and computer, not doing things that make me happy. The main culprits are scrolling X, YouTube, or Reddit, but it’s also just doing some Sudokus on my phone (instead of reading for example, which brings me more joy).
I want to fight this, and if I can replace half the time I’m spending on those activities by doing things I talked about earlier in the post, I’ll be in a great place to accomplish a lot more next year.