Looking back over what I’ve put on dalelane.co.uk this year… I wrote twenty-six posts.
Not as many as I’d hoped… I want to try and write a little more in 2026.
Machine Learning for Kids
Four were about Machine Learning for Kids:
Exploring Language Models in Scratch with Machine Learning for Kids 
Introducing LLM benchmarks using Scratch 
Introducing Generative AI into Code Clubs 
“Shoebox”: an artificial intelligence history project Kafka
Seventeen posts were about Kafka, Flink, or something else event-driven:
Visualising Apache Kafka events in Grafana 
Using MirrorMaker 2 for simple stream processing 
Using time series models with IBM Event Automation 
Using annotations to store info about Kafka topics in Strimzi 
Understanding event processing behaviour with OpenTelemetry 
What are we missing in AsyncAPI? 
Turning noise into actionable alerts using Flink 
How to use kafka-console-consumer.sh to view the contents of Apache Avro-encoded events 
Event-driven sessions at IBM TechXchange 2025 
From Event Streams to Smart Streams : Powering AI / ML with your Kafka topics 
Using AI to augment event stream processing 
Triggering agentic AI from event streams 
Using event streams to provide real-time context for agentic AI 
Using streams of events to train machine learning models 
AI patterns in event driven architectures Personal
And I wrote five other posts to share other projects and random ideas.
npx dalelane 
Maverick Dark Castle 
A break in Devon 
Fun things to do with Strava Statistics
As this is the year of vibe coding, I asked Claude to create visualisations for some of the data from my WordPress database.
It generated dalelane.github.io/wordpress-year-in-review
Other than a couple of tweaks to index.html, I’ve uploaded this as-is – in the spirit of vibe coding I didn’t even read the JS and CSS that was generated. I’ve not done this before… it’s a weird feeling!
Tags: 2025-year-in-review