I wrote last year about my efforts to get my health back on track in 2024, and a big part of this was to exercise more. Walk more. Run a bit. Sit less. Move more.
Even then, I knew that the only thing harder than starting to exercise more would be to maintain that when it wasn’t a new thing. So… what happened in 2025?
I still miss Twitter, despite it being over two years since I left. My main replacements have been Bluesky and Mastodon, even though I don’t use them as much as I used to use Twitter.
Continuing my effort to save the end-of-year reports from my various homes across the web, here is what I get from Bluesky and Mastodon.
Another YouTube end of year recap – but while the last one was about what I’ve watched this year, this one is about what I’ve uploaded to YouTube.
I don’t really use YouTube as a platform in it’s own right – it’s just a free place to host videos I want to use to illustrate something in a blog post or show someone a screen-recording of how to do something.
I don’t upload regularly. Most of my videos don’t make sense without the context of the blog post or ML for Kids worksheet I created it to be embedded in.
All of this is to say that it’s hard to understand why I have any YouTube subscribers at all. But let’s see what YouTube has to say about them.
A gaming end of year recap – from True Achievements.
What does True Achievements think I’ve played on my Xbox this year?
(Spoiler… not very much, it seems. The TLDR is that I paid for a month of Game Pass in January so I could play Indiana Jones, and in May/June so I could play the new DOOM game… and mostly ignored Xbox the rest of the year. So these stats are a little thin.)
I’ve received another end-of-year recap – this time from YouTube.
What does YouTube think I’ve watched this year?
It’s December, which means it’s Spotify Wrapped time.
What does Spotify think I’ve listened to this year?
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.
Four were about Machine Learning for Kids:
Seventeen posts were about Kafka, Flink, or something else event-driven:
And I wrote five other posts to share other projects and random ideas.
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!
On Saturday, I ran the Maverick Dark Castle: an 11km night time trail run around Corfe Castle.
I’d not done a night run before, and had never run a trail run (needing to buy my first pair of trail shoes for this event!) so take my uninformed opinions here with a pinch of salt.
Running in the dark
The run started a little after 8pm. It is November, so that means it was dark. Very dark. The route isn’t lit, so head torches were essential to see where you’re going.
An uprooted tree was the biggest obstacle. Most of what we had to navigate were branches and tree roots… oh, and mud. So much mud.
Photo of me (I’m underneath the “ic” in “Maverick”) close to the start of the run. I think I love this photo not just because of the arty light from the flare but because you can’t see whatever stupid face I’m probably pulling…
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 
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 
npx dalelane 
Maverick Dark Castle 
A break in Devon 
Fun things to do with Strava