Favorite Things of 2025

1Zpresso ZP6. My coworkers who are deep coffee nerds convinced me to get rid of my cheap spice grinder and buy a $300 heavy piece of aluminum to hand-grind my own beans every morning.

Arizona. It was my first time climbing here, east of Phoenix, at a crag called Homestead. I love the saguaro and the limestone tufas. Feels significantly different than Utah or Nevada.

Speaking of climbs, Bullet the New Sky at the New River Gorge: awesome climb in a beautiful place.

Claude Code. I’m on the more skeptical side of using LLMs in software engineering, but this helped me prototype a complex feature in a way I could not have done without it.

Controlled Pod Into Terrain, a podcast about aviation disasters with a perfect title. Funny, irreverant, scrappy, smart. They seemed to have stopped, sadly.

Crafting Interpreters, a lovely book about building interpreters and bytecode compilers. Perfect for spending thirty minutes every morning with a cup of (hand-ground) coffee.

Cyberpunk 2077, a game that puts an enormous amount of effort into the setting of Night City. I recommend turning off the minimap and riding a motorcycle everywhere; you’ll start building the map in your head. Keanu Reeves was excellent.

Geese, Getting Killed.

Listers, a movie about competitive birdwatching. Funny and earnest.

NBA playoffs. It was good, perhaps, that the Celtics lost early to the Knicks so I could enjoy the spectacle of the Pacers and Tyrese Haliburton. And to have it all come crashing down halfway through game 7 of the finals – incredible drama.

Pluribus. I like how – unlike Severance – there is a simple bluntness to what’s happening, and the mysteries live on the periphery.

Rumney, New Hampshire. Truly felt like my third place this year.

Survivor, seasons 1-10. The early seasons are great in that the players are not yet “good” at being reality TV stars – they are not as self-aware as modern contestants. Even the villians are not quite acting the villian. Most seasons are long, well-edited set-ups for thin veneers of loyalty to turn to backstabbing and selfishness, with rare moments of connection and even sacrifice.