In case this email reaches you still within 2025, here’s an important tip I picked up from Nic in Mastodon this morning:

Just before midnight on 31st December, raise your left leg.
That way, you’ll be sure to start the New Year off on the right foot.

I will keep that in mind as the clock approaches midnight.

I normally keep all the good bits from the web at the end of the newsletter but there’s one thing I discovered this week that I had no idea existed: a rare standup gig from young Victoria Coren Mitchell from 1992. It’s been in Youtube for a year and a half and somehow I had not seen it before. She is such a brilliant and sharp comedian and I absolutely loved her quick wits in that short gig. Probably the best thing I saw all year long.

December has been a good month for me. I’ve been on a holiday since Christmas Eve and will be for the rest of this week and I’ve had one of the best Christmas holidays I can remember. I’ve slept a lot and with high quality sleep and really vivid and real-like dreams and I haven’t been stressing out about stuff like I normally would.

Stuff I made this month

Advent of Code was the main thing in December this year again. I solved all 24 puzzles in 12 days and shared my solutions with educational explanations in my digital garden with hopes to introduce how cool Python is and how beautiful and easy to read the code written with it can be. I also wrote a retrospective once the calendar was finished.

IndieWeb and indie web were both a big focus on discussions I was part of in the web. Richard asked in his blog: “Would you still write if you had a single reader? And do you appreciate the readers you do have?” and I replied in About writing and audience.

Then I took part in IndieWeb Carnival for which V.H. Belvadi asked where we see the IndieWeb in 2030. I wrote about how I see the community myself and how I hope it stays open and encouraging. A follow-up discussion led me to write about how I see IndieWeb as a community of tool builders and why it’s important that we build our tools instead of just playing nice in billionaire-run walled garden.

Since it’s the end of the year, I wrote three pieces of reviews and retrospectives: one for a Pokémon TCG Progression Series we ran, one for games I enjoyed this year and my annual Year in Review that I published earlier today.

I’m a sucker for simple Christmas romcoms so I watched a ton of those leading to Christmas, sprinkled in with a few proper good Christmas movies.

Community activities

With archipylago, we organised a small Advent of Code jam where we got together with a few people to hang out and learn how to solve puzzles.

Turku ❤️ Frontend hosted our 10 year anniversary meetup and it was an emotional evening for me. After the tech talks, I gave an anniversary speech looking back at the past decade and my main goal was not to cry and I barely got through that.

The talks were amazing and we recorded them and published them online. And to be true to my habits, I documented the recording setup I’m using. My goal was to build a setup that doesn’t take a lot of space, is easy to take with me to an event and something I can run myself while MC’ing, socialising and even speaking at the event.

To finish up the year, we organised an afterwork after the Christmas to make new friends.

Lovely bits from the internet

Do you have a day to spend on a fun word association game? If so, 2025 is for you! It’s a game with 2025 buttons that are labeled with words, names or concepts and you need to combine them in 45 groups with 45 items in each by combining things two at a time. It’s a solid addition to my Word Games recommendation list.

Chris created a font out of his own handwriting and documented the process.

Ik ben geen robot is a Dutch short-film about a woman who fails a CAPTCHA and starts to question her own humanity. I love me a good scifi short story and this one was so well made and definitely worth checking out.

Neal, known for fun digital projects, published Size of Life, an interactive web app that shows life at different sizes compared to each other. I saw many people share it with a joyful comment like “this is what web should be for” and I agree.

Since 2015, Year Compass has been a recurring companion of mine at the end of the year to help me reflect on my year and plan for the next. If you’re at all into journaling or want to give it a go, take a look! It’s a free booklet that you can print out or fill digitally and it asks you questions about your past and upcoming year.

Here’s to a wonderful 2026! 🥂