Better late than never! It's been a really big year. My wife and I had our first baby, we moved to New Orleans (temporarily), I gave my first in-person conference presentation (at RustConf) then flew to Vienna for my second (EuroRust). And Zoo has grown massively. So it's been a fun but crazy year.

Books read

Since moving to the USA in 2017, I've logged every book I read on my Goodreads.

Fiction (Stephen King)

• Mr. Mercedes
• Finders Keepers
• End of Watch
• The Outsider
• If It Bleeds
• Holly
• Elevation
• Later

Fiction

• The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
• Schild's Ladder (Greg Egan)
• Ghost Music (An Yu)
• After Dark (Haruki Murakami)
• Killing Commendatore (Haruki Murakami)
• Tokyo Vice (Jake Adelstein)
• The Last Yakuza (Jake Adelstein)
• Cuckoo (Gretchen Felker-Martin)
• Heaven's Net is Wide (Lian Hearn)
• A Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin)
• Fire & Blood (George R.R. Martin)
• Caesar (Colleen McCullough)
• His Dark Materials trilogy (Philip Pullman)
• Polostan (Neal Stephenson)
• Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)

Non-fiction

• Invitation to a Banquet (Fuchsia Dunlop)
• Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa
• The Elements (Philip Ball)

Recommendations

Overall I think I enjoyed all 3 non-fiction books I read more than any of the fiction. This is pretty unusual for me! I usually prefer fiction! But these three were all really interesting. Invitation to a Banquet claims to be about the history of Chinese food but it's actually a really good history of all China, overall. I hadn't really thought about how closely food is related to the rest of society. But once you think about it, it's obvious that food is one of the most important things a society has to control and manage. People die really quickly. So, it was a great and thought-provoking book.

Fukuzawa's autobiography is a fascinating history of Japan's transition from a classical Samurai-era society to becoming a modern state. This happened within a single generation, so people like Yukichi were born into samurai culture and died as administrators of universities who would telegram their peers in other countries. It's a really wild ride.

The Elements gave me a huge appreciation for chemistry and materials science. It led me to take a blacksmithing workshop at a local New Orleans blacksmith so I could really appreciate the craft firsthand. It's a beautiful book of the history of society and how it's reflected both in our theoretical understanding of physics and our practical access to all kinds of materials.

Life

I'm a dad! Jordan and I had our first child this year. She's an incredible little girl. She's been sleeping and eating well, she's generally cheerful and happy. We took her on a plane to Sydney at the end of the year, and she was really well-behaved and easy to care for on the long flight. I cannot believe we have such a happy little baby.

We also moved to New Orleans for 12 months. Jordan got an internship at a local children's hospital to finish her psychology PhD. It's a fun city, and I'm glad we get to live here for a bit. But I am also very excited to move back to Austin in July.

Language

I didn't make much progress with language this year. I've maintained my Spanish but my Mandarin completely fell behind, because I didn't keep studying after the 101 course finished. Towards the end of the year I was accepted to speak at Rust Asia in Hong Kong, which gave me some more motivation. So I'm gradually working my way back up, via Duolingo and some private lessons with Mandarin teachers online.

Games

This year I spent most of my gaming time playing the Elden Ring DLC, Satisfactory 1.0 and Returnal. I also really enjoyed Rise of the Golden Idol and the Riven full-3D remake.

Career

This year's been a quiet year on the blog, because I've finally achieved a big career goal: I spoke at an in-person conference! In fact, I spoke at two: both RustConf and EuroRust. This has been a bit of a dream ever since I went to my first tech conference in 2016 (KiwiCon in New Zealand). In fact, because I finished this blog post so late, I may as well add that I spoke at Rust Asia 2025 last week. Speaking at 3 conferences across 3 continents in a single 12-month period is pretty crazy considering I'd never spoken at a single conference before. I had a really fun time travelling around the world, especially hanging out with conference friends like Predrag.

I was also interviewed on Developer Voices by Kris Jenkins. DV has become my favourite tech podcast, so I was really honoured to be invited on.

I'm still working at Zoo where we're building a new CAD suite for the 21st century (and 21st century hardware). Still really enjoying it! The work is a bit stressful right now because we're trying to finish our roadmap and release 1.0. Startups are a lot of fun and I'm really glad I work here.