Intro
Now I've written like 3 whole ass retrospective blogs, and I'm not going to backdown from this tradition, even though the laziness is hitting me hard. So lazy that the indonesian language is not even written. Last year's retro was written mostly by AI, and I do think it was pretty silly. So this year, I'm going to write it myself, just because I got myself more spare time to write it (took lots of leave from work). I mean I still use AI, but mostly just for the autocomplete because usually the AI knows what I'm about to write (I'm not a clanker).
Enough yapping, here we go, 2025 retrospective.
Work and projects
To be honest I kinda forgor most events happened about work. Like of course I worked a lot, like aside from my full-time job, I did some projects, with my colleagues. Sadly there's this particular project that I was working on and was ambitious about it, but since it's like not paid and was really just like a spare-time project, I didn't manage to finish it this year.
Every week I said to myself, that I will try to finish it, but then I remembered other works that I need to do, and then I just forgor about it.
The project was kinda cool tho, it uses AI (yes it's llm wrapper) and we also tried to monetize it, I even registered for a Stripe account. Someday I will finish it for real (hopefully), and shared it in a new blog post.
Work wise, it wasn't that interesting, I mean I just worked hard, and that's basically it. Had some sharing sessions with my colleagues, and learned a lot from them.
AI and programming
AI is a bubble. Nahh just kidding, not gonna talk about that here. AI is a big thing in 2025, and I obviously utilized it a lot, like a lot more now than last year.
Vibe coding with Cursor IDE
Starting this year, I'm using Cursor IDE for literally everything. Mobile apps, web apps, web servers, scripts, you name it. It's a great tool, and I'm glad I discovered it and moved on from VSCode. Yes I know it's just a fork of VSCode, but idc what you guys think. I like it, and it's working great for me.
I tried to use Trae before, when it was still in beta. It was good but I still encountered bugs here and there. Once their beta ended, they immediately limit the shi out of the usage, so I stopped using it. If I were to pay for an IDE, why not just use Cursor? which was like the most popular AI-powered IDE at that time. Then I got their pro plan, and guess what? The auto mode is just crazy, like it makes me feel like it won't run out of usage. And if we don't use auto mode, there are lots of selections to choose from. Latest and greatest popular models are almost always available, and they got their own model called Composer, though I'm not sure if it's as good as the other models.
Of course, knowing the project context is important. If we understand the project and requirements, we can make better prompts and better instructions. It's also important to understand the code that was generated by the AI, and then we may modify it to fit our needs, or even write a follow up prompt.
Bun.js
Yes, I tried using Bun.js just because of the hype in Twitter (Sybau I'm still calling it twitter not X).
It's really interesting to me that the Bun team literally wrote the entire JavaScript runtime from scratch, with Zig. Their main selling point is that Bun is blazing fast, and they don't lie.
They also have their own libraries for managing S3, and is compatible with many cloud providers. I personally start using it for this very repo. Once I heard that Vercel already support the Bun runtime, I immediately migrate to it. I guess it's mostly because of FOMO, but it's a good tool regardless.
Money and wealth
This year I grinded a lot, and managed to save some money and invest it in the stock market, both US and Indonesian stocks. Lately, I discovered a good community that made me interested in learning more about trading in stock market. I did make some profit, and a bit of loss (learned my lesson lol). I can see myself getting more serious in trading in stock market in 2026. Hopefully I can make more profit for real this time.
I also learned more about credit card and its benefits. I've had credit card since like 2023 but I never really used it, since I don't really understand the benefits of using it. Basically we can get cashback or miles from using it, just need to be mindful about the spending and payment due date, so that we don't get charged with interest.
Misc
I will put things that I found interesting but don't really fit into the other categories here.
Starting this year, I'm using Raycast to enhance my productivity. It's a really, I mean really good tool for macOS users. I can peek my GitLab pipeline status from it, and also have nice clipboard manager built in. They got tons of extensions in the store, and I've experimented with some of them. One of my favorite is the image converter tool, because I often convert images to webp. You can also perform simple math operations, unit conversion, and currency conversion directly from the command. There are lots of other things that you can do with Raycast, and I'm pretty sure that I haven't even explored them all.
Another tool that I discovered this year is Obsidian. It's a really nice note-taking app that is very similar to notion, but it is free, lighter, and can be used offline. The notes are stored in a markdown file, and we can specify the directory and file name. We also can sync the notes to the cloud, but I'm not using that feature. It's also very customizable. There are tons of themes and plugins from the community.
I watched several anime and movies this year, and one of the most interesting ones is Jojo's Bizarre Adventure series. What else do you expect? It's a really good watch, especially part 5 (we don't call it season here). It's really a bizarre and golden experience to watch. Also I hated that One punch man season 3 got violated badly by JC Staff. No need to talk about it it's just horrendous. The manga is such a masterpiece, and the anime is a heresy. But hey at least the memes are hilarious tho.
Lastly, I want to give a shoutout to my girlfriend. She's been a great support to me this year. Always gave me motivation to keep going. Hopefully we can spend more time together in the future.
Outro
2025 was a year of growth for me. Learned a lot, discovered a lot of new tools, and I'm glad I was able to learn a bit about trading in stock market. This year I didn't write as many blogs as I wanted to, hopefully I can write more in 2026 (or 2027, and so on).