My favorite things from 2025

These are my favorite things from year 2025, which turned out to be a year of many changes:

1. Spending time with family & friends – as has been usual for the past couple of years, I went back home to Lima, Perú to spend the 2024 holidays with my family, and stayed for most of January there. Then, after a year of many changes, I went back again for the 2025 holidays, only this time I couldn’t stay as long because of another life change. Starting and ending the year in my home country, surrounded by family and visiting friends, has been a highlight of these past few years, and I hope I can continue to do the same for many years to come.
2. Finding a job, the reason I couldn’t stay for that long in Lima these last holidays. While it definitely makes it harder to keep up with the personal projects, it does feel good to have an income again and to not eat away at my savings 😅.
3. Having found my own place in a new city. The job required that I move countries again (to keep up the average of one country move per year 😆), but then it was up to myself to find a nice city to settle down, and I think I’ve found it in Zaragoza; let’s see how the next years unfold. (For the time being, I already found libraries and cafés, so I’d say it’s quite good.)
4. Music, as always. Not only my favorite songs discovered (or re-discovered) this year (and which I have collected in this playlist), but also the amazing NTS Radio, which has been soundtracking my mornings almost every day (I’ve become a fan of their Breakfast Show).
5. The few concerts I had the opportunity to attend: Primavera Sound Porto, the amazing, incredible, once-in-a-lifetime Oasis reunion 🤩, and finally listening to Elesky live.
6. My favorite podcasts and/or YouTube channels, an endless source of entertainment. Not only the ones I’ve been following for more than a year now, like 500 Open Tabs (which has an amazing Discord community!), Lateral or Los Malditos Podcast, but also the ones I’ve discovered this year, like the amazing Midnight Burger, The Dogs Were Good (Again), Doodle Gremlins or Tale Foundry (which I actually discovered in December 2024, it seems, but which I mostly and thoroughly enjoyed las year).
7. Having finally published my new personal website (the one in which you are reading this right now!) & jumping in the Homebrew Website Club online meetups to find a nice community of other personal website enthusiasts.
8. A sort of predecessor of this website, I managed to keep going a second edition of the newsletter I ran through the summer of 2024; this new edition ran through the first three months of 2025 and was titled Dreaming of Summer. I have to admit I found it a little more challenging to keep it going (and not only because it caught me in the classic end-of-year madness), but it is still a good archive of interesting things I found; that same spirit is what I’m trying to keep alive with this website.
9. The few trips I managed to do: besides the ones needed to attend the concerts, I visited Barcelona for a couple days (and was amazed by the wonderful Casa Batllò at night), Zaragoza as well (which ended up being my home city), Bilbao a few (good) times with my brother and his friends, Madrid a couple times for the anniversary & Christmas dinners of my company, Helsinki & the fine city of Turku for a reunion of my masters, and Düsseldorf a few times, which were really nice opportunities to see my colleagues face-to-face.
10. The couple of Discord hangouts with the people from my masters, a very nice way we have found to keep in touch in spite of the distance and time zone difference. We chat, we catch up on our lives, sometimes we watch movies, but we always have a good time 😊.
11. Having my first paper published: Dynamic Test Case Prioritization and Selection for Continuous Integration Using Reinforcement Learning. It was a late but very welcome finishing detail to my academic sabbatical, only a few months after I returned to the workforce. I won’t completely dismiss going back to academia, but for now I am, once again, part of the corporate world 🏢.
12. Starting to learn German, because Spanish, English and a little bit of Italian were not enough, but mostly because the classes are free 😄 (thanks to my current employer). It is proving to be a challenging enterprise, stretching my brain in all the right ways.
13. Trying to recover the reading habit by purchasing a couple of books: The Summer Book, by Finnish author Tove Jansson, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, and El optimismo es para los valientes (Optimism is for the brave), by the great Ricardo Liniers, one of my favorite modern cartoonists.
14. Buying a new cellphone :D. Mine was already acting up and sometimes grinding to an unnerving halt, so I took the opportunity on Black Friday and purchased a Pixel 9a, which so far has proven to be an excellent choice (b’-‘)b. (No need to purchase the latest and greatest; one previous model is more affordable but equally good 👍🏼.)
15. Trying to also recover the baking habit, as a way to make my new flat into a home and befriend the house spirits 😆.
16. Turrón and tortilla de patata 😄 (turrón was a surprising hit with my family back in Lima).

Here’s to another year of adventures and nice things 🙌🏽