Now that wrapped and year summaries are so fashionable, I wasn’t originally planning to join the trend. In the end, the only summary I usually look at with real interest is the one on Spotify, to see everything I’ve been listening to (more than 72 thousand minutes and 499 different genres), and, of course, the one I consider the best of all: the one from my great friend Wajari, to whom I’ve been loyal for years, with his compilation of Google search trends.
Thanks to this gem I learn about great news, such as how to poop at work. Essential for any self-respecting professional.
But this year has had many good things and some not so good. And since I have a lot of entries in draft that I never end up publishing, this year I decided to write this summary and tell how my 2025 has been professionally and personally (even if it’s a bit of a lie because I’m dictating it to the computer).
Personal
Personally, I should say that I have done very well, but as in everything, there are nuances, and as the good Galician that I am, I will apply the “it depends” in all aspects of my life.
It has been a good year personally. But as the years go by and I keep adding candles to the cake, I am seeing that age not only counts for me, but also for those who come after me and those who are before me, my parents and my mother-in-law, who are already very old and that implies a series of things. This is both a good thing, because I am lucky to still be able to count on them, and a bad thing because of my physical and mental state, which is obviously not the same as it was years ago (my father is 93 years old).
This year it was time to renovate the office and, having to get rid of all the junk from about 15 years ago to paint and change the furniture, I have found boxes and boxes of contents of old devices, etc.. I have listened to my good friend Juan and, as surely none of these devices represents me enough to be in a museum when I am no longer there, they have gone to the trash. I have emptied more than 6 big boxes of all kinds of material and I have kept only some very specific things that I do like to keep and remember. Now I have a completely renovated office, desk and furniture, which I would like to think that it is the definitive one until I retire, so it should last another 10 or 15 years. Unless I win the lottery and leave it all behind.
Personally, this has been a big change. I had been with this same office since before I was self-employed. This is my second personal office and it will have to last until retirement.
11 years ago I wrote a letter to my future self in 10 years. I forgot to read it at the time and, with the cleaning of the office, we found it and read it a few days ago.
This gives a very different perspective from how I thought 11 years ago and surely how I will think in 10 more years, so I have yet to write another one for my future self in 10 years.
I was delighted to read this letter and see that some of the wishes have been more than fulfilled and that some of the other ideas I have put forward have not been fulfilled at all. I have gone a totally different route.
It is a very good experience that I recommend to everyone. Especially at the moment when you read the letter and see how naive or accurate your past self was.
This year I have also started going to the gym, although most weeks I am not meeting the proposed three or four days. My time and project management continues to fail me.
I have started private English classes with Ohia, who besides being a fantastic person, is a great teacher, especially if you belong to the technological world, because she adapts each class wonderfully. Let’s see if this 2026 I manage to correctly differentiate past -ed endings or it’s a losing battle đ.
I have also redone another of my tattoos that was more than thirty years old (it needed it) and I like the result. Although surely those who have seen it think it is religious in nature, it has little to do with religion and the meaning it has for me is very different, but that is something private and irrelevant to this entry.
In the family, my wife and daughter, everything is going fantastic. I am very happy and proud of the trajectory and progress of both of them, but this also remains in the private sphere (I am very fortunate).
I have little else to highlight on a personal level, except that this entire entry is a letter to myself; I don’t pretend to tell, show or discover anything new.
Professional
On a professional level it has been a good year; I continue with the same developments as in previous years and some maintenance, which is the scalable basis of the business. Fortunately, I am not short of work.
I do more and more joint developments with my partners Sonia and Wajari with whom I think we form a pretty complete team that works great. These are the advantages of partnering with two great cracks in their respective fields.
I had a mistake with a project from which in the end you end up getting good lessons; the problem was neither mine nor the client’s, simply after a few months working together, it turned out that it did not fit what they expected from me and what I was willing to do. You learn from everything and, in this case, my great learning has been that it is not always a problem of one of the parties, but that there are clients and developers for each case.
This year I started writing articles for WordPress.com and doing webinars. Thank you very much, Mon, for trusting me, and Ălvaro, for being there for every doubt and problem.
It has been an incredible experience that I will continue during this 2026 and I hope there will be some new project that I will tell you about.
In the end, the work of writing each article is much greater than I initially imagined: many hours of testing, searching and, although we use artificial intelligence to help us rewrite sentences, search for commands or collect data and ideas, AIs do not write for us (or at least they should not); they help us and complement the articles to make them better in form, but we have to work on the substance, structure and content.
It has been a fantastic experience and, since I had little time to write in this blog, at least this way I am writing articles that I consider quite interesting in the world of WPO and WordPress security.
For this 2026 I hope that some projects they had in mind will come out, such as one that I am particularly fond of and that was going to be done in 2017, but due to lack of time it never came to fruition. I think this could be the year and, if all goes well, it will see the light soon.
AI
Artificial intelligences are helping more and more in programming and day by day I realize that they are a great help, but not the solution. I am seeing very big problems of people who start programming because AIs theoretically do the work; people who take courses of all kinds without having the training in those areas. It’s as if I started doing design because AIs generate the end result for me…. We’d better not talk about what this would produce.
I am very excited about all the improvements and functionalities that artificial intelligences are bringing us and will bring us, but also a bit worried about all this amount of expert junk content that pops up behind every corner. Nothing new, whenever something new comes out, a thousand pundits pop up overnight.
I feel a bit of FOMO and not being able to keep up with the times, that I am lagging behind and that I am not able to advance as much in new technologies in general, frameworks, editors, automations, new developments, etc. as with the AI world.
There are days when that impostor syndrome is very much on the surface and I feel that I am doing a job that many other people could do much better than me. Although there are other moments when the experience of almost 30 years in the sector comes to the surface and when I solve problems that other professionals have not been able to solve, that impostor syndrome is more buried and I feel a little more satisfied with my work.
In addition to the office remodeling, I have also reinstalled my computer, which was due, and since I reinstalled programs, I have done a good restructuring to avoid as much as possible to dirty it with tests.
I have installed the essentials and, in addition, with Hyper-V, I have created two virtual machines. One with Ubuntu for all the desktop tests with Linux and another with Windows 11, so that, every time I have to test programs, I don’t have to do it directly on my computer and use this machine that I can restore to its previous state at any time or delete and create a new one.
All the development part I have centralized in an Ubuntu in WSL2. This time I have created three WSL2 machines. One for most of the management tasks that I do from Linux, another one only for the developments with VSC and Dev Containers inside this machine and the third one with a Kali-Linux for security tests.
I have also generated two new profiles of these same machines with light background only for taking screenshots; this has an explanation that will be seen in a few months, because so far I have never worked the console with light background.
Here I could talk a lot about the implementations of these Developer Containers and how I did all the development, the new tools I use, the changes made, the reinstallation, etc., but I’m not going to go into all those details, at least in this post, because it’s not something that has much to do with the 2025 summary.
WordCamps
2025 has been the first year in which I have participated in a WordCamp as a volunteer. It seems strange, because after so many years of attending WordCamps as an attendee, speaker and organizer, I had never been a volunteer and in this WordCamp Europe, in addition to being an organizer, as I needed some volunteers, I signed up and it was an incredible experience that I should have done many years ago.
This year I will participate again in the WordCamp Europe as organizer, I still have to be a speaker in a WordCamp Europe, but that is something I might do someday. Ohia has suggested it to me on some occasions, but I have the excuse that, being an organizer, I can not also be a speaker, so we will see if it happens in the future or not; at least for the moment, I do not see myself able to do it.
In 2025 I also went to a WordPress Day in Porto, another fantastic experience that, as always, was with my favorite WordCamp group, which we started in 2019 and in which Juan, Jorge, Wajari and I are. We will repeat this year at WordCamp Porto, WordCamp Europe and maybe some more. Many thanks to all three of you for these fantastic days spent on each trip; now that we have the one-key trick at home, the trips will be even more fun.
It has also been a good year for the Lugo Meetup, which I organize together with my colleagues Anxo, SaĂșl and Juanra, without them it would not be possible to hold this Meetup, since, being involved in more and more things, my time is becoming more limited than I would like. By the way, we’ve already had two editions of WordPress Day Lugo and I think it’s working very well. Thanks compis, for being there and making it possible for this small Meetup community in Lugo to keep running.
There is little more to tell in the summary of this 2025, without being an encyclopedia. As I said at the beginning, this is an entry a bit for myself, to remind me of things from this 2025 that I would like to repeat during this year and things that I have not managed to do and I would like to do in 2026. Things I’ve done well and things I should improve on. We’ll see how this 2026 goes, if at some point I do a summary and it doesn’t turn out like most of the WordCamp summaries, which I have in draft form and which have never been published.
A hug to anyone who reads me and see you in Lugo or at a WordCamp.