Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)
A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. All of the posts are available at the 2025 in Review series page.
As usual, writing made up a huge part of my work — though not the sort I get paid for — this year. Between an article for Christianity Today, my music newsletter, and this site, I ended up writing around 85,000 words all told: no small feat in a year filled with many other responsibilities! I’m always surprised at the end of the year to see just how much writing I have done. At some point I should stop being surprised.
Elsewhere
A few years ago, I set myself a goal of publishing at least one essay each year somewhere not my blog. I managed it again this year: I was published in Christianity Today, for their July/August 2025 issue on AI: Don’t Conflate Intelligence with Value. Being published in a major magazine was a nice milestone, and I was glad to contribute to an area where my fields of expertise overlap such that I have something valuable to say.
My other major publishing win this year is that Carol Nichols and I also finished a major revision pass on The Rust Programming Language book this year, including the brand new chapter I wrote introducing async and await. The online version is largely up to date with our revisions. Meanwhile, print and EPUB versions of the new edition will be out in February, with EPUB actually available in early access now. (If you prefer either of those to the online version, you can buy them from NoStarch here.) It’s a great feeling to have all that work out in the world, and soon to be out in the world physically.
Music newsletter
Another major outlet for my writing this year was my music newsletter. I managed to keep up my streak from last year and publish every month. All told, I wrote 21,099 words in the regular issues, with another few hundred words for the short issue where I announced the release of Holy Saturday — EP. As I mentioned in the year-end issue, having the forcing function of writing monthly was really good for me. If I am going to send something into the world, I want it to be worth reading. That meant I needed to be thinking throughout the month about what to say. It also incentivized me to do the writing sooner than the deadline, because getting it out on time was a near thing several months, and an outright miss once or twice.
The blog (a.k.a this site)
As usual, a good bit of writing here: 63,357 words this year. (Amusingly, that number grew by about 8,150 words from the time I started writing this series to the time I finished it. This is always one of my highest writing times of year.) That’s in line with most “normal” years for the past half decade. For comparison:
| 2020 | 60,069 |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 44,442 |
| 2022 | 39,603 |
| 2023 | 55,658 |
| 2024 | 79,885 |
This year’s count is very close to the average of the preceding 5 years, so no major surprise here!
The more interesting bit is how dramatically the frequency and volume of my writing shifted when I started my new role at Vanta in April. I published 32,618 of those words, or about 52%, from January through April. What is more, the post-April word count includes the full text of my LambdaConf keynote, Infrastructure, Common Goods, and the Future of Open-Source Software (also covered in my Public Speaking post). No surprise that my writing dropped off dramatically after April: a full-time job takes a lot of time, and my writing volume prior to that was aimed in part at helping me land a new job.
The posts I published this year I am proudest of:
- “Working Effectively” Instead of “Productivity”: a helpful shift in language as a way of thinking more clearly about what I do.
- This Is Not Your Last Job: a call to learn what is professionally interesting to you, regardless of its “value” to your current employer.
- The Essence of Successful Abstractions: writing down one of my software design heuristics in a way that I can share with others.
- Big Packages or Many Dependencies: a foray into a then-hot, now-simmering argument across a number of language ecosystems about using external dependencies.
- How Progress Feels: on what improvement in a discipline — any discipline! — feels like.
- Own Your Music: because you may lose access to your favorite music if you rely on the streaming services.
- Yes, Hallucinations are the “Least Dangerous” — Exactly: on how we ought to think more clearly about the problems with LLMs.
- Some Products Just Aren’t Big Companies: on Mozilla’s horrific mishandling of their acquisition and slow killing of Pocket.
- Software, change, stability, imperfect markets…: on 1Password as synecdoche for how companies can leave behind their original and most loyal customers when chasing size.
- Context and Trust, or: Test Suites Reflect Teams: responding to a post making what I took to be some pretty bad arguments about automated test suites for software (old-school blogging at its finest!).
- Naming Policy: ‘Large Language Models’, Not ‘Artificial Intelligence’: just what it says on the tin, but also why.
- Reversion to the Mean: on LLMs being very poor editors if you have any style of your own.
- Friendly Little Wrapper Types: writing down another one of my software design heuristics.
Public theology?
One notable absence from the blog this year is much writing on theology or ethics. These continue to be major considerations of mine, and I spend a good deal of time talking about them privately. I am in the midst of what seems to be a decade-long transition in my public posture on them, though. I am very happy to write about these issues (see: being published in Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, and Christianity Today) but I find myself very much in flux in how I write about them here. This is a bit ironic, since the early days of my blogging were almost entirely about those themes.
That is actually a big part of why I find myself in flux in this area. I am keenly aware of how much I opined with relatively little knowledge in the late ’00s and early ’10s, and am only that much more aware of the limits of my knowledge now. I have some small degree of expertise in theology and ethics by dint of my M.Div., but the emphasis here ought to be on the word “small”. I still read omnivorously, and a great deal of my essay-reading in particular is theology and ethics. I find, though, that where I have enough expertise to dash off a post about programming with some confidence that it will be helpful even if it is “thinking out loud” I do not have that confidence about off-the-cuff theological or ethical writing.
I also find this complicated by my very mixed audience! I know that many of my readers are orthodox Christians, but that many are also not, and addressing both parts of that audience well is very difficult. Assumed Audience headers only go so far. Part of what makes it easier to write for e.g. Christianity Today is that I can assume many more shared commitments. On the other hand, I want to do public theological writing for the good of the church and the world.
Perhaps I should write on these things more, then, despite my sense of just how much I do not know. Expertise is always relative, I can always provide appropriate caveats, and I know from many a conversation at church that I do have things to share for other Christians that are not “mainstream” knowledge for them — and I find the same is often true when talking with friends who are not Christians. The trick, I think, is growing some confidence in posting on such things simply by doing it, as well as finding the right “register” in which to write about them again.