Glorified Plumbing

Out with the old and in with the new?

I was raised in a culture where New Year was a time for renewal. It all centred around New Year’s Resolutions.

Resolutions were all about dropping bad habits and starting new disciplines: quit smoking, cut out fatty foods, jog every day. Yeah I’m so old that running for health was called jogging. Resolutions were announced loudly, often asked about, and mostly failed. I think they were really just another way for us Brits to be self deprecating, or something to talk about in winter other than the invariant weather, which alternated between “brass monkeys” and “nice weather for ducks”.

So, even after decades living in the colonies (or as the locals call it, The Bay Area) I see this as a time for reflection. Though I no longer make a pinky promise to commit, there is an underlying resolution that sticks: be better!

So, have I gotten better? I surely have. I finally got a handle on years of chronic fatigue and started managing my carb intake; “hangry” is no longer a daily adjective I subscribe to.

Professionally, I’ve improved technical skills and workflow. Partly from having time to do my job properly, partly trial by fire in new stacks at work, and partly because new tools have changed how I work.

The Great LabVIEW Adventure

One thing that’s been on my list forever was learning LabVIEW – not just using it, but really getting what it’s good at. I started years ago with Lego Mindstorms NXT and later with my BeagleBone Black. Both times, real life pulled me away before I could go deep.

This year, I finally had a chance to work with a real LabVIEW VI at the office. Let’s just say: it’s a weird, wonderful beast. The GUI composition is super fast, the wiring diagrams look familiar (data flow, signal flow, control flow), and then it starts getting funky. Think loops, state machines, global variables, and parallelism like I haven’t seen since LISP.

I’ll be posting more about that soon.

Second Year Working Alongside AI

There’s a shift in the workplace. Whether you want it or not, AI is here.

I’ve now spent two-years with AI tools in my workflow. 2024 saw me swapping 40-minute Stack Overflow expeditions for quick, targeted queries to ChatGPT. Claude joined the mix in 2025, and it’s changed how I think about documentation, test planning, and implementation.

These tools aren’t perfect – you still have to stay sharp – but they’ve helped me shift time from boilerplate toward architecture and systems thinking. I’ll share more soon on how Claude, especially, is changing how I write and test code.

Wrapping Up

No resolutions here. Just looking back over the rabbit holes over I explored this year.

In a year where I changed employers, picked up that Staff title I was after, and landed a 5-mile commute, I still count “lessons learnt” as my biggest wins.

I hope your 2025 was good and that your 2025 will be even better.

Happy New Year!