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2025 in Review: A Year of Growth, Resilience, and Practical Engineering

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By Billy Okeyo 4 min read

Who would’ve thought I’d open my editor on the 29th of December not to debug production or chase a failing test—but to write this recap? Because apparently, I enjoy explaining bugs to the internet.

If you told me at the beginning of 2025 that I’d spend the year writing about scalable systems, testing strategies, outages, performance optimizations, and developer excuses I would’ve believed you. If you also told me I’d still be debugging things that “worked yesterday,” I would’ve believed you even faster.

This article is a recap of everything I wrote this year: the lessons, the wins, the bugs, and the “how did this even pass code review?” moments. Think of it as a Spotify Wrapped, but for technical articles, minus the judgment (okay, maybe a little).

System Design & Scalability — Because Your App Will Grow (Whether You’re Ready or Not)

Summary: This year, I spent a lot of time talking about scalable backend systems — not because every app needs to handle millions of users, but because every app eventually meets its first “why is the server on fire?” moment.

Key lesson: Scalability isn’t about overengineering — it’s about not regretting your life choices later.

Testing — Trust Issues, But Make Them Automated

Summary: Testing dominated a good part of the year, mainly because nothing builds trust issues faster than code that looks correct but isn’t.

This series walked through testing from the basics to full CI/CD integration — because “it works on my machine” is not a deployment strategy.

Key lesson: Tests don’t slow you down — debugging production issues does.

Performance & Tooling — Making Code Faster Without Sacrificing Sleep

Summary: Performance optimization showed up in different forms this year — from modern runtimes to build optimizations. Because sometimes the app isn’t slow… it’s just doing unnecessary work very enthusiastically.

Key lesson: If users say your app is slow, they’re probably right. The logs just haven’t confessed yet.

Engineering Culture — Because Code Is Written by Humans (Flawed Ones)

Summary: Not everything this year was serious architecture talk. Some articles leaned into the very human side of software development — where excuses are plentiful and accountability is… negotiable.

Key lesson: If you’ve never blamed the cache, the network, or “some weird edge case,” are you even a developer?

Industry Case Studies — Learning the Hard Way (So You Don’t Have To)

Summary: One of the most impactful pieces this year was breaking down a real-world outage — because nothing teaches engineering humility like watching large systems fail in creative ways.

Key lesson: Distributed systems don’t fail loudly — they fail politely, globally, and at the worst possible time.

What 2025 Really Taught Me

If I had to summarize the year in engineering truths:

  • Scalability matters before users complain.
  • Tests are cheaper than apologies.
  • Performance issues hide in plain sight.
  • Systems fail — preparation determines whether you panic or recover.
  • Developers are predictable creatures with unpredictable bugs.

Looking Ahead

In the next year, expect:

  • More real-world case studies
  • Deeper dives into distributed systems and cloud patterns
  • Practical articles you can actually apply on Monday morning

Thank you for reading, sharing, and occasionally finding bugs in my examples (yes, I see you).

Here’s to another year of writing code, fixing mistakes, and pretending we knew what we were doing all along.

Engineering, Year in Review
Year in Review Engineering System Design Testing Performance Culture Case Studies
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.