2025 in Review

Dec 18, 2025

Daniel Pepuho

IT Infra. Lost in the Cloud(s)

A small retrospective of this year. 2025 was a quiet year for me. It didn’t move fast, and it wasn’t very linear. But many things happened.

📍 Port Numbay.

The morning I still carry with me.

Writing, Work, and Study

At the start of the year, I was writing technical blog posts regularly (2 times a month), mostly about Kubernetes, Docker, and infrastructure. Writing helped me think and document what I was learning Midway through the year, I had to slow down. My thesis needed more focus, and at the same time I was working with SPMB JATIM, running infrastructure for a public enrolment system. It was my first time handling a production app on GCP by myself. Balancing work and my thesis was tiring. It wasn’t technically hard, just long and mentally draining. Progress felt slow, and motivation came and went.

Finally, I finished and received my degree after 5 years. Graduation felt like relief, like closing a tab in browser that had been open for too long.

After that, I returned to writing. I kept writing technical articles, but I started to feel that writing only technical content was becoming repetitive. I didn’t want to stop writing. I just wanted to write differently.

Open Source

I made small contributions to projects like kubernetes/@minikube and @PapuaOpenSource. Nothing huge mostly fixes, documentation, and small improvements but it helped me stay connected to real-world systems, work with ma friends, and build something for our people. Still learning, still connecting.

Speaking

One meaningful moment this year was speaking at AWS Community Day 2025 in Jakarta.

I also submitted other talk proposals that didn’t get accepted. That was okay. Trying still mattered. Maybe next year.

What I Wrote in 2025?

I wrote several posts about Kubernetes, infrastructure, server-side topics, and personal experiences, 13 in total. Not much, but still on target.

Some of those posts are also posted on dev.to and Medium.

Closing

What’s next?

Next year, I don’t really know what it will look like. I think I’ll be busy with something new. But yeah, I want to finish the Kubernetes Series from 106 to 109 and then start a new Kubernetes 201-20x series. I’m also interested in exploring MLOps and LLMs.

I wanna try something different. To be honest, I’m getting tired of writing only technical posts. Maybe I’ll write more personal ones too. About everything around me, about my people.

About Open Source, I wanna more next year. Not just contributing when I have time, but trying more consistently building with ma friends, maintaining what we’ve started, and bringing something useful back to our people.

2025 taught me a few things:

- Finish what I started, even if it’s too late.

- Changing direction doesn’t mean starting over.

- Consistency matters, even if it’s just a small step a day.

- Growth doesn’t only happen behind the keyboard, it also happens when you step out and speak.

Nothing too dramatic. Just steady progress.

Huge thanks for taking time to read my review of this year. Good luck in 2026.

HELEM FOI!