2025 Wrap Up
2025 wrapped up a couple of days ago, and honestly that was one of the hardest years ever. While 2024 was the year I got laid off, and hiked the PCT, drove around and camped and the year I incorporated Basweight, 2025 was the year the bill came due and I had to acutally try and make Baseweight a real business. Unfortunately I failed at doing that because I couldn't figure out how to build a startup in Vancouver. The reason being that Vancouver is a terrible place to build anything. I'm not going to say that Canada is broken, but I'm definitely going to stay that Vancouver is.
The first problem that I had was that I needed to find a business friendly co-founder. The thing is that I'm definitely not business friendly enough. I'm good at writing code, and putting things out into the world, but I'm absolute shit at self-promotion. It's probably due to my utter lack of tolerance towards people who are absolutely full of shit and who I view as not worth my time. I have no desire to do business with people who follow the whole Silicon Valley VC drama and believe everthing that billionare VCs say. The first thing that you have to remember is that you don't have to agree with people that you take cheques from, but they have to like you enough and you have to actually have a business. I just have a bunch of cool tech demos. To be clear, I also don't see how most of the OnDevice startups that appeared over the past year even have an actual business model or product, because you need customer demand. That's probably because I saw how PhoneGap happened, and I know that Nitobi itself was a bootstrapped consultancy that ran an open source project as a loss-leader for its consulting business and that we had to take on startup clients whose ideas were super niche and occasionally half-baked. The reality is that you need customers somehow, and chances are, you're not going to like your customer. If your first instinct is like mine and you think "are you fucking kidding me" when you talk to a customer who has an absolutely dog shit idea, then consulting might not be the best thing for you. Although technically Baseweight is open for consulting. I'd rather work a day job where I know how I'll get paid over a consulting contract where I expect to take someone to collections for their "Labubus but AI" idea.
So, what's happening with Baseweight?
Baseweight will still exist as a vehicle for me to publish apps and launch experiments. The fact is that you have to have some legal entity that's responsible for fufilling a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy when you ship an app on the Google Play and Apple App Stores, and I will be shipping to the App Store soon. I'm not going to be seeking investment until I actually have real interest from a customer, or get a business/sales focused co-founder who can make this thing actually happen. There's no business here until there's a customer and a need. This is just tech demos to keep my technical skills sharp while I work in Engineering Management. I said that I would shutter the company if I didn't do anything with it after getting the job, but I think vibecoding and releasing Baseweight Canvas and delivering talks count as "doing something", so I'm not going to take it to the woodshed just yet.
OK, that's tech/business/whatever, what else?
2025 was a terrible year health-wise. Since I didn't have any revenue and was living off my savings for half the year, I spent all my time grinding on Baseweight or looking for a job, which I did eventually find. I didn't spend any time at the gym, and I might have rode my bike a half dozen times in the past year. I didn't go on any camping trips, and it wasn't until December that I decided to finally become more active and start trying to ski again because the inactivity was getting to me. I do both cross-country and downhill skiing, and I'm extremely terrible at both. However, I'm better at downhill skiing than I am at Snowboarding, so I'm sticking with skiing because I no longer feel like I'm a total social reject like I did when I was a non-skier. In 2026, since I have a job, I am trying to figure out what shorter trips I can do in the next month, and I'll hopefully get back out on the trail for a week or so. Given the current political climate in the United States, I will not be section hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and filling in the gaps of Washington State that I left on my thru-hike attempt in 2024.
In conclusion, I'm still very much trying to rebuild my life after the layoff threatend to end my career in 2024, and while 2025 was a better year in that regard, I'm not incredibly optimistic and I think 2026 will still be another year where survival is the focus than building. It'd be easy to talk about how everything is shitty and terrible, and I'm often tempted to sell everything and retreat to somewhere with a low cost of living and wait out the end of the world, but unfortnately the bills still need to be paid and I still have adult responsibilities.