Year in Review 2025

Year 2025 was a busy year: music, playing, writing, listening, building; hacking, building apps, programming languages, giving talks; tennis and pickleball; cooking burritos and pizzas and manhattans; travel, Chicago, Amsterdam, Lisbon, SF, Cincy; collecting watches.

Some of our stuff from this year:

• NextRally. Aimee's tennis tools.
• Panana. Aimee's pickleball-scheduling app, for iOS and Android.
• bamusic.xyz. Brian's music.
• Rustmax. A growing collection of Rust resources that encapsulates much of Brian's Rust knowledge.
• Datalove (password "love and data"). A statically-typed interactive scripting language with advanced type system and compiler features that balances strong typing with ergonomics and fast startup time.
• Building a TigerBeetle Rust Client. Brian did a programming project on stream this year.
• Toolchain Horizons. A talk Brian gave in SF about dependency-toolchain compatibility.

🔗New stuff we tried

Supported local sport team: Colorado Rockies. They keep losing :P

Participated in Denver Bike Fest 2025.

Rodeo event during the National Western Stock Show. We learned that people don't take off the Christmas lights here until the stock show finishes.

Aimee joined pickleball ladies' Christmas party and brunch party. We went to a friend's Oscar viewing party so we dressed up. Brian won the prize -- an Oscar trophy made with chocolate. We are ready for another Oscar viewing party 2026.

Brian began to build his own watches.

🔗Travel

We went to Berkeley, CA early this year for vacation. It rained for the whole week we stayed -- it was lovely, and we needed the moisture coming from Denver.

We visited Chicago and liked the city planning, but not the weather or old feeling. Brian had a few short trips alone to Cincy and SF this year.

Our biggest trip this year was the round trip to Europe: Denver -> Brooklyn -> Amsterdam -> Lisbon -> Boston -> Denver.

We had an authentic hotpot in Brooklyn, loved Amsterdam's architecture and city planning, hated Lisbon, and enjoyed the Boston music scene. More about Amsterdam and Lisbon.

Brian on a bro trip to Santa Cruz with buddy Jason! Brewgrass festival — bluegrass and beer heck yeah.

We visited SF for the music events and went to the restaurant where we had our first date.

We spent Christmas with Brian's family in Cincy.

🔗Cooking

We have been quite into peppers, especially poblano and jalapeno peppers. We made the best hummus (2025 version), flatbread. We made our end-of-the-year lasagna this year.

🔗Recipe: Best Hummus 2026

• 1 can chickpeas drained
• ¼ cup+ runny tahini (not thick chunky tahini)
• 3 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 clove garlic, pressed
• ½ tsp salt
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• ½ tsp coriander
• ⅛ tsp cumin
• cold water

Tahini sauce first: whisk everything but the chickpeas until smooth and creamy. Add drops of cold water as you go: it will clump and seem hopeless, slowly stir in cold water until smooth and creamy.

It should be a perfect emulsion: starting with a perfect emulsion is the path to finishing with a perfect emulsion. Incorporate the chickpeas in 4 batches. Immersion blender. Blend each batch until final consistency before proceeding, scraping down sides of bowl in between. Taste each batch and add small qtys of lemon juice and salt each time. Add small quantities of cold water to achieve desired consistency. By the fourth blend it will be perfect.

Note on seasoning: the lemon juice and salt are your big levers. This recipe is tuned to what we like. Might be best to start at 2 tbsp lemon juice and ¼ tsp salt.

Pour artfully into large shallow bowl, top generously with olive oil, a heaping pile of Best Mediterranean Salad 2026, top with toasted pine nuts, optional dash of za'atar, serve with side of Best Pizza-dough Flatbread 2026 and some scoopy veggies.

🔗Recipe: Best Mediterranean Salad 2026

It's so easy and fresh.

Cucumber, tomatoes, red onions, chopped.

Dressing: about half lemon juice half light olive oil, whisk season with salt and honey or other liquid sugar.

Toss lightly.

Augment with feta, kalamata olives, toasted pine nuts, pickled stuff.

🔗Recipe: Best Pizza-dough Flatbread 2026

(This specimen, topped with za'atar, was cooked long at high temp and became crackers).

We get serious mileage out of the King Arthur neapolitan pizza dough recipe that comes on the flour package.

It's this:

• 2 cups (232g) King Arthur ‘00’ Pizza Flour
• 1/8 teaspoon instant yeast or active dry yeast
• 1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoons (8g) table salt
• 3/4 cup (170g) water, lukewarm, (105° to 115°F)

We found measuring by weight worked better than by volume. It also took dozens of tries and experiments before getting the hang of it. But now it's pretty easy to make a batch of several pizza doughs with less than a half hour of work, store them for a few days of bread.

The recipe as stated makes two thin flatbreads for us. It can also make one substantial pizza.

We work this dough for about 5 minutes by hand, form it into a ball, pat it down with olive oil, place into bowl, cover and proof for 30 minutes. Then divide in 2 dough-proofing containers, place in refrigerator from 30 minutes to several days.

To get the perfect simple flatbread:

• Place cast iron skillet into oven
• Preheat to 480 degrees
• Roll dough flat and transfer to hot skillet
• Brush lightly with olive oil
• Sprinkle with sea salt
• Bake for 8 minutes, golden, faint touch of browning

🔗Racketsports: pickleball and tennis

Aimee started with tennis during summer and went all in. She played too many matches and got her name displayed on the club's community board. She broke the strings for the first time and got herself another racket for backup. Brian developed severe tennis elbow in his dominant arm and spent the year learning to play left-handed. Now he's a double-threat!

We play almost every day.

🔗Music

It was a big year in music, both playing and listening.

We saw interesting concerts, mostly jazz, at Yoshis in Oakland, Dazzle in Denver, Mike and Pattys in Bay Village, Boston, experimental bizarreness at the Berkeley campus.

Aimee has been learning fretless bass. We had a great SF adventure where we went to the 2025 Music Expo and then to a Michael Manring concert in Tiburon.

Michael Manring is a legendary bassist with a unique fretless style where he has double drop tuners on every string and uses them dynamically for performance. He performed at a tiny historic chapel in SF's north bay. The day of the performance was rainy and our ferry was cancelled. We finally found our way there and there were just a small handful of people who trekked out to see this grandmaster. We chatted with him and he was super charming and friendly. Amazing experience.

Brian only finished two full tracks, but published his own music website at bamusic.xyz. In addition to completed tracks it also has every intermediate rendering, including unfinished tracks.

🔗Gordon Goodwin at Yoshi's

First time visiting the legendary Yoshis jazz venue in Oakland. Neat venue, half restaurant, half auditorium. We didn't know Gordon Goodwin, but he's a pro big band leader, impressive stuff. I (Brian) assume he must be running one of the best big bands in the world right now since the genre is not popular.

🔗Berkeley campus

We just stumbled on this campus event where an experimental-music professor invited back all his favorite alumni to perform. It was weird!

🔗Michael Manring at St. Hillary's Tiburon

One of the most memorable adventures of our life and we only took this one picture of me leaving the outhouse next to the church.

🔗Dazzle Denver

Dazzle is one of a small number of modest jazz venues in Denver. We saw a few shows here this year. It's run by a local jazzman who performs on Mondays at the venue with his local big band.

🔗What's next in 2026?

We are thinking of visiting Canada this summer to escape Denver's heat. Other than that, probably just SF or NYC where there are the best hotpot.

We want to build more products while continuing to play pickleball and tennis.

We're working on live music performance, playing Song For My Father by Horace Silver, Aimee on fretless, Brian on keys and live sequencing.

Brian hopes to resume live streaming again, hacking and music.