2025 Year In Review

In 2025, I purchased a Claude Pro subscription. Guess when?

With tons of help from my new friend Claude Code, I started (because you never really complete) some fun projects in 2025:

• I created a Video Poker game that updates winning hand probabilities in real time as you select cards. I threw this together in a hotel room in Vegas in under an hour out of nothing but curiosity.
• At work, we spent a lot of time dealing with construction cranes appearing unexpectedly in our airspace. I thought, there has to be a data source somewhere I can use to automate this. It turns out there are three: 1) the FAA data object files, 2) the FAA OE/AAA database, and 3) NOTAMs. I built a website that lets you search for registered obstacles within some nautical miles of a U.S. address. Turns out most of the data sources are unreliable (especially during federal government shutdowns) but building the site and automating daily data collection and site builds was a fun exercise.
• I really miss Google Reader, and after trying both Feedly and Reeder, I was left wanting. After Google killed Reader, someone resurrected it for awhile as an open source project, but it hadn’t been maintained. I pointed Claude at that person’s code and added bells and whistles, and I now use it exclusively for my daily RSS reading needs. See GoRead2. I’m currently the only customer/user, but it is fully integrated with Stripe and supports a monthly subscription so in theory others could use it, too. I’m not exactly keeping it secret but it has not had a proper alpha/beta test so there are likely bugs to be found.

Those were the big ones. As for other major time savers with Claude and friends, I don’t write scripts anymore or spend much time caring about what data I need to extract from a database. I just select * from table_name, download everything as a CSV file, and let Claude Code figure it out.

Not sure what to expect in 2026, but happy new year to anyone out there reading this.