musicmatzes blog

Recently I came by a lot of blog posts and videos that recap on 2025, for example the one by Jan-Erik, and I must say I like the general idea of doing a recap.

So lets see what my recap is. I must say, I really have to think about it, because from the top of my head I can not think of that much. Doing a month-by-month recap is certainly not very fruitful.

Vacation in Great Britain

My highlight this year – or rather last year – was definitively my vacation in Great Britain.

My Wife and I flew to London and had three awesome nights in the Motel One Tower Hill. We visited the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Exhibition near London and it was absolutely fabulous. We strolled through London, saw Big Ben of course, the London Eye, visited the Sherlock Holmes Museum and the Frameless Experience. We had awesome Food during our stay in London! Quite contrary to what everyone said, the English Food was awesome – we only went to an Italian Restaurant once and resorted to English/Scottish Restaurants throughout our trip! This was definitively not a mistake.

Also, quite contrary to what everyone told us, the weather was awesome. We had sun every day and only had one day with light rain in Edinburgh, which is not that much for a two-week trip!

After our days in London we took the Caledonian Sleeper to Edinburgh. I did not expect to be able to sleep on a train, but I slept very well, although our compartment. We had a two-bed + sink room (yes, we did allow ourselves something here, but to be honest, it was not that expensive).

In Edinburg, we of course visited the City, the MinaLima House, had Haggis, saw the Castle – but didn't enter, because there was some festival and it was too expensive. We visited Craigmillar Castle instead (we walked there, yes) and Holyrood Park – unfortunately on the rainy day, but it was okay. We also had a Whisky tasting in the Holyrood Distillery which was really nice.

During our stay in Edinburgh we visited Sterling Castle for one day (by train) and had a three-day trip to Fort William, where we took the Harry Potter Steam train to Mallaig and back, just one day before September 1st. Of course we allowed ourselves to have the full experience, so we did the trip 1st Class and had a Whisky tasting during the trip. The whole Harry Potter Steam train was definitively the highlight of the whole vacation.

I probably left out a lot here, especially the different kinds of Haggis that we had. All in all it was a really nice trip and even the trip from Edinburgh Airport back to Germany was enjoyable (as enjoyable as flying gets in Economy I suppose).

RustWeek

Another highlight of last year was RustWeek in Utrecht. My employer send me there and I really thank them for that trip. First of all because I learned a lot, I met awesome people there, and I saw Utrecht – a City I immediately fell in love with. If I would have to live in Netherlands, I definitively would try to get a place in Utrecht! Such a walkable City, with so well-thought bike lanes and coordination of motorized traffic, I cannot possibly imagine a better city to be in.

RustWeek itself was awesome of course with all the awesome talks by awesome people and of course I already have my ticket for this years RustWeek – I am especially looking forward to Greg Kroah-Hartmann giving the keynote talk – most certainly about Rust in the Kernel. I am excited even thinking about it!

GPN

I attended GPN in Karlsruhe, as every year. I again was able to attend on company time this year and I am really fond of that. It was an awesome four-day weekend full of talks, nice people, good conversations and of course also a really nice party.

Even my wife came along this year and although she didn't attend any talks as far as I can remember, she still had an nice time there (She went to the Zoo as far as I can remember). I hope she will be able to come along this year as well.

Medieval Group

Of course I also spent one week on a castle with my wife, as every year. She participates in a medieval group and we spend one week on a castle every year, where some of us fight in armor, some of us cook and we spend the whole time there just having an awesome time and talking and of course drinking lots of beer (we're German after all).

This is always a very nice week, because it grounds you. Cellphone reception is available there, but nobody really is glued to the screen, so you can enjoy just being there.

Unfortunately we likely cannot attend this year, so we will see where I get my week of relaxing from this year.

Music

I got a lot better playing the saxophone last year and I continue to improve of course. For Christmas, my wife and I bought a piano (actually early December) and I am starting to learn playing it again (and hopefully my wife starts learning it as well). I played the piano for about ten years but that stopped about 15 years ago... still, I made a lot of progress already just in the last few weeks of the year.

I did not DJ that much last year as I should have and also my home-studio was not used as much as I would have liked. In late January a missing hardware piece should arrive (fingers crossed) and I hope everything works as expected then, so I can finally start learning how to make Techno tracks then.

Overall...

Overall, not that much happened last year. A few big events, but not that many events. I worked a lot of course, wrote a lot of code, got better (which my employer promised to honor this year... we will see).

After getting married and moving in 2024, having 2025 be a bit more quite was a good idea I suppose.

I do not yet have any plans for 2026 (certainly no new years resolutions), mostly because my wife seems to not have enough holidays to do some extensive traveling. I will attend RustWeek and hopefully also GPN of course. Besides that I only want my personal pet project to finally get to a stage where one can play with it. But I think I do not have any bigger plans for 2026.

So, to conclude this post,... am I happy with 2025? I think mostly. There are some things that could have been better, but this is really just nitpicking.