21 December 2025 —
I haven’t traditionally written end-of-the-year articles, retrospecting on what happened to me, but I thought 2025 was worth the effort.
I want to talk about my hobbies, the open source projects I maintain and my professional life.
Video games
One of my main “solo” hobbies is playing video games, and 2025 has been great on that.
It has been a year were a lot of great and highly-expected games have been released, but it’s also been the year I have finally got my first video game console, a Nintendo Switch 2.
The video games I have played on PC that are worth highlighting are:
- Hollow Knight: Silksong: I was really expecting this game, since I loved the previous one, released around 7 years ago. It’s probably my favourite game of all times.
It ended up being much harder than the first one, and had a couple controversial design decisions that I didn’t love, but overall it didn’t disappoint, and I ended up completing 100% of it, including all optional content. - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: I bought this game without knowing a lot about it, and ended up being my favourite game of the year (and most of the people, since it was awarded Game of the Year 2025).
One of the best stories and soundracks in any video game ever. - Sea of Stars: Similar to Golden Sun, but without all the burden of very passive gameplay and a lot of farming that other JRPG games have (it’s similar to Expedition 33 on this).
Another one of those games yo remember for a time after completing it. I didn’t love the DLC though, and I haven’t finished it yet.
In addition, I have also played a bunch of hours to Elden Ring, to complete a few extra secondary missions on a NG+, Dredge DLCs and FEZ (about time).
But that’s not all. In June, I got the Nintendo Switch 2.
I knew it didn’t have a lot of games available yet, but since I never had a Nintendo Switch (the first one), and almost all games are compatible, I took the opportunity to play a bunch of them.
- Metroid Dread: Many years ago I played Metroid Fusion on a GBA emulator and I loved it. It was my first time playing a Metroidvania.
Metroid Dread is its direct sequel, and everything is bigger and better on it. - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: One of the best Action RPGs out there, with a huge world to explore.
It had been on my To-Play list since 2017, when it was released. - Super Mario Odyssey: I never had played a 3D Super Mario game before, and it didn’t disappoint. I enjoyed it a lot, from beginning to end.
- Donkey Kong Bananza: Probably the most fun and most satisfying platformer I have ever played. I had to rush it a bit to finish it on time for Silksong’s release, but I still enjoyed it.
The terrain destruction mechanic is very satisfying, and “Bananza” transformations give you a lot of freedom to decide how to complete every level.
It’s from the same team that created Mario Odyssey, and it even takes place in the same universe, as a prequel. - Super Mario Bros. Wonder: After playing the (considered by most) best 3D mario game, I had to play the best 2D one (not exactly 2D, but side-scrolling).
I also loved it, and had a lot of very original mechanics not seen in previous games.
Additionally, I also played Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 (I didn’t love them that much. Controls and automatic camera movement feel a bit dated), Super Mario 3D world and a bit of Mario Kart World, as it came with the console.
Open source projects
Or should I say “project”, as my main focus for the past years has been Shlink. This could also go under “hobbies”, as it’s something I do mostly for fun, in my own free time.
In Shlink ecosystem, this has been finally the year to release Shlink Dashboard.
It has been a couple of years in the making, starting by extracting a few building blocks and utilities from what used to be the only web client, Shlink Web Client.
Once those were stable enough, I focused for a few months on building the first version (0.1.0), which I then released in June, followed by a couple of bugfix releases.
Then, a couple of weeks ago I released v0.2.0, polishing a few aspects of the UI.
Additionally, I have been able to work on a couple important refactorings that were always in the way of building new features in the ecosystem:
- A full migration of all the UI from Bootstrap to TailwindCSS.
- A migration from react-redux
connectto hooks. - A removal of weird dependency injection practices for components in FE apps.
Professional life
On the work side of things, 2025 has been a bit bittersweet.
The year started strong. We had just hired a fifth developer in December 2024, who was doing great and fitting perfectly with the rest of us.
At the end of February, the whole product team met in person in Bilbao for a week, to plan what we would be working on next, and do some knowledge sharing sessions.
We were 8 people in total, coming from different places of the US, UK and Spain:
- 5 developers
- 1 SRE
- 2 product people
Everything went great, and all of us ended up with the feeling this was one of the best teams we had ever been a part of.
Layoffs
After that great start, we had a layoff in June. Two of the developers, and other colleagues outside the tech team, were fired.
But that was not it. At the end September, we had a second layoff, reducing the team immensely, and leaving me as the last engineer.
As you can imagine, these were very demoralizing for everyone. I didn’t want to be a one-man team, as I like to work with others and learn from them, so I made the hard decision to start looking for something else.
I love what I have done in this company, and I loved the product, but overall I loved the team, so this didn’t really work for me anymore.
New position
After a couple of months doing interviews, I was offered a position in a company called Pleo, where I will be starting early January 2026.
Wish me luck!
What next
I intend to continue playing video games (I have just started S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Persona 5 Royal will be next), and I also intend to continue improving Shlink (v5.0.0 will be released at the beginning of 2026, and then I’ll continue improving Shlink Dashboard).
On the professional side of things, I hope I can share some updates soon about the new place.