Howdy, it seems creating something with “wrapped” in the name is a ritual this year around so I decided to name my 2025 recap this way… It is also fashionably late because Nix is a wonderful piece of software.

Another year almost in the books. I thought about skipping the recap thing because honestly who cares, but then I remembered I care (a little), and also the blog has been quiet lately so might as well fill the void with some self-indulgent yapping before my time runs out. If you are surprised by me posting at the last second (i.e., after it became 2026 for some people reading this), I am honestly impressed. I thought myself more predictable and you… less gullible. That said, I am sufficiently intoxicated for the New Year celebrations and jokes aside my dear reader, 2025 has been a very long year and a lot has happened. Hope you’ve got a drink or some snacks ready, because this is a long one.

Starting strong, NixOS 25.05 happened and I took part as a release editor. This coincided with a lot of important real-life events so I could not do as much as I hoped to but it was a good release regardless, and I’m proud of however much I was able to contribute. You can thank me for most of the grammar or typo fixes in the changelog. In the end it was the usual mix of module arguments, inconsistent defaults, and people discovering that lib.mkForce is both powerful and a crime scene. We shipped without total catastrophe, nobody died. I count that as a win.

Hyprland is also coming along nicely, for those interested. I’m a little over Hyprland at this point, but it appears that wlroots -> Aquamarine migration is continuing its slow, painful crawl toward something resembling sanity. While I’m still the resident babysitter for the community, I took off from the Nix side of thing as those are usually not deferred to me. We’ve got some Nix-related changes coming along, but there is some time until those are actually… tangible. Long story short, the ecosystem is still alive. That’s more than most Wayland compositors can say after three years.

Project News

Projects-wise, it was a year of small-to-medium itches scratched in various languages. I think 2025 is the year I can finally call Rust my “go-to” language, and the year my honeymoon period with Go has ended. I’ve written about this and I intend to talk a bit more in depth about the Go language because of how confused people seem by my stance but I am quite happy with my adoption of Rust for the time being. Plenty of new Rust projects now plague my “portfolio.”

Something worth noting is that I have taken over nh from my good friend ViperML (who considers the project complete and is no longer interested in maintaining it as per his original vision) to continue its maintenance as time goes on. I was a contributor to nh before this happened, so I am quite familiar with the codebase already. This gradual change in maintainers has covered the 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 releases as I continue to publish more bug fixes and feature additions. If you are not familiar with nh, I recommend that you check it out as it is quite a handy CLI for managing NixOS systems. It will continue to improve over the time as new updates come along :)

We have also released v0.8 for nvf! It was a long time coming and was doubted by many, but after just over a year, the release is out. This update brings the Nix-for-Neovim approach of nvf to a whole new level with more robust LSP configurations, many plugin additions, new documentation and more! The reason that it took this long, of course, is that I was on a tiny side-quest writing a documentation generator for my Nix projects! You may or may not be aware that I have a lot of ongoing projects related to Nix, and documentation is most often a very high priority. Unfortunately I find the ecosystem very lacking, and I just had to create something of my own. The first half of 2025 was mostly spent working on ndg, our in-house documentation generator at feel-co. While this lives in feel-co and has been designed for feel-co (and my own) projects, it is a project for any Nix module system looking to document its options in a stylish manner. Try it, it grew on me despite the hellish CSS and Javascript misadventures.

Another noteworthy project, which ndg was actually initially designed for, is Hjem. I’ve been bothered by Home Manager’s poor file management primitives for a long while, and all this rage ultimately bubbled up into our own in-house module system for managing one’s $HOME, elegantly. Powered by SMFH, a manifest based file linker made by my good bald friend Gerg-L and designed for atomicity & correctness, Hjem has received many new features such as brand new documentation, much better module interfaces, and Darwin support—which many were excited for. It has come a very long way over the past year, and I am happy to report that it is nearing “completion.” Of course, it’s doubtful we’ll stop tinkering on it ever but the features originally envisioned are almost fully implemented. If you are interested in fast, low-cost and correct file linking in your $HOME perhaps give it a try. It is at a stage where feedback and bugreports are very valuable to us. We eventually hope to upstream Hjem into Nixpkgs as a first-party home management system, as it is just the right amount of abstraction; almost none. Contributions are also welcome, as they are to any other project of mine!

Some other projects worth mentioning are:

  • MicrOS got its initial push in January — Nixpkgs modules + runit instead of Systemd. It’s still extremely niche, still requires manual prayers to boot on real hardware, and still mine. This is a long-term project that I am hoping to develop more in 2026. If you are one of those nutjobs that are against Systemd, your feedback would be appreciated. Contributions even more so.
  • The byproduct of a most unfortunate naming conflict, Stash has gotten a bit of attention around August and has taken its forever place in my Wayland desktop as a feature-rich clipboard “manager” with persistent history and multimedia support.
  • nix-bindings has appeared after my poor attempts to deal with C++, and is now a somewhat viable way of interacting with Nix’s C API. I don’t have a worthwhile use for this project yet, but perhaps you do. Either way, your feedback would be appreciated. It seems that Nix is ramping up the work being done for the C API, and as such the bindings will only evolve further over time. Perhaps those bindings will make their way into more projects of mine to replace instances where I shell out to Nix.
  • I have finally forked tuigreet to solve many of the minor issues that were bothering me. This ended up with me implementing some requested features, modernizing the codebase over a single week, and adding a new configuration system. Since tuigreet is my primary greeter and will remain as such for the foreseeable future, I plan to maintain it as much as I can. If you also use tuigreet and have had feature requests or bugs to report, then head over to the issue tracker and let me know. I promise to keep an open mind. PRs are also very welcome as you might guess. Ratatouille is an infinitely powerful TUI framework and I plan to leverage its powers further as time goes by. The result? Terribly extensible TUI greeter. You’re welcome.
  • Microfetch has gotten much faster and has taught me a lot about Rust. It has also seen a bit of attention late 2025, so perhaps it is now adopted by more NixOS users. It will, of course, continue to get faster. Sky is the limit. In both speed and pointlessness.

Other than that, I’ve continued housekeeping work on watt (CPU power management), tailray (Tailscale systray in Rust), and a dozen smaller things like flint (flake input linter), and tempus. Nothing revolutionary, but they ship, people use them, and my system feels marginally less awful.

Blog Updates

My blog has remained opinionated and chaotic as it was designed to be. I think I’ve dropped plenty of posts within 2025, but I’d like to highlight a few that I’m particularly proud of:

  • “The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything” was my most popular post this year, and it opened the door to many interesting conversations about software and the compelling urge to “fix” things. I’m told this is also called “obsession.” No, not like the perfume.
  • “The Federation Fallacy” in June—my thoughts on federated software as I have come to adopt them in 2025. Federation is cool until you realize most people just want their little walled garden with extra steps.
  • “I am Not Convinced by Vibe Coding” in August—I’m quite disappointed in the state of… well, everything. Software is only one of the things AI has managed to ruin (I reckon with many more to come) but imagine how beautiful it would be if we just stopped telling glorified autocomplete to rewrite things?
  • “The Tradeoff Trap” shortly after—simplicity isn’t a virtue if you’re just sweeping edge cases under the rug and calling it minimalist.

Shorter rants and post have made their appearances, but I am not going to ruin the fun of discovering those posts for yourself, organically. I also plan to make a few more posts in early 2026 as I get to finishing them, so maybe also stay tuned? I’ve got an RSS feed that you can subscribe to if what I write interests you :)

Shorter rants sprinkled in about Golang deliberately dodging good patterns, mutation testing as the only test metric that matters, why Hydra is ironic hell for a declarative ecosystem, and the usual Nix-sucks-but-less-than-alternatives sermon.

Other Stuff

I think I aged like ten years over the last year. A lot of things happened, but most prominently, burnout happened. Still ongoing work on privacy/data integrity in policy contexts. Briefly relapsed to Arch in November—don’t ask, it was bad, I’m back on NixOS, lesson learned (again).

Sailing, as usual, was alright when weather allowed. It seems that I am making less time for things I actually enjoy. Chess ELO still trapped in the 1100-1150 limbo but I haven’t played chess in almost six months. I guess you can’t climb in ELO without, you know, actually playing the damn game.

Overall? Just the slow realization that software culture is still mostly vibes, politics, and bloat, and we’re all just trying to carve out tiny corners where it sucks marginally less. We make do, we always do.

2026 Wishlist: bigger than projects, smaller than miracles

This brings us to my 2026 wishlist, and I’m tired of small asks. Polish is nice, but polish on a rotting foundation is just expensive lipstick.

What I actually want this year is an industry (and our little corners of it) that starts punishing redundant complexity. Not rewarding it with stars, funding or useless engineer titles but instead make adding a dependency cost something real—social cost, maintenance cost or cognitive cost. Stop pretending that “but it’s modern!” is an argument. We are in the year of 2025 and for some godforsaken reason our computer resources seem like they will be dwindling over time. Do you know what this means? OPTIMIZATION god damn you, actually think about it for once. I am tired of useless Typescript projects for desktop or Python in production. Write actual languages. Write Rust, write C, write C++ but stop overcomplicating. On this note, tooling that does not actually hate maintainers would not be so bad either. NixOS modules cleaner from the start. A CI that isn’t as ugly as the nightmare that is Hydra. Less YAML worship. Less vibe “coding” in infra that people rely on daily.

Minimalism that isn’t performative or cultish. Suckless is an unfunny joke sure, but it is not and has never been the endgame. We need small and correct, small and usable, small and secure. Not just “fits in my head” while leaking like a sieve. We know this is possible, because people used to do it when it was funny. Now it’s important, and people have long forgotten.

I also want privacy to stop being a quirky nerd interest. This is not a niche hobby for people who like encryption diagrams. This is something normal adults should understand well enough to get angry about. Educate your wine aunt. Educate your siblings. Explain it in plain language until it clicks that “exceptional access” is just marketing speak for “someone else gets to read your shit”. No more ChatControl style proposals quietly sliding through because someone mumbled “but cyberbullying uwu” and everyone nodded along to avoid looking callous. That rhetorical trick needs to stop working. I need widespread acceptance of a very boring technical truth: every backdoor is just an exploit wearing a badge. There is no such thing as a friendly vulnerability, no such thing as access that only the good guys use, no such thing as a hole that stays politely scoped to its original intent. If a system can be accessed, it will be accessed, by actors you did not anticipate and in ways you did not authorize. Governments, companies, and especially mid-tier tech bros need to internalize this as a fact of reality, not treat it as optional flavor you can trade away for optics or convenience. You wish this is paranoia, but it isn’t. It is pattern recognition and anyone with more than just a goldfish brain should be able to notice the patterns as well. There is a rant coming about this, but I will spare you for today. Or rather, I will spare you the rest for today.

Last but not least, I wish for a single ecosystem somewhere, anywhere, that still chooses craft over clout. Not as branding, not as a values statement, not as a thin excuse for moral theater, but as an actual operating principle. No moral grandstanding, no trend chasing, no resume padding rewrites whose main purpose is to signal participation in whatever the current discourse cycle happens to be. Just good engineering because it is good engineering. Systems that are designed to be understood, maintained, and trusted by the people who have to live with them. We can have this. We have had this. We know exactly what it looks like when correctness, performance, and restraint are treated as first class concerns rather than optional polish.

What changed is not that nobody cares anymore. It is that we have become so fragmented that care is no longer visible. A lot of people still care, quietly, competently, and without hashtags. They just do not want to spend their limited time arguing with the loud group of critters who insist that performance can be bolted on later, that quality is premature optimization, and that maintainability is someone else’s problem. “We shipped and that is all that matters” has become an excuse to stop thinking, as if shipping were the finish line rather than the point where responsibility actually begins. That mentality does not just produce bad software, it produces brittle ecosystems that slowly train everyone involved to accept decay as normal. If craft does not matter, nothing downstream does either. That idea needs to die. It needs to die for good.

Okay, I think that’s it for my rant. Let’s wrap it up for today.

Closing Thoughts

It has been a long and somewhat productive year. I’ve created a lot, contributed to a lot, and cynically criticized a lot. I do not plan to change. I will continue to create, contribute and criticize.

2025 was survivable.
2026 will probably be too.
Software will keep being disappointing.
We’ll keep trying to disappoint it back a little less.

If things get better, thank the people who still care.
If they get worse… well, blame webdevs. Always blame webdevs.

I’m looking back with bittersweetness but I cherish a lot of things, and a lot of… you. I’ve met a many amazing people over 2025 that I am happy to call “friends” over this parasocial existence that you call the internet. Know that you are appreciated my dear reader, and see you next year, or; see you when I’ve got something worth saying. Have a nice one.

— raf