Tag Archives: vegan

2025 in review

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My first year of retirement has passed so quickly and, of course, has been filled with different activities than when I was working part- or full-time. Keeping the tradition going, though, I’m taking the opportunity to reflect on the year that was 2025.

Vital statistics

As I mentioned at the end of 2024 when I essentially retired from the testing industry, I expected my activity on this blog to reduce considerably – and I only published 4 blog posts this year (including this one).

Surprisingly, my total views for 2025 were still around the annual average since I started blogging here in 2014. For the first time in many years, I didn’t critique the World Quality Report and those annual posts had been some of my most popular.

While I still have a presence on Twitter/X (and closed out the year with almost 1,200 followers), I’m no longer posting on X and never visit my feed there. I’m still pretty active on LinkedIn, which is where most of the action around testing now seems to occur anyway.

Writing my first Status Quo book

Many of you probably know that the British rock band Status Quo have been a lifelong passion (and somewhat reflected in my X and WordPress handle, therockertester!). I’ve run one of the most popular Quo websites for more than twenty years – Access All Areas – and maintain the best online gig history for the band there.

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing some kind of Quo book for many years. With more free time in retirement, 2025 became the year when the idea came to fruition! I’ve spent most of the year working on a detailed history of the band’s tours in Australia and New Zealand (of which there were 14 across a period of almost 45 years). It’s been a long process, but very enjoyable. The content is basically finished now and I’m hopeful of going to print early in 2026 (as an A4-sized full-colour hardback tome).

Work life

I haven’t engaged in any testing-related work this year, but have continued some one-on-one mentoring relationships. After a long break, I’m looking forward to sharing my testing knowledge and experience to help a Melbourne organization in an advisory capacity early in 2026 (and I remain open to other gigs like this).

Testing books

I was delighted to be involved in Taking Testing Seriously, the epic new testing book from James Bach and Michael Bolton.

I contributed chapter 20 “From RST to AST” in which I describe my personal experience with the Rapid Software Testing approach and how it led to my deep involvement with the testing community and particularly the Association for Software Testing.

I hope this book reaches a broad audience it deserves – it’s beautifully crafted and treats testing in a way that no other textbook has ever done.

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

I continued with my volunteer work for the UK’s Vegan Society by contributing mainly to their web research efforts.

The process of building a completely new website for the Society still continued this year and most of my efforts involved testing it. It was good to be “hands on” and providing value to the organization using my existing skillset. I also tested new versions of the VeGuide mobile app.

I published three new blogs for the Society in 2025:

I enjoy blogging on veganism – it utilises my writing skills and feels like a good fit in terms of vegan activism for me.

As a result of my travel blogs for the Vegan Society, I was interviewed for the World Vegan Travel podcast . I shared my tips for travelling as a vegan in and around Melbourne in this enjoyable interview with Brighde Reed.

Coffee blog

With more spare time in retirement, I started another blog – this time about coffee! I enjoy a great oat latte and my blog’s name reflects this, In Search of the Perfect Oat Latte. I blog about every new coffee place I try and I also post similar content on Instagram @theperfectoatlatte.

Reading

I’ve enjoyed using my extra free time to read a lot in 2025, again largely thanks to the great service from Geelong Regional Libraries.

Looking back on my review of 2024, I mentioned that Rolf Dobelli’s plea in his excellent book “Stop Reading The News” was one of the most impactful reads of that year. I’m happy to say that I have successfully broken my addiction to following the news and would strongly recommend it – there really is now downside.

I read 33 non-fiction books and 2 fiction (by a local author who literally lives a few doors down on our street!). In terms of themes, I found myself heavily into AI, veganism, vaccines and the COVID pandemic response.

My most impactful reads were pretty diverse this year.

Will Guidara’s excellent Unreasonable Hospitality was really inspiring. His approach to leading people and organizations is so refreshing and, while it’s a story based around running restaurants in New York, his ideas are of great value to anyone who’s tasked with creating a great place to work. (I blogged about Will’s book here.)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (by Shoshana Zuboff) was insightful and a welcome reminder to keep pushing back on the encroachment of tech into more and more aspects on my life. And, yes, I’m one of those people who still uses cash whenever I can – central bank digital currencies are just around the corner if you don’t resist and ask yourself whether you really want programmable money (when you’re not writing the programs…).

Dissolving Illusions (by Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk) is an important book, challenging the historical narrative around vaccines. It’s well worth a read for people new to the medical freedom/vaccine space, especially those open-minded enough to accept the possibility that they’ve been lied to by the medical profession.

Controligarchs (by Seamus Bruner) was a great read. While I consider myself well-informed when it comes to many of the topics covered by Seamus, he constructs a compelling narrative and backs it up with a lot of research (and amazingly deep “following the money” threads). The book serves as a good wake-up call for anyone who still thinks “philanthropists” and worldwide organizations (WEF, WHO, etc) are actually trying to help us.

My reading for the year is detailed below:

Non-fiction

Very Bad People (Patrick Alley)
McMafia (Misha Glenny)
Toxic (Richard Flanagan)
Code Dependent (Madhumita Murgia)
Chill & Prosper (Denise Duffield-Thomas)
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (Justin E H Smith)
The Coming Wave (Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman)
Braving The Wilderness (Brene Brown)
Dissolving Illusions (Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk)
Unreasonable Hospitality (Will Guidara)
Futureproof (Kevin Roose)
AI Needs You (Verity Harding)
Follow The Science (Sharyl Attkisson)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff)
Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism (Richard Holden and Steven Hamilton)
The Art of Bleisure (Emma Lovell)
AI 2041 (Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee)
Techno Feudalism (Yanis Varoufakis)
Upstream (Dan Heath)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
When The Body Says No (Gabor Mate)
Ikagai (Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia)
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You (Janelle Shane)
Controligarchs (Seamus Bruner)
Data Grab (Ulises A Mejias and Nick Couldry)
How to Argue with a Meat Eater (and Win Every Time) (Ed Winters)
Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman)
Eat To Live (Joel Fuhrman)
Hanging By A Thread (Erin Deering)
Eat For The Planet (Zachariah and Stone)
Main Street Vegan (Victoria Moran)
All In (Mike Michalowicz)
Tools of Titans (Tim Ferriss)
The Golden Years (Jamie Nemtsas and Drew Meredith)

Fiction

The Maw of the Beast (Rick Wilkinson)
Poppy Day (Rick Wilkinson)

In closing

My first year of retirement has opened up time for following other passions this year and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on my Status Quo book while continuing to volunteer within the vegan community.

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

(Featured image for this post by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash)