2025 Year in Review in Review

Every December people publish a look back at their year. AI researchers, database experts, banks, a small city, quilters, lawyers, runners, solo founders. I went looking for as many different kinds as I could find, opened every one, and wrote a line on what makes it different.

There are 251 here, in five groups and 20 smaller categories. 117 of them are part of a yearly series, so where the same person or company did one in earlier years, I linked those too.

If you want to write your own, Big Year is a free one-page year calendar for Google Sheets. Set it to 2025 or 2026 and mark what happened, month by month. And if you want the step by step, here’s how 199 people review their year.

Publishing a 2026 review? The 2026 Year in Review in Review is open. Email [email protected] and I’ll add it.

Jump to: Tech and AI · Companies and “Wrapped” recaps · Founders, indie hackers and creators · Personal and family · Professionals

Tech and AI

AI and LLMs (15)

• 2025 Open Models Year in Review, Florian Brand; Nathan Lambert. Ranks the year’s open-weight winners (DeepSeek R1, Qwen 3, Kimi K2) and tier-lists model makers by country. Chinese labs dominate.
• State of AI Code Review 2025, PullFlow Research. Analysis of 40.3M pull requests: about 1 in 7 now involve an AI agent, up 14x since early 2024.
• Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2025, technicalities; Tomáš Gavenčiak; Stephen McAleese; et al.. Field map of roughly 70 safety research agendas, each with funders, FTE estimates and outputs, plus a lab-by-lab comparison table. Earlier: 2024.
• The 8 worst technologies of 2025, Antonio Regalado. The annual anti-list of the year’s biggest technology flops. In 2025 politics was a recurring theme. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025 LLM Year in Review, Andrej Karpathy. Six paradigm shifts, from verifiable-reward RL to vibe coding; argues LLMs are summoned ghosts, not evolved animals, hence jagged intelligence.
• A Year Of Vibes, Armin Ronacher. Flask’s creator on becoming an engineering lead for Claude Code, his unease about bonding with agents, and the version-control tools he now wants.
• From RAG to Context - A 2025 year-end review of RAG, RAGFlow team. An open-source RAG engine argues retrieval didn’t die in 2025; it turned into ‘context engineering’ for agents.
• MCP Year in Review 2025: What We Learned, Pento AI. An AI software shop on year one of the Model Context Protocol, from internal experiment to industry standard with 97M monthly SDK downloads.
• A curl 2025 review, Daniel Stenberg. curl’s lead maintainer counts it out: 3,400+ commits (a record), 9 CVEs, 2,179 tests, and an explosion of AI-slop bug reports.
• My 2025 AI Developer Year In Review, Scott Watermasysk. A Rails developer’s whole year told through AI: from distrusting Cursor for small tasks to agents writing nearly all his code.
• 2025 in Review: Jagged Intelligence Becomes a Fault Line, Drew Breunig. Essay on AI’s uneven abilities: power users and default chatbot users now live in different worlds, and AI leaders are losing the narrative.
• The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions, Sebastian Raschka. Researcher’s technical view: RLVR and GRPO defined 2025, plus a neat one-line-per-year history of post-training fads since 2022.
• 2025: The year in LLMs, Simon Willison. 25+ themed sections, nearly all ‘The year of…’: reasoning, agents, Claude Code, YOLO mode. Encyclopedic and link-dense; HN’s top retrospective of the year. Earlier: 2023, 2024.
• Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?, Cal Newport. Scores Sam Altman’s prediction that agents would join the workforce in 2025, and explains why it didn’t happen.
• Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025, LiAnna Davis. Real data from thousands of student editors: 1,406 AI edit alerts and far fewer fake citations than feared. Only 3% had repeat alerts.

Software, databases and the web (33)

• State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions, Jeff Quast. Automated Unicode-correctness tests of terminal emulators with ucs-detect; Ghostty and Kitty top the leaderboard.
• Val Town 2023-2025 Retrospective, Tom MacWright. Unusually candid insider look at almost three years at a devtools startup: pivots, hiring, salary-versus-equity math and what startup news gets wrong.
• WordPress Playground: 2025 Year in Review, WordPress Playground team. In-browser WordPress now runs 99% of the top 1,000 plugins and was used 1.4 million times in 2025.
• Postgres CDC in ClickHouse, A year in review, Sai Srirampur. Lessons from the first production year of a Postgres change-data-capture connector, built from the PeerDB acquisition.
• Staying ahead of censors in 2025, meskio; shelikhoo. Tor’s anti-censorship team on Iran’s blackouts and Russia’s shifting blocking tactics, and how its bridge and Snowflake tools coped.
• Data 2025 - the Year in Review with Mike Stonebraker and Andy Pavlo, Mike Stonebraker; Andy Pavlo. Turing Award winner Stonebraker and Pavlo debate which data trends heat up or cool down. Recorded webcast.
• Bytes #449 - Grading our 2025 predictions, Bytes. A JavaScript newsletter does the rare thing and publicly grades last January’s predictions, cold takes included.
• Thunderbird 2025 Review: Building Stronger for the Future, Monica Ayhens-Madon; Natalie Ivanova. Donor-funded email client’s year: what contributors shipped, framed as a gentle anti-Wrapped.
• The 2025 Stratechery Year in Review, Ben Thompson. Most-read and most important posts of an AI-dominated year, from a newsletter that moved back to the US after 12 years in Taiwan. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• HN Wrapped 2025, Kadoa. Spotify Wrapped for Hacker News: type your username and an LLM roasts your comments, trends and predictions for the year.
• 2025 - A year in review, Immich Team. The self-hosted Google Photos alternative grew from 55K to 87K GitHub stars, with about 1,700 contributors. Earlier: 2024.
• The Pragmatic Engineer in 2025, Gergely Orosz. Most-read deep dives of the year from the biggest software-engineering newsletter: 134 issues and a podcast past 10M downloads. Earlier: 2023.
• AI Police Reports: Year In Review, Matthew Guariglia. Part of EFF’s long-running year-in-review series: how AI-written police reports spread in 2025 and the pushback. Earlier: 2024.
• A 2025 retrospective, Jonathan Corbet. LWN’s editor scores his January predictions: Rust in the kernel ‘borne out nicely’, sched_ext more subdued, no new XZ-style backdoor. Earlier: earlier.
• Day 25 - Raku 2025 Review, Raku community. Christmas-Day finale of the Raku advent calendar: commit counts, RakuAST progress and module growth for a small language community. Earlier: 2024.
• Linux Kernel Highlights For 2025: Schedulers, Rust & Torvalds’ Commentary, Michael Larabel. The year’s most-viewed kernel stories: more Rust, Bcachefs dropped from mainline, and Torvalds’ sharpest commentary.
• Procurement Power - When Cities Realized They Can Just Say No: 2025 in Review, Sarah Hamid. Upbeat entry in EFF’s series: city councils began treating surveillance-tech purchases as political votes, and many voted no. Earlier: 2024.
• PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review, Dustin Ingram. Python’s package index served about 2.56 trillion requests, and 92% of malware reports were handled within a day.
• 2025 CVE Data Review, Jerry Gamblin. Charts and counts on every CVE: 48,185 published, up about 21%, more than 11% of them in December alone. Earlier: 2025, 2023.
• 2025 letter, Dan Wang. A long annual essay comparing Silicon Valley with the Communist Party (both humorless), covering compute, Xiaomi’s EVs and tariffs. Earlier: 2023, 2017.
• The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025, Michael Lynch. Data-driven ranking of HN’s top personal bloggers. Simon Willison wins for the third year running with 1,000+ posts.
• Postgres year in review 2025, Nikolay Samokhvalov; Michael Christofides. 47-minute podcast on Postgres 18, a Postgres bug used in the US Treasury hack, and the year’s acquisitions.
• Databases in 2025: A Year in Review, Andy Pavlo. Postgres keeps winning, every database ships an MCP server, MongoDB sues FerretDB, file-format wars, plus Pavlo’s trademark jab at Larry Ellison. Earlier: 2021, 2022, 2024.
• Rust Wrapped 2025, Rust Bytes. Issue #100 wraps Rust’s year: still Stack Overflow’s most admired language for a tenth straight year, slow and steady company adoption.
• 2025 in retrospect & happy new year 2026!, Gentoo developers. A distro’s annual numbers: 112,927 commits, 19,174 packages, four new developers, with year-over-year comparisons throughout. Earlier: 2025.
• 2025 Internet Law Year-in-Review, Eric Goldman. A law professor’s top-10 countdown of internet-law developments. He warns readers up front that there’s little upbeat news. Earlier: 2025.
• A Year of Typing: My NumPy Fellowship Retrospective, Joren Hammudoglu. A paid open-source fellow’s year spent making NumPy fully type-checked. He calls it ‘the best job I’ve ever had’.
• A year of work on the ALPM project, Arch Linux developers. What 15 months of Sovereign Tech Fund money bought: a Rust framework for Arch’s package management, milestone by milestone.
• 2025 year in review, Astro team. A framework’s own recap: 113 releases including v6 alphas, and weekly npm downloads up from about 360K to 900K+. Earlier: 2024.
• Web frameworks: 2025 in review, Netlify. Covers the whole framework ecosystem: 13 major releases, 52 security vulnerabilities, 3 acquisitions, and a converging bet on Signals. Earlier: 2024.
• This year in LLVM (2025), Nikita Popov. A core maintainer’s deep technical log: ptradd migration, the new ptrtoaddr instruction, capture tracking and compile-time work. Earlier: 2025, 2024, 2022.
• Interop 2025: A year of convergence, Nicole Sullivan. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla’s joint test suite rose from 29% to 97% cross-browser pass rate in one year.
• Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025, Zero Trick Pony. A solo dev ships a small HTML5 mystery game and logs 50 browser bugs and quirks they ran into, Safari especially.

Companies and “Wrapped” recaps

Wrapped-style recaps (16)

• Uber Eats hits one billion deliveries and reveals Australia’s biggest cravings of 2025, Uber Eats Australia. Seventh Cravings Report: zero-sugar soft drink orders doubled, and one shopper ordered 70 bananas in a single delivery.
• 2025 Duolingo Language Report, Cindy Blanco, Ph.D.. Country-by-country map of what the world learned; Japanese passed German for fourth place worldwide. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• Spotify Wrapped 2025, Spotify. The original Wrapped. 2025 added Wrapped Clubs and a Wrapped Party feature; Bad Bunny was global top artist. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Strava Releases 12th Annual Year in Sport Trend Report, Strava. Billions of workouts plus a 30,000-person survey: Gen Z is trading doomscrolling for run clubs; clubs nearly quadrupled to 1M. Earlier: earlier.
• 2025 Garmin Connect data report, Garmin. Wearable-data league tables: racket sports up 67%, Hong Kong tops steps (10,663/day), Netherlands least stressed. Earlier: 2024.
• State of AI: An empirical 100 trillion token study, OpenRouter + a16z. A year of real LLM traffic, 100T+ tokens, broken down by model, task and country. Usage data, not a survey. Also at a16z.com/state-of-ai.
• Checkpoint 2025: Discord Year in Review, Discord. Discord’s first Wrapped, for its 10th birthday: games played, voice hours, emoji and your most-messaged friend.
• PlayStation 2025 Wrap-Up launches starting today, PlayStation Blog. Personal gaming recap for 10+ hour players: top games, trophies, even your most-used DualSense colour.
• Which chart types did our users create in 2025?, Veronika Halamkova. ADJACENT: a chart tool’s own usage review. Tables were the most-made chart type of 2025; chart covers 2013-2025. Earlier: 2024.
• Excel in 2025: A Year of Culture, Craft, and Copilot, Microsoft Excel team. Excel’s 40th birthday, Excel esports and a documentary, plus Agent Mode and the =COPILOT() formula. A culture-first company recap.
• Actual Budget Wrapped 2025, Matiss Janis Aboltins. ADJACENT: open-source budgeting app’s Spotify-style money recap that runs entirely in your browser; your data never leaves it.
• What We Watched the Second Half of 2025, Netflix. Netflix’s raw viewing data dump: 96B hours in six months, with KPop Demon Hunters at 482M views. Earlier: 2024.
• Unpacking your YouTube Recap 2025 personality, YouTube. YouTube’s first personalized Recap assigns viewers a watching ‘personality’; this post explains the archetypes.
• Meet your 2025 Design DNA: A snapshot of your year with Canva, Canva Team. A design tool’s Wrapped: a personal recap of what you made, across 12 billion+ designs created in 2025.
• Year in Monzo 2025, Monzo. A bank Wrapped told as a fantasy quest; UK customers spent GBP 210M on Vinted and Depop, up 13%. Has an opt-out after shaming complaints.
• 2025 Year In Review (Chess.com), Tarjei J. Svensen. Over six billion games played in 2025; one member solved 255,000+ puzzles. Mixes elite results with platform stats. Earlier: 2024.

Company and platform reports (26)

• Octoverse: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1, GitHub. Data year Sep 2024-Aug 2025, so it lands early: TypeScript overtook Python and JavaScript, and India passed the US in open-source contributors. Earlier: 2024.
• End of Year Summary 2025: Top Trends, Songs & Creators, YouTube. US lists of creators, songs, podcasts and trends; MrBeast top creator for a sixth straight year, brainrot and Grow a Garden on the trend list. Earlier: 2024.
• Announcing Wikipedia’s top 25 most-read articles of 2025, Wikimedia Foundation. ‘Deaths in 2025’ led at about 49.6M views. Readers spent roughly 2.8 billion hours on English Wikipedia; list updated in January for the full year.
• Tinder Year in Swipe 2025, Tinder. Dating trends named like memes: Clear-Coding, Friendfluence; ‘hopeful’ was singles’ word for 2025. US press-release PDF.
• Getty Images 2025 Year in Review, Getty Images editorial. Curated year in pictures from a wire agency that covered 160,000+ events; split into news, sport and entertainment. Earlier: 2024.
• Apple unveils the winners of the 2025 App Store Awards, Apple Newsroom. 17 winners as a year-in-apps snapshot: Tiimo iPhone App of the Year, Pokemon TCG Pocket top iPhone game, plus ‘Cultural Impact’ picks.
• Top of the Charts: our most popular work in 2025, Our World in Data. A data site’s own most-viewed charts: CO2 emissions first, then life expectancy and democracy.
• Striking findings from 2025, Pew Research Center. 12 charts on the year, e.g. the first drop in the US immigrant population in 50+ years. Earlier: 2024.
• NASA Ignites New Golden Age of Exploration, Innovation in 2025, NASA. Agency-wide wrap: possible biosignature in a Perseverance sample, 6,000 exoplanets confirmed, Artemis II countdown.
• 2025 in Review: Highlights from NASA in Silicon Valley, NASA Ames. One NASA center’s year: ‘gum-like’ material in asteroid samples and a hidden companion star for Betelgeuse.
• 60 of our biggest AI announcements in 2025, Google. A month-by-month company changelog of 60 AI launches, Gemini 3 to Ironwood TPUs. Promotional, but a tidy timeline format. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025 Year in Review (2025 Wrapped), Commerce City communications. A small city borrows the Wrapped format: 88,988 police calls, auto thefts down 31.5%, 3.1M Meta views.
• 2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services, Apple Newsroom. Services scorecard: 850 million weekly App Store users and $100B+ in extra merchant sales through Apple Pay. Covers Apple Music’s best year too.
• 2025 In Review And A Look Forward To 2026, Ben Collins. the best-known Google Sheets teacher’s 11th annual review. Candid that site traffic halved from its 2021 peak. Earlier: 2019.
• PlayStation Store’s top downloads of 2025, PlayStation Blog. Plain download charts by region and platform: the store-side view of the year to pair with personal Wrap-Ups.
• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025, Backblaze. Failure rates for 344,196 hard drives, with the raw data free to download. Fleet AFR fell to 1.36%. Earlier: 2024.
• Google Play’s best apps, books and games of 2025, Google Play. Editors’ picks for the year; Hank Green’s Focus Friend won best app, also winning on Apple’s list. Same app, both stores.
• Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review, Cloudflare Radar team. Explorable dashboard of the whole internet’s year: traffic up 19%, post-quantum encrypted share jumped from 29% to 52%. Companion blog post at blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• Year in Search 2025: What and how we searched this year, Google. Searches starting ‘Tell me about…’ rose 70%; the year’s breakout question was how to spot a fake Labubu. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• A transformative year for Canva: 2025 in review, Canva Team. Company scorecard: 260M monthly users, $3.5B revenue, Affinity relaunched as free, 100M education users. Earlier: 2024.
• Goodreads Choice Awards 2025, Goodreads. The only major book awards decided entirely by reader votes; genre-by-genre winners for the year. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025: That’s a Wrap and Here Are the Stats, Backblaze. The same company’s lighter companion: the blog’s own year in numbers.
• ESA’s highlights in 2025, European Space Agency. ESA’s 50th year: first artificial solar eclipse in orbit, Biomass forest satellite and a 2040 strategy.
• Year in images 2025 (ESA), European Space Agency. A space agency’s year in pictures: launches, Earth views and deep-sky shots, one image per moment. Earlier: 2024.
• Wikipedia Year in Review 2025, Wikimedia Foundation. Month-by-month microsite of what the world looked up, plus scale stats such as 965M unique devices a month on English Wikipedia.
• Steam Year In Review 2025, Steamworks Development (Valve). Valve’s dev-facing recap: hardware launches, Discovery Queue rebuild, and 5,863 games earning over $100K in 2025 (per press coverage). Published late. Earlier: earlier.

Founders, indie hackers and creators

Indie hackers and solo founders (16)

• Zero Revenue in 2025: Indie Hacker Lessons I’m Taking to 2026, Meysam. Opens by admitting $0 revenue across all projects, then lists lessons for 2026 (distribution is day zero). A counterweight to the $1M posts.
• 2025 (annual review), Justin Duke. Buttondown founder grades last year’s 10 company goals (5 done) in a status table, mixed with family life; names 2026 hopes. Earlier: 2024.
• A look back at 2025, Stefano Verna. Ten years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue, +10% YoY, team of 13, with open margin talk. Hit HN front page. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025: A Year in Review, Piotr Kulpinski. Directory builder’s best year in ~20 years of work: OpenAlternative 1M visitors, $57,361 revenue (+516%), $6K MRR by Dec; Dirstarter $22K; links revenue proof.
• What happened in 2025, Cory Zue. Short factual ‘epilogue’ companion to his AI career angst essay: 27 SaaS Pegasus releases, 11 posts, side tools built, shift into contracting. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• My 2025 review as an indie dev, Alvaro Ramirez. First full indie year after going independent in 2024: launched blog platform LMNO.lol, iOS/macOS apps, Emacs packages and a YouTube channel, funded by sponsors.
• My 2025 Year in Review, Adam Fortuna. 15th yearly post from the Hardcover co-founder: new house, job, dog; shows the app dashboard and sets up 2026 projects. Links every edition since 2010. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025 Year In Review, Corey Haines. Uses James Clear’s three-question template; agency revenue ~+35%, incubated SaaS at $19K, $800, $300 and $100 MRR, plus pricing experiments. Earlier: 2024, 2020.
• 2025 year in review, Justin Jackson. 13th straight annual post; Transistor revenue held steady while tech wobbled; theme is making moments significant on purpose; ends with 2026 goals, trips, product plans. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• My 2025 Annual Review: When the Work Started to Lift, Ross Simmonds. Agency founder and marketer on years of reps finally compounding; main lesson is that most limits are self-imposed.
• I made $1,032,000 in 2025, Marc Lou. $1.03M across 15 income streams, 20% down on 2024 by choice for calmer life; product-by-product revenue breakdown, DataFast at $15.8K MRR. Light on 2026 plans. Earlier: earlier.
• Annual Review 2025: The One Where Greg Gets A Job, Greg Faxon. Coach for solo businesses admits burnout and taking a job for someone else; self-mocking went-well / didn’t format. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• My 2025 Annual Review, Tiago Forte. ‘Year of Profitability’ delivered: $2.15M gross, $650K net, no new hires; high-ticket AI program and 2,350 Notion template sales. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder, Michael Lynch. After selling TinyPilot: $8.2K profit on $16.3K revenue (mostly book Kickstarter) vs a $50K goal. Monthly revenue chart; grades last year’s goals. Earlier: earlier.
• 自由职业第六年 - 2025 年度总结 (Sixth year freelancing: 2025 summary), Viking. Chinese indie dev’s sixth freelance year: launched SaaS template TinyShip Dec 15, a toddler at home; warns it’s less glamorous than posts claim.
• Journey to $1 Million ARR, Jon Yongfook. Running hub of milestone recaps (zero to $10K, $10K to $20K, video recap to $36K MRR) rather than a single annual review. Earlier: earlier.

Newsletters and writers (11)

• Reflections on my first year writing full time, Henrik Karlsson. Essayist marks one year since leaving his art-gallery job to write full time; opens with his 10 most-read essays, then what the year taught him. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Year in review 2025, Sasha Chapin. Essayist opens with an urge to tell everyone he loves them; mostly paywalled, so only the intro is public. Earlier: 2021.
• State of the Sanderson 2025, Brandon Sanderson. Huge annual report from the fantasy author: his writing year, 2026 releases, every project’s status, film/TV and games, plus updates from each company department. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025 in review., Will Larson. Author scores his decade goals (set 2019, revised 2022) item by item; fourth book out, new job, turned forty. Earlier: 2024.
• My 2025 Annual Review, Kyle Nitchen. PM newsletter writer argues people should review themselves like projects; covers a $300M+ portfolio promotion, ~1K book sales and a template launch.
• 11 Best Things of 2025, Trung Phan. Review as awards show: best TV, live event, tweet, book, podcast, film and purchase, with his own top SatPost pieces. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• 2025 in review, Vicki Boykis. Writer and ML engineer joins a startup as founding MLE; progress bars vs error logs, and keeping her own context from coding agents.
• Year in review, 2025, Henry Oliver. Literary newsletter readers grew from 16,112 to 29,184; became a Mercatus research fellow and dropped the paywall completely. Earlier: 2024, 2023, earlier.
• Zubby Newsletter #140: Year In Review, Jim Zub. Comic book writer’s 16th annual review, ‘massive change and surprising stability’, with links to every edition back to 2010. Earlier: earlier, earlier, earlier.
• **[Reflecting on 2025 + Reader Survey #318](https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/reflecting-on-2025-reader-survey)**, Paul Millerd. Written from southern Taiwan: eighth year meeting his one goal (never return to a paycheck job), plus a reader survey to reshape 2026. Earlier: 2023.
• 100 things that made my year (2025), Austin Kleon. No metrics, no goals: a numbered list of 100 small delights (books, songs, moments) as a year review. Earlier: 2024, earlier.

Artists, makers and YouTubers (20)

• 2025 Year in Review, Alix Earle. Creator reacts to her own clips from the year and says what was really going on behind each one. 255K+ views.
• The Program audio series, 2025 year in review, Mark (The Program creator). Sci-fi audio drama crosses 1M lifetime downloads; 140K in 2025 vs 170K/240K, Patreon 74% of revenue, Apple paid subs falling to 64. Earlier: earlier.
• Best Wildlife Photography of 2025 - A Year in Review, Harry Collins. Pro wildlife photographer recaps a globe-trotting year through his best frames, and pitches his workshops.
• 2025: A Year of Trains in Review, CoasterFan2105. Railfan’s yearly tradition: trips to California and the Northeast, 10 new steam locomotives; 650K+ views. Earlier: earlier, earlier.
• **[The Trash Taste 2025 Year in Review Trash Taste #288](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D8INWirdD0)**, Joey Bizinger, Garnt Maneetapho, Connor Colquhoun. Three Tokyo-based YouTubers talk through their year on their own podcast as a full episode; 380K+ views. Earlier: earlier.
• all my sketches this year… II SKETCHBOOK TOUR 2025, evydraws. Every sketch of 2025 in one place, from pencil portraits to gouache ‘watercolor cat landscapes’.
• 2025 - Year in Review by Cee-Roo, Cee-Roo. Swiss video artist’s yearly mashup: the year’s moments re-edited to his own music. A long-running format. Earlier: earlier, earlier, earlier.
• You Won’t Believe These Channel Numbers, 2025 Breakdown, The New Retired Me. Retiree YouTuber opens his analytics: total views, watch time and the stats behind a year of retirement content.
• **[Why I Drew a Tree Every Day for 30 Days Sketchbook Tour & Year in Review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a7siqFg52Q)**, Andy Smith Illustrations. Quick creative hits-and-misses of the year, then a tour of a 30-day daily tree-drawing challenge.
• The Best Of 2025, My Gear And Photography Highlights, Matti Sulanto. Street photographer pairs his best images of 2025 with the cameras that actually earned their place.
• 2025 in review, Jenn Lueke. Food creator reviews her year as recipes that stayed in rotation into 2026, plus favorites and a cookbook tour.
• 2025 in Review, Kent C. Dodds. Course creator’s pivot from EpicReact/EpicWeb to EpicAI and MCP, ‘exhilarating, exhausting’ and partly heartbreaking, plus a sixth child.
• Supervising the Idea Factory: My Year of 60 Personal Projects, Ruben Berenguel. Went from ~20 LLM-assisted side projects in 2024 to 60 in 2025, games and apps alike, catalogued with notes on how much AI did.
• I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025, Nate Meyvis. A year in review made only of spaced-repetition stats: 301,432 Anki reviews. Has a follow-up post on why he does it.
• MEGA SKETCHBOOK TOUR!! (Everything I Drew in 2025), Ali Risby. Review as a page-flip through every drawing from the year, thanking a fast-growing audience; 120K+ views.
• **[2025 Was… Too Much Novympia’s Year in Review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBlTRh9_Fbw)**, Novympia. British-American couple channel looks back at ‘all the rubbish we uploaded’, starting with too much American chocolate.
• AD 2025, Sebastian Garren. Teacher-essayist’s literary review: January learning Biblical Hebrew, then cutting from three full-time jobs to 1.5.
• My 2025 Year in Review! Ninety two Finishes!, Elisa Menck. Diamond-painting crafter shows all 92 canvases she finished in 2025, one after another. A whole genre of ‘finishes’ reviews.
• **[Intermediate French Reflecting on my entire 2025 (before planning 2026)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_L8mJm_KeM)**, Piece of French. A language lesson that is also a review: she reflects on 2025 in French before planning 2026 and shares her question list as a PDF.
• Year in Review Review, Ian Vanagas. Existing directory of annual reviews, sortable by author streak or word count; 25 posts for 2025, 163 posts from 41 authors, 2010 to 2025.

Personal and family

Reading (10)

• My 2025 reading year, Jo Case. A books editor tags each of her 98 reads with why she picked it up: reviews, bookshops, work, word of mouth.
• Books I read (and those I gave up on) in 2025, Doug Belshaw. Honest reading list that counts the books abandoned as well as finished (30 started, 18 finished), ordered by rating.
• Every book I read in 2025, Benedict Townsend. The light-reader version: a quick, chatty run through all 17 books he read in 2025.
• What I read in 2025, Andrew Liptak. A sci-fi writer and newsletter author runs through all 58 books he read in 2025.
• Wrapping Up 2025, Looking Forward 2026, Jenna. Her 16th annual goals post: a book blogger grades last year’s reading and blogging goals, then sets 2026’s. Earlier: 2025.
• 2025: A Year in Books, Tinted Edges. A deliberately slow-down reading year: 72 books tallied, children’s books read aloud included, with favourites by month.
• **[Every Book I Read in 2025 Yes, No, or Maybe? Reading Wrap Up & Stats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS1jesXLmHo)**, Izzy Rain. BookTube wrap-up giving every 2025 read a yes, no or maybe verdict, plus a stats breakdown.
• 2025 Reading Data, Savannah Apple. Reading-stats breakdown built from Goodreads and StoryGraph: 68 books, pages per month, moods, genres and fiction/nonfiction split.
• 2025 Reading Review, The Reading Room. A reader’s personal-best year of 118 books, written candidly through a season of low mood.
• ranking EVERY BOOK I read in 2025 (156 BOOKS!), Jaime Fok. Tier-list video ranking all 156 books from one reader’s year.

Running, cycling and the outdoors (9)

• My Cycling Year - 2025, Bongo Twisty. A home-made ‘DiY Wrapped’ of a cyclist’s year: hitting an 18,000 km goal, a bike tour and country lanes.
• My 2025 Running Year in Review: Goals, Races, and Progress, Lisa. A runner openly admits missing every running goal, yet still logged about 1,550 miles and a marathon. Refreshing honesty.
• Running Around: 2025 running dataviz in R, Stephen Royle. STYLE: Garmin export as CSV turned into progress-vs-target lines, a calendar of run days, treemaps and training-load charts. Earlier: 2023, 2023, 2021.
• 2025 The Year in Birds, Elliotte Rusty Harold. Annual birding tally: 389 species, 32 life birds, with state and county lists.
• 2025 in review: Cycling, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. About 10,500 km and 80,000 m of climbing; one of a set of themed 2025 reviews by the Jenkins creator.
• Year in Sport, Tantek Çelik. IndieWeb-style sport summary assembled from Strava, Swarm and notes: miles, climbing, races and year-over-year changes.
• A Look Back at My 2025 and Ahead to 2026, Bryon Powell. Trail-running editor’s biggest mileage year in 33 years of running (2,915 miles), a ninth straight year of daily runs. Earlier: 2024.
• An Unforgettable Year, Thomas Meinzen. Reflections on a record car-free ‘green big year’: birding Oregon only by bike, bus and foot.
• 2025 in review, Oliver Jackson. Two-part personal recap, running (from Strava totals) and holidays, written well into February.

Making, cooking and growing (12)

• Garden 2025 Recap, Heart of the Homestead Family (podcast). Homestead family podcast on the garden season’s wins and lessons, including an early snow and a tarp pulled by truck.
• what i knitted this year, Julie Broberg. Dated photo log of a year’s finished knits (13 projects), with a companion post on weaving.
• 2025 in review: Cooking, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. A busy engineer’s first year of cooking his own three meals a day, and what stuck.
• 2025 in review: Coffee, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. How a colleague’s pitch that coffee is the perfect engineer’s hobby turned into a year-long one.
• 2025 Sewing Top 5, Doctor T Designs. A sewist counts everything she made (44 items, mostly undergarments) and picks a top five. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Twelve New Recipes I Enjoyed in 2025, Marie. One favourite new recipe per month from a home cook who has posted recipes almost daily since 2010.
• 2025 In Review, Osborn Fiber Studio. A fiber artist’s last-day-of-the-year roundup of finished socks and sweaters and studio news. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025: A Year In Review, Laurie McNamara. A recipe blogger nearing 16 years online looks back on family moments and the kitchen year. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2010.
• Wrapping up 2025 and Planning for 2026, Deep in the Heart of Textiles. A quilter’s eight finishes in a year, helped by a long-arm quilter for the first time; many are donation quilts. Earlier: 2025.
• 2025 Recap! A Full Year Of Farming In One Video, Bells Farming. A family farm’s whole season compressed into one highlight reel of favourite clips.
• My 2025 Garden and 2026 Garden Plans, Jeni Baker. Crop-by-crop review of a container and border garden (peas, tomatoes, pumpkins, dahlias) before a move to a new yard.
• Summary of 2025: Looking Forward To 2026, The Quintessential Clothes Pen. Historical costumer’s recap of sewing projects and events, in her 13th year of the Historical Sew Monthly.

Travel (5)

• 2025 Summary, Kami. A Polish travel blogger’s annual ‘year in a nutshell’ of trips and favourite places. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025: A Year in Review, Riana Ang-Canning. A travel blogger’s year of becoming a parent and moving abroad, with trips recapped and her 2024 predictions checked against reality. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025 Year in Review, Jamaipanese. A Jamaican expat in Japan finishes grad school, starts a podcast and weighs highs and lowlights, checking last year’s plan. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Annual Expense Report of a Nomad, 2025 (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, USA), Roaming About. STYLE: a nomad couple’s sixth annual itemised cost-of-living report from a year driving South America. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2020.
• 2025 Annual Recap, Travel2Unlimited. A country-collector’s year in stats: 41 countries and territories, 74 flights, 29 car rentals, named Nomadmania’s biggest traveler. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2014.

Family and faith (9)

• A Look Back at 2025: Projects, Progress, & Big Life Moments, Casey Finn. Home-DIY family blog reviews the year’s room makeovers, maintenance tutorials, book news and first big vacation as a family of four.
• **[2025 Highlights A Year in Review Christmas Day & Family Moments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trpSGI2LZYc)**, Natural & Simple Living. A long, cozy family-life video looking back over 2025 and ending on Christmas Day.
• Our 2025 Year in Review…, Brooklyn and Bailey. Twin-sister creators share favourite 2025 moments: a new baby, Europe travel and a night at Dancing with the Stars.
• 2025 Year in Review, Thomas Buffer. A Catholic priest’s newsletter looks back at its readers, most-read post, and which predicted topics he actually wrote about.
• A Year in Review - 2025, Kara Abbey. A photographer-mom answers a fixed set of year-end questions and invites readers to answer them too. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2018.
• Looking back at 2025, Sheila Dougal. A faith-centred essay on a year of loss and transition, read through scripture on letting go.
• Year End Recap 2025, Rhoda. A long-time home-decor blogger’s month-by-month photo recap of a year that held trips, renovations, grief and gratitude.
• 2025 in highlights, mrmr. A small, upbeat month-by-month list of everyday highlights: walks, crafts, outings, concerts and home projects.
• Counting Last Year’s Fruit, Rebecca Giantonio Moran. Month-by-month gratitude-and-growth review of 2025, framed as counting the year’s fruit.

Life in numbers (7)

• Indignified: My Year in Review, CD. reviews 2025 successes and failures against a ‘goal sheet’ kept in Google Sheets, checked each solstice and equinox.
• 2025 Year in Review, Yukari Peerless. Month-by-month review from an interpreter and community volunteer, closing with three words for the year. She has done these since 2014.
• 2025 in pictures, Rob Allen. A developer’s year told month by month through photos, steam trains included, from a Project 365 habit. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2008.
• My 2025 in 25 numbers, Simon Howard. STYLE: a year counted in 25 stats (miles walked, photos, emails, even tumble-dryer cycles), compared with prior years. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025 A Year in Photos, Crispina Kemp. Twelve photos for twelve monthly prompt titles from a long-running ‘pic of the month’ blogging challenge. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025 Statistics!, badblokebob. Chart-heavy film-watching year: monthly counts, formats, decades, countries, ratings, even time lost to Skyrim. Earlier: 2025.
• 2025 Annual Report, Ellie. CALENDAR: a podcaster-parent’s ‘annual report’ with goal scorecard, calendar review of the year, and itemised podcast costs and revenue.

Professionals

Law (12)

• From Consolidation to Innovation: 2025 Year in Review, Nicole Black. Attorney-columnist tracks a year of legal-tech mergers, record AI funding and a flood of new startups.
• 2025 in Review: The Year Legal AI Grew Up (And Sometimes Fell Down), Rev. An honest-titled look at legal AI’s year: real progress, and the stumbles alongside it.
• Our favorite Instagram posts from 2025, Jackson A. Thomas. The lawyers’ magazine looks back at its year through the Instagram posts readers loved most. A lighter take on the genre.
• Lawyers and AI in 2025: Embrace, Evolve, or Fall Behind, Jean Gan. Argues 2025 made AI a core lawyering skill, moving from hype to hard adoption numbers.
• The 10 Legal Tech Trends that Defined 2025, Bob Ambrogi. Longtime lawyer-journalist ranks the ten trends of the year AI went from legal-tech experiment to everyday deployment.
• Texas Law Firms Navigate 2025 Trends and Shifts, Collier Legal Search. A Texas legal search firm flags the year’s shifts: new Texas Business Courts, AI in firms and lateral hiring.
• 2025 In Review: Themes from our work highlights across Practice Areas and Industry Sectors, Azmul Haque. A Singapore law-firm founder maps his year of cross-border deals along the Singapore-India-Asia corridor, theme by theme.
• Canadian patent law: 2025 in review, Michael Crichton, Alex Gloor, Nevena Cekic. Patent partners walk through the year’s Canadian rulings on eligibility, term adjustment and other patent fights. Earlier: 2025.
• Year in Review: Key Legal Developments 2025, Gibson Dunn. A big-law compendium of the year’s defining legal shifts, from fragmented AI regulation to enforcement swings, practice area by practice area. Earlier: 2024.
• Welcome to 2026 + My Top 5 Conversations With Lawyers from 2025, Nathan Aron. A legal recruiter recaps the five lawyer conversations that best captured the 2025 careers market in construction law.
• 2025: A Year in Review, Sarah High. A Houston trial and appellate boutique sums up its year of hires, wins and continuity.
• 2025 Year in Review, Barley Snyder. Pennsylvania firm’s annual recap of cases, growth and community work, plus notes on new state laws such as Act 50. Earlier: 2024.

Medicine, nursing and pharmacy (10)

• A year in review: The DO’s top 10 stories of 2025, Katie Arvia. The osteopathic physicians’ magazine counts down its ten top stories of the year, many written by DOs and students.
• Pharmacy’s Year of Progress, Mike Hennessy Jr. Publisher’s editorial frames 2025 as a year of wider scope and recognition for pharmacists, with real challenges too.
• Year-End Review: The Top Monitor Articles and Med-Surg Moments Episodes of 2025, Anna Horner. The med-surg nurses’ academy rounds up its most-read articles and podcast episodes of 2025.
• Pills, policy and prescribing: 2025 in numbers, The Pharmaceutical Journal. UK pharmacy’s year told through numbers: vaccination services, prescribing, regulator concerns and contract talks. Earlier: 2022.
• The best stories of 2025 in health, science, and medicine, Gary Marshall. STAT’s editors pick their top work of a year of turmoil at federal health agencies and big drug-market shifts.
• The top doctor news stories of 2025, Erin Dean. A UK doctors’ network recaps strikes, exam errors, pay rises and prostate cancer screening news.
• What Mattered Most in 2025, NEJM Clinician editors. NEJM’s clinician service curates the ten 2025 topics most worth knowing for generalist doctors heading into 2026.
• Episode 8: 2025 Year in Review, Rahul Ganatra, Molly Brett. Two physicians talk through the highlights of NEJM Clinician’s 2025 year-in-review topics.
• Nurse.org Year in Review, Nurse.org. Nursing news site’s recap, from the Education Department excluding nursing as a ‘professional’ degree to its reader awards.
• 2025 in Review: The College of Pharmacy’s most-read stories of 2025, Ohio State College of Pharmacy. A pharmacy school’s most-read list, led by the growing problem of pharmacy deserts.

Accounting (4)

• The biggest stories in accounting in 2025, Accounting Today. The 150-hour rule cracking, IRS staff cuts and private equity’s spread top accounting’s year.
• Here’s what made headlines in 2025 in accounting … and beyond, MACPA. A state CPA society’s rear-view look at the stories that hit the profession, and the wider world, in 2025.
• Canadian Accountant’s most popular accounting stories of 2025, Canadian Accountant. Most-read stories among Canadian accountants: regulatory reporting, landmark tax decisions and exam results.
• Top 10 Insightful Accountant Articles From 2025, Gary DeHart. Bookkeeping and accounting-tech readers’ top ten of the year, heavy on AI and advisory growth.

Real estate (4)

• 2025 Housing Market Year In Review: Is There Anybody Out There?, Jamie Forbes. Record prices, falling rates, piles of listings and few buyers: Redfin calls 2025 an odd buyer’s market. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Did the 2025 Real Estate Market Perform As Expected?, Scott P. Rogers. A Virginia realtor grades his own forecasts: sales and prices both missed. Refreshingly honest scorekeeping.
• 2025 Year in Review (topic hub), HousingWire staff. A trade-press hub of year-end stories on what shaped real estate, mortgage and housing in 2025.
• Your 2025 Year in Review: What Worked, What Didn’t & What’s Next, Lindsay Dreyer. A coach walks agents through a year-review that weighs how the year felt, not just production numbers.

Teaching and education (6)

• Teacher 2025: Our year in review, Teacher magazine. Australia’s magazine for teachers looks back on its most-read articles, columns and podcasts of 2025.
• The Best and Worst of 2025’s Education News (Opinion), Larry Ferlazzo. A veteran classroom teacher sorts 2025’s education news into best and worst: phone bans, absenteeism, vouchers. Earlier: 2024.
• The top 10 education stories of 2025, Alexander Russo. An education-media critic’s annual most-memorable list, spanning journalism, podcasts, books and TV.
• The Year in Education: 25 of Our Top Stories About Schools, Students and Learning, Nicole Ridgway. Twenty-five stories from a year of Education Department dismantling, reading struggles and teacher pay.
• 2025 Year in Review, Sanhita SinhaRoy. A tough year for libraries: federal funding fights and changes at the ALA, recapped for library workers. Earlier: 2025, 2024.
• What We Learned: Our 2025 Era, Harvard Graduate School of Education. An ed school walks month by month through the stories that shaped its year, framed as an ‘era’. Earlier: 2023.

Science and academia (10)

• Nature’s 10: Ten people who shaped science in 2025, Nature editors. Nature profiles ten people behind 2025’s science stories, from a fired CDC chief to a baby given custom CRISPR therapy. Earlier: earlier.
• How 2025 showcased the power and resilience of science, Nature editorial. Nature’s editors weigh huge disruptions to research against a year of bright spots in health and discovery.
• The Year in Biology, Hannah Waters. Touch neurons, deep animal evolution and what brains and AIs have in common. Earlier: 2024.
• The Year in Computer Science, Michael Moyer. A new link between time and space in computing, and an undergrad who toppled a 40-year-old conjecture. Earlier: 2024.
• The Year in Physics, Natalie Wolchover. A strange new black hole, weakening dark energy and fresh debates over quantum mechanics. Earlier: 2024.
• Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year: The unstoppable rise of renewable energy, Tim Appenzeller. Science picks the global surge of solar, wind and batteries as 2025’s top breakthrough.
• Pioneers of 2D metals win the Physics World 2025 Breakthrough of the Year, Physics World. Physicists who made the first atom-thin sheets of metal win the annual award over nine other finalists. Earlier: 2025.
• The Year in Mathematics, Jordana Cepelewicz. A shape that can’t pass through itself, a teen prodigy and two new kinds of infinity. Earlier: 2024.
• Year in Review: Our Top Stories of 2025, Columbia Climate School. Climate scientists’ news site revisits a year of LA wildfires, Texas floods and record heat.
• Cheers to 2025: In which Retraction Watch turned 15, and The Center For Scientific Integrity really became a center, Retraction Watch staff. The science watchdog’s annual look back: 15 years old, 300+ posts and a retraction database past 63,000.

Careers and other professions (16)

• Adobe: Cyber Monday Hits Record $14.25 Billion in Online Spending, Adobe Digital Insights. Adobe’s Cyber Week tally: record Cyber Monday, buy-now-pay-later over $1B, and AI-referred shopping traffic surging.
• In Pursuit of the Architecture of Empathy. My 2025 Year in Review., Chris Shayan. His seventh annual review, written from Ho Chi Minh City, asks whether empathy can be engineered into products. Earlier: 2024, 2023.
• Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2025 Final Sales Figures & Metrics, Paul Drecksler. An e-commerce newsletter gathers every platform’s BFCM 2025 numbers in one place.
• Ezra Dyer’s 2025 Automotive Year in Review, Ezra Dyer. A Car and Driver columnist’s wry personal take on the auto industry’s 2025. Earlier: 2024.
• A high-level summary of my 2025 year in review for book publishing, Jane Friedman. Publishing’s go-to analyst names the Anthropic settlement as authors’ biggest 2025 story, plus audiobook shifts.
• How I Wrote My 2025 Year in Review with Claude Code, John Turner. Cut his yearly review from three hours to 20 minutes by having an AI interview him. A meta pick.
• IEEE Spectrum’s Top Energy Stories of 2025, IEEE Spectrum. Engineers’ magazine counts down its most-read energy stories, led by small modular reactors and strained grids.
• My 2025 Year in Review, Nick Taylor. A developer’s year after his startup was acquired by the Linux Foundation: new work, MCP projects and lessons. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025 Wrapped: The Biggest Moments in HR, HRAddict. A Wrapped-style HR newsletter recap: federal hiring freezes, rehire block lists and remote-work holdouts.
• 2025 Year in Review & 2026 Outlook, ClearSpot.ai. A solar software firm recaps a year that passed 500 GW of global installs while Europe’s market shrank.
• My 2025 Year in Review, Noah Learner. An SEO tool builder looks back on family, dogs, conference travel to Tokyo and growing an SEO community.
• Kicking off the New Year with a post that will hopefully resonate, Anupam Bhattacharya. An executive recruiter shares his 2025 numbers: mostly C-level placements, and a notable tilt toward external hires.
• My 2025 Year in Review: Ten years in, Josh Doody. A salary-negotiation coach’s 11th annual review, marking ten years of his business and book. Earlier: 2025, 2024, 2023.
• 2025 Year in Review, CISA. The US cyber agency’s annual report card on defending critical infrastructure and blocking malicious activity. Earlier: 2024.
• 2025 Year in Review, Eugene Yan. An ML engineer scores his goals: promotion to Principal, an O1 visa, jaw surgery and a year of writing. Earlier: 2024, 2023, 2022.
• 2025 Year in Review, FS-ISAC. A threat-sharing group for 5,000+ financial firms reports how members turned intelligence into action.

Thanks

Ian Vanagas keeps Year in Review Review, a list of tech year in review posts going back to 2010. Worth a look if you want more.