I did one last year so it’s probably time for another year in review. It’ll be mentioned more in the non-technology section but I did spend 6 months in Japan and that will be a theme in why I haven’t made as much progress in side projects as I desired.

tarpaulin

Tarpaulin had some significant speed improvements in 2025 as well as improvements on memory usage in the llvm coverage parsing. Additionally, the llvm profraw parsing code I’ve written in llvm-profparser is being used by Ferrous Systems in a new project. They’ve helped by contributing more testing, and fixes to parts of the library which Tarpaulin doesn’t hit and it’s been a pleasure collaborating with them on something I wrote.

The focus in 2026 will be taking more of the existing issues and closing more and more of them. Hopefully, UX issues with workspaces and excluding code from results can be solved in a way that’s more intuitive to people.

Tarpaulin has seen 14 releases in 2025 (and including New Years Day). That’s 3 more releases than last year and from 12 contributors (including me and ignoring dependabot).

streaming audio API blog series

In 2024 I started a blog series on streaming audio APIs with 4 posts released and a working system which could be used as a basis for things like streaming transcription services. In 2025 I only managed to release a single post but with 2 others in a draft state.

Currently, there’s a post on implementing the production metrics for these sorts of APIs. It’s in revisions and I hope to get it out within a month or two. But first I want to add more details to the section on tokio-metrics…

After that I aim on releasing the one on batching futures for performance. I might be ambitious and aim for the Opentelemetry one but given how terrible the Otel developer experience is that one might take a long time…

wiremocket

Last year I released wiremocket to minimal interest. This was expected as not everyone likes mocking, and most people don’t like websockets. However, it’s as complete as I need for the few times I need it which means unless people raise issues or I need more it can be seen as feature complete.

My current plan is just to keep bumping up dependency versions as new versions come out and otherwise keep it in a light maintenance mode.

asyncapiv3

I did start some work on improving asyncapiv3 submitting 7 PRs in the end. My hope was to make something similar to an openapi experience for websocket APIs. I’ll have to go back into my notes for this but I believe the library should be at a place where it can be used to power something similar to utoipa in Rust.

Currently at my day job, clients consuming websocket APIs is lower priority than it used to be. This does mean my work on this has somewhat stalled.

trustfall

Last year I got into trustfall some more and wrote a post on it. I also, revived Predrag’s WIP PR for a trustfall docs site and filled in some more details (See the PR here).

There’s a tracking issue for ideas for the docs and missing holes. I hope to get back to this work and hopefully something will be up and hosted this year. Trustfall is a cool piece of technology and helping making it easier to adopt would make me personally happy!

outside of technology

I mentioned in the past year in review I’d be spending some months in Japan. All in all that was 6 months during which I did get married with a traditional Shinto ceremony. Obviously, a large landmark in life and definitely a unique experience, the kimono was like 5-7 layers and in 85% humidity it does become a feat of human endurance.

In Japan my Japanese progress has obviously leapt forwards. It’s not where I want it to be but spending most of my time around people with little to no English has sharpened up my listening comprehension and speaking skills. I also helped out on the family rice farm splitting my time between my day job and rice farming for a few months.

I did get to see a reasonable amount of Japan, a lot around the Shizuoka prefecture where I was living, Tokyo, Nagoya, Nagano, Hiroshima, Imabari, Yamanashi. I should be back again this year and hopefully I’ll have time to explore more of Japan north of Tokyo.

Reading wise I just managed to finish Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and I’m partway through How to Blowup a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. I didn’t get to any of my other reading targets too many other things going on! I did start reading more manga though, mainly classics and seinen with Beserk and Oyasumi Punpun being the ones that have taken the most of my time.

I did definitely play a lot more games though. I finished everything I planned to last year (1000xRESIST, Chasing Static, Hollowbody, Half Life 1). I also picked and completed other fun indies like Parking Garage Rally Circuit and Selaco.

Cult of the Lamb was also something I really enjoyed. But the most time I’ve put in a game last year has to be Dwarf Fortress where I’ve racked up around 100 hours in 2025.

In terms of TV/Film, I’ve mainly watched a lot of anime since getting back to the UK. All of Naruto + Naruto Shippuden, Orb, Dandadan, Spy X Family and Yuru Camp are the ones that spring to mind as standouts. For film I’ve watched a lot and some standouts (not animated) are:

Shin Kamen Rider (Dir. Hideaki Anno)
Onibaba (Dir. Kaneto Shindō)
Decision to Leave (Dir. Park Chan-wook)
Memories of Murder (Dir. Bong Joon Ho)
Pulse (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Weapons (Dir. Zach Cregger)
In the Mood for Love (Dir. Wong Kar-Wai)

I’ve also started trying to watch all Akira Kurosawa films: Seven Samurai, Ran and Throne of Blood are all amazing. For animated films Jin Roh - Wolf Brigade is an amazing work of animation and 100 meters might get me on a sport anime kick. Plus the Chainsaw Man movie was an amazing spectacle.