2025 was definitely something new, something different. 2025 was supposed to be the year of two financial related apps, but hah I failed at that. I failed because I discovered Gemini 2.5 Pro. 2025 didn't produce the two services I imagined, instead it culminated in the production of an entire ecosystem of open source MPL 2.0 licensed projects. It was a year where I produced far more than I ever imagined. There's no way I've would have been able to do all of this on my own in 10 or 20 years.
I've focused my attention on using Rust Programming language and moved away from Java and Node.JS. I rebuilt all of my infrastructure in Rust, at least the ones that were written to leverage Node.JS. I just don't use Node.JS for anything anymore. It's either Rust or Dart/Flutter now. 2025 was the year that I realized that.
With regard to Open Source projects, I never imagined building ZeroMQ in pure Rust. At least not within 5 years anyway, but lo and behold RZMQ. RZMQ features io_uring and tcp cork support, which are not even features I had imagined adding. I was curious if these could be done and it took a lot of time and effort (I put it on the back burner after the first attempt), but wow it got done. RZMQ enabled me to evolve XSMB to 2.0. I don't use GRPC, I use XSMB 😏.
RZMQ spawned fibre, which is another amazing project that I never would have done in 10 / 15 years, but I needed something to replace async-channel in RZMQ as kanal was not a good replacement at the time and probably still isn't. io_uring does not run on the tokio thread, so I wanted one unified channel that supported both modes. fibre is quite likely the safest rust channel library through its very very sparse use of unsafe.
I'm glad to see some of the projects like RZMQ got stars (25 right now) without any marketing. I imagine over time as RZMQ gets more stable that there will be more use of it therefore more questions or pull requests.
There's just a lot of software that I could finally get out of my head and notes that I did this year. View some at Excerion Sun LLC's Open Source Projects if interested. Excerion Sun LLC's website was updated in September after my infrastructure had been fully rebuilt and using XSMB 2.0 and all the other supercharged work.
2025 heads to a close, there's still a lot I want to do. 2026 will see the release of Hi Stakes Markets Game. 2025 was supposed to be that year, but there was a lot more complexity that I encountered and more features than I initially planned for. I didn't plan for player tasks (contracts) nor market chatter, analyst reports and etc. It's crazy that I was even able to get to this point given how many projects I took on this year.
With the finalization of Hi Stakes Markets Game, January is the new target for an alpha. There aren't any more major things to add, the work now is composed of verification, fixing bugs, adjusting and creating new content at this point. I now have a website and a management site, etc. to satisfy requirements for app stores and inspect and manage the game. I'm glad I didn't rush to release in November like I wanted, because there are insidious bugs that would have been difficult to fix without wiping data. Hi Stakes Markets Game leverages SSK DB, which had bugs in the implementation of some common data structures or in the use of SSK DB. It's just not fun to find glaring errors in your DB.
2025, the year AI stopped being a toy and produced a lot of incredible innovation. 2026 is the year I march forward and finally start the journey that should have started in 2020.