2025 — My year in review
I'm writing this year's review post from sunny Spain. It's Christmas Eve, and I'm happy. Compared to 2024, 2025 has felt like a very eventful year. When I look back at the year, I can mostly think of good things.
Tailwind
This year was my fourth year working for Adam and Tailwind. Tailwind has never been a full time gig for me, but it's definitely felt like it a few times this year. The headline for me this year has been the sponsorship program that have ended up consuming a lot of my time. We started the program in late July and it's now doing more than $800k in ARR. Most of the revenue is coming from companies sponsoring at the Partner level.
Whenever I'm talking to people about the sponsorship program, they assume companies are lining up outside our door to buy a Tailwind CSS sponsorship. But that's not really how it works. Most of the companies sponsoring us are doing so because I've been doing outreach and spent a lot of time getting to know them. A lot of cold to lukewarm emails and DMs were sent this year! It's been a really interesting challenge to figure out how to structure the program and how to get "sales" to work. It's been really awesome to build relationships with all these different companies and the program has become a meaningful part of the revenue at Tailwind Labs. The companies sponsoring us are some of the most interesting companies in tech, such as Cursor, Shopify, and CodeRabbit.
I'm super bullish on working with larger companies in 2026, and I have a lot of ideas for ways to partner with companies beyond what we offer in the sponsorship program. Figuring out the enterprise and partnership side of the business is going to be my main priority in 2026 at Tailwind.
In general, it's been a turbulent year at Tailwind with AI and fierce competition. Adam has documented a lot of that on his new podcast, so I won't spend time on it here. I'm bullish on what we are planning for 2026!
Laravel
I worked for a new client this year: Laravel. Getting to work for Taylor and Laravel felt surreal and I joked that I had been called to serve! I am pretty sure it mostly came about because of this tweet:
Early this year, I was doing a lot of experiments publicy around AI and MCP. It caught Taylor's attention and Laravel asked if I was open to come in and experiment with AI stuff at Laravel.
We quickly decided that the most obvious thing to work on was an MCP SDK for Laravel, and for the next two months I worked like a madman to try to compensate for the fact that I have never really built a Laravel package before. I learned everything about MCP, and read through the spec over and over and over. What came out of it was the laravel/mcp package, that the Laravel team took over, polished, and released in the fall. I'm super proud to have kickstarted this project, even though I am no longer involved, and it's been awesome to see how it's been received by the Laravel community.
The most important thing I took away from the Laravel gig was how much I love working on dev tools. I've never really seen it that way until one of my friends pointed it out, but I've almost always worked on tools for developers, and it's truly my happy place. Building an open source package was really fun, and it ended up giving me a lot of inspiration for OG Kit, which we'll get to in a second.
2025 has also been a year of conference speaking. I've spoken at Laravel Live in London, Laravel Live in Copenhagen, and at the Laravel meetups in Copenhagen, Odense, and Aalborg. I love the Laravel community, and I love speaking!
Photo by Maurizio Bonani on X. I've lost about ten kilos since this photo was taken.
OG Kit
I built a new product this year and I think it's the most excited I've ever been about a product. When I had the idea for OG Kit (dynamic Open Graph images with just HTML and CSS), I almost couldn't believe it didn't already exist. The reception has been incredible. Still to be determined whether there's a good business here, but even though the numbers are really small still, I'm seeing some really good sign.
Going into OG Kit, I wasn't really sure if this was even something people were willing to pay for, so I honestly mostly built it because I thought the idea was so cool. OG Kit currently has 36 paying customers and the feedback from these early customers has been really good, so maybe this could actually work?
I've been really intentional with how I'm building this business. Both in terms of the product and all the other things around it. It's a simple product — I mean, it's an API with one single endpoint. I want it to be a simple business, too, and not a Reform 2.0. But most of that stuff is probably for a different blog post!
Personal stuff
Last year I talked about our new house. This feels a little taboo to say, but we don't really love the house. We're too far away from town and we kind of regret that... It's a great house and a great place to live with kids, but I wouldn't be too surprised if we revert that decision in the next few years and move back into the town centre where we used to live.
This year we made a lot of new friends in town (my wife gets most of the credit here). It's been really awesome and have made us even happier that we made the move to this small town where we didn't know a single person a few years ago. Having a lot of friends in town really makes it feel like home.
As I mentioned in the begining, I'm writing this post from Spain where we are spending a month over Christmas and New Year's. Travel is something that used to be a big part of my identity. Most of my twenties were spent traveling the world, but after having kids it's slowed down a lot. Both our kids struggled with a lot of sickness when they were little, and we've gotten to know the hospital a little too well (even though everyone there is really nice, ha). Even though everything is fine now, it's still caused me a lot of anxiety that's made it hard for me to plan a big trip with the kids. Because of that, this trip to Spain is a really big deal for me personally. It's a place I know really well, but it's still been something I've had to overcome! Now that we're here, I'm so glad we pulled the trigger.
Finally, in September this year I decided I needed to take my health more seriously. It's suffered a lot over the past five years with kids and startups. Over the following months, I lost ten kilos in a way that actually feels pretty sustainable and got a lot more serious about my sleep. I've been wearing a Whoop wrist band for the past six months and it's made me really aware about how different kinds of foods and eating habits affect my well-being. Losing weight was a combination of a LCHF diet, intermittent fasting, and tracking my weight religiously every single day with my Withings scale. I'm happy to talk about this more if you are curious. Mental health has also been a big topic for me this year. I've spent the past few years dealing with some hard personal things, where therapy has really helped. Last year I told my therapist that one of my new year resolutions for 2025 was to continue regular therapy (every 6-8 weeks) whether I felt like I needed it or not. This has worked really great for me — there's always something to talk about whether it feels like it or not beforehand.
All in all, 2025 felt like a really big year for me, both on the work front and the personal front. For the first time, I don't really feel like I want to change much in the new year. For me, 2026 is going to be a year of doubling down on what already works.
See you in 2026! 👋
