Happy New Year everyone! 🎉

Let's start off with a few small confessions...

  • It's been quite a few years since my last blog post!🙈
  • I intended to get more into my YouTube channel, but didn't publish a single video! 😬 (though I did publish one on Nick Chapsas's channel! - more on that later)
  • I only published 10 podcast episodes

The first two are definitely on my list of new year's resolutions to do something about in 2026. The podcast one too - but, to be honest, I'm happy if I do one a month - it's the YouTube channel I want to focus more on this year.

For the blog - one of the things I did do in 2025, was a re-write of this website! (see below). So given that, I should really start getting back into blogging! So let's start that new years resolution with another "year in review" post...

Website re-write

I wanted to move this website to a be a statically-generated site (not using a database, etc). This makes it more manageable, and all in one place. I went with 11ty.

I also wanted to change the home page to be a place that I can send people to for links to all my things (social links, podcast, newsletter, courses, etc).

I'm really pleased with how it's turned out - and AI certainly made the rewrite a lot easier too! If you have any thoughts or feedback, please do let me know.

Podcast

There were 10 podcast episodes released this year. Which doesn't actually sound that much when I look at that number! I would have guessed more than that. There were 20k downloads in 2025. I had some really amazing guests on - checkout the website for more details: unhandledexceptionpodcast.com

Newsletter

My newsletter has continued to go out each month - with a steady growth in subscribers. Each episode has a list of hand-picked new items from the past month, a dev tip, a dev comic pick, and more.

I must admit, whilst the number of subscribers is growing over time - it's not growing as much as I would have hoped. Which I find a bit surprising, given the news items are such a great way for developers to keep up to date with the latest happenings in our industry. And it's only monthly, so not a big inbox hit either.

If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here: danclarke.beehiiv.com. If you have signed up - thank you! I really appreciate it. If you get value from it, please do share it with your friends and colleagues - it really does help.

Everstack

With my company, Everstack - I've continued working with my current two main clients. One of which, I've finally got to the end of the backlog, which will free up a bit of my time for more content creation, which I really want to focus more on in 2026.

Dometrain

Earlier in 2025, I released my 4th course on Dometrain - Getting Started with .NET Aspire. This was a really fun course to create, and I've had some great feedback. I'm strongly aware that the technology has moved on a bit since I created the course, and I really want to update it in 2026 to reflect the latest changes.

The previous courses (Docker, Kubernetes, and JetBrains Rider) have all continued to do well, and I've had some great feedback from those too.

YouTube

Each time I finish a course, which gives me tons of practice with creating videos - I say to myself, "right, now I'm all warmed up with video creation, I must do more on YouTube!". But then I never seem to get around to it! So 2026 is the year I really want to focus more on my YouTube channel. If you can all be my accountability partners and nag me if I don't - that would be amazing! 😄

*In fact - at the start of this post, when I said I didn't publish a single YouTube video. That isn't technically correct, as I did have the honour of being asked by Nick Chapsas to publish a video on his channel! I created one on Getting Started with MCP (Model Context Protocol).

.NET Oxford

We had three in-person .NET Oxford meetups in 2025, and it was great to catch up with everyone again. Our meetups are quarterly, and we unfortunately missed the first (March) one due to me being a bit rubbish. The June and December ones were our usual lightning talk format, and for the October one we held an "unconference", which is no set agenda, no prepared talks, no slides. We used Slido to gather topics from the attendees, and then everyone voted on what to discuss. We picked the top ones, and time-boxed group discussions about them. It was really nice doing that rather than our usual "speaker in front of everyone just watching" format. We'll definitely have to try that another time.

Personal life

On the personal side of things, 2025 was a really good year. My family and I went on a few different holidays, and have already planned more for this year. My boys are growing up so fast now - my eldest is almost as tall as me! I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to have such an amazing family, a job I love, and great friends.

New Years Resolutions

To wrap up this post, here's a list of my new years resolutions (some mentioned above).

  • Get back into creating content on my YouTube channel
  • Start blogging again
  • Start playing the guitar again
  • Get into running (I train a lot at the gym with weights, but am really unfit cardio-wise)

I plan to continue as I am, for other areas - eg. podcast, gym, family, client-work, etc. So whilst not technically 'new years resolutions' - they're definitely things I need to continue focusing on.

I'm also very excited to see what happens in 2026 with AI. There was so much progress in 2025, and I can't see it stopping soon. We certainly have interesting times coming up, and I for one, am so glad to get to see this within my lifetime!

Happy New Year everyone, and happy coding (vibing?)!