My Year in Review - 2025 Edition
Overview
Despite being a few weeks late, I still wanted to take some time and go over what I worked on in 2025 and what my plans are for 2026. I accomplished a lot in 2025, including the completion of a book that I had been working on for some time, as well as starting a few other projects. 2026 is going to be a busy year for me, and I am going to work hard to stay on track and get everything completed that I need to get completed.
Professional and Personal Life
I went on a 2 week trip to Munich in July for work, which was the second time that I have travelled there for my current company. It is an amazing city, the weather was great and the food was fantastic. I spent an entire day walking around the city just to take it all in.
I also spent an entire afternoon at the Deutsches Museum, since it was recommended by one of my colleagues.
Overall, despite being busy with a lot of things, the year went well and I think I got a lot of things accomplished.
New Website Domain
Earlier in 2025 I made the decision to move the primary domain from the mjcb.io domain to the mjcb.ca domain. This was for a lot of reasons, but it mostly came down to wanting to highlight the fact that I am a Canadian, and my online presence should reflect that as much as possible. I took a hit in the search engine rankings as a result, but it has recovered at this point.
Online Services Diversification
I started an initiative at the end of 2024 to migrate away from Microsoft 365 for several reasons, and it ended up evolving in a bigger initiative to migrate away from a lot of US services. I have moved multiple services to providers located in Canada and the EU, and it has worked out very well so far. I wrote about the experience and challenges that I encountered:
- Why I Ditched Microsoft 365 (Part 1)
- Why I Ditched Microsoft 365 (Part 2)
- Online Services Diversification
Even though it was a bit of a pain to get to this point, I am happy with the results and I am making a serious effort to keep my online services as diverse as possible.
Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - Second Edition
After several weeks of grinding away at it, I finally published the follow-up to my first book, Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - Second Edition.
Just like with the first edition, I will also create a post about the work that went into creating it which I will try and do in the next few weeks.
I also did some minor updates to the existing guides that were already available. This was mostly to update the documents for the new website URL, and to do some final cleanup on them. Unless someone points out an error, I have no intention of updating these documents again.
Miscellaneous
AI Policy
I don’t think I needed to make a policy for AI usage, but here it is. My opinions on AI and LLM tools have not changed in 2025, and I still have zero intention of using those tools for anything that I create. If you use AI tools then I have no issues with that, but they are something that I don’t use.
Apple Silicon
I am still using my MacBook Air (M1, 2020) that I bought back in 2021, and I cannot believe that it is still working. This laptop will be 5 years old in February, and aside from a few scratches it is working almost as well as it did when I first got it. I have recently upgraded it to macOS Tahoe, which works perfectly fine despite what other people say about it and I have no complaints about it. I talked about this last year, and I intend to use this until it either dies or becomes unusable due to a hardware issue (such as the keyboard or battery). At the same time, I am still using my iPhone 12 Pro Max that I also got around the same time, but the battery is in poor condition, and I will probably end up getting a replacement this year. Whether that is an iPhone 17, or presumably the iPhone 18, it just depends on price and availability.
End of Life for Windows 10
On October 14, 2025, Windows 10 went end of life for the vast majority of users. I never had any issues with Windows 8, so I always found Windows 10 to be an incremental upgrade to that operating system. I had planned on creating a more in-depth post about this, including a full summary of the major changes that occurred during the lifetime of the operating system. I ran out of time during that exercise, so I only ended up creating a short post about the history of Windows 10.
2026 Goals
Linux
Even though I am still using my MacBook Air as my primary computer, I am going to be making a move to using Linux using a new desktop this year. I have an idea for how I am planning on using it, and I will write a post about it when I get it working the way that I want it.
Moving
This year is going to be a challenge because I am going to be moving, hopefully later in the spring. I am staying in Toronto, as I have been based out of the city for almost 15 years and I have no intention of leaving.
As part of the move there are some minor renovations happening to the house, and I am building a dedicated office for myself. This will allow me to work on projects without needing to put everything away at the end of the day and be able to work on things in a quieter environment. I will also be able to finally display my game collection which has been in and out of storage for the last decade, and actually start playing a lot of the games that I haven’t had the chance to play yet.
I will also be running a lot of network cabling in the house prior to moving in, which is something that I am looking forward to. I have already started working on this and I will create a post about this when it is completed.
I made a comment last year about the tagline for the website, “A website about networking, system administration and other things that interest me” and I will finally add some networking content this year as a result of the move.
Website Changes
I am not planning any major changes to any of my websites this year. Making the domain change last year was a major change, as well as the web hosting migration, and I still like the Hugo platform and theme that I am using. I want to focus on other things for the website and start posting more often. I decided to create a separate section on the website for newsletters, which I will start using more often this year for updates. I also created a Mastodon profile, and I might start posting things there if I think it is appropriate.
New Projects
I am in the planning stages for a new book, which will be completely unrelated to the last two that I published. It will be tech related, but it won’t be a guide like my previous releases. I have no timeline for when it will be released, as it requires a lot of research to ensure that I get all of the details correct. If I actually start working on it, I will post some updates about it.