kevin's 2025: year-in-review

For years, I've had this end-of-year ritual where I read the last stanza of Walcott's Love After Love and, following its call, feast on my life. I spend a few days in solitude, walking up memory lane before leaping off the cliff to the next year.

Sounds mystical, but really it's just looking back at the year's journal entries and photos, reflecting. Picture your life flashing before your eyes over like 48 hours, with your face cycling through dozens of emotions as you relive each peak and trough, but with hindsight.

Anyway, I'm done feasting on my 2025 life and would like to share some regurgitate with you.

Go on...eat, while the bolus is warm.

I spent most of the year:

Sauntering Vancouver

I covered more ground on my perennial quest to walk all the streets in (Metro) Vancouver! And what makes it so nice is how different each was. There were:

The three great expeditions:

• a fun trek where Jo and I walked the full length (~18km) of Burnaby, dipping my feet in both the southmost (river) and northmost (sea) points to bookend the adventure

• a long-awaited 15km along the entire Hastings St, starting at the base of Burnaby Mountain and ending at Coal Harbour's waterfront, on a bench next to a man who was losing his mind

• a ~10km expedition through both the walkable parts of Burnaby and those that made me contemplate my suicidality. Went up the hills that make New West and shared roads with articulated trucks towards Burquitlam. All for $10 IKEA DAIM cake (and yes, I'd do it again!)

Walking out of a funk

Not all walks were impulsive explosions of curiosity and agency. A few were calm saunters to piece myself back together during a depressive slump. When I got the Gogomi notification that I'd completed Parkcrest-Aubrey, I shrugged. Those walks meant much more than that.

The one I remember most was on a rainy day when barely anyone was outside. I took a stroll around, all hooded up, because I'd much rather be in the gloomy outside than be gloomy inside. That's when I stumbled upon a bird drowning in a puddle at an alleyway near Halifax and Howard Ave.

I got closer and realised that it wasn't drowning, but actually playing! I stared at it for too long, feeling envious of this little starling. Something shifted. Since then, I've been noticing birds more, especially the hummingbirds who visit my neighbour's balcony almost every morning. Given my tendency to take things too far, who knows, might join these folks.

Roaming with others

Speaking of joining folks, 2025 meant more walks with old friends and meeting new ones:

• Errand runs (getting pots with Vi) and tourism challenges
• Chasing warm fall gradients around East Van with Rob (this year's autumn really bloomed, eh?)
• Em and I caught up over a quick walk in Strathcona and stumbled upon some artefacts hiding in plain sight! (waiting for the tiktokers to hidden-gemify some of them)
• Kai showed me how to scale a wall, while we dilly-dallied around Mount Pleasant
• In the summer, I walked all the way to downtown New West to meet a friend, then we lined the quayside together (found a koi pond I could sit next to all day)
• The most random was bumping into an elderly woman who also moved from an African country to Vancouver, though 30 years before I did. We traded stories while walking around her neighbourhood, Sperling-Broadway.

Rounding up

These, plus about 200 others, made for a busy sauntering year. I ran the numbers and 2025 saw 422 km walked, 21 new neighbourhoods and 124 hours on foot.

As for quest completion, all this adds to a...+3% bump for Vancouver, and +7% for Burnaby. Now you understand why I describe the quest as perennial! If you read between the lines, you'll figure out that the goal isn't really to walk all the streets of the region.

One thing about this quest is that there's no such thing as being delayed anymore. You can just putter around. For example, my friend was late to a coffee hang, I said "sure" and just walked around the neighbourhood a bit, "chasing reds" on Gogomi until they got there. A fun way to pass the time, rather than, I don't know, cycling through the same 5 apps on my phone.

"Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities... Walking helps me feel at home."

— Lauren Elkin

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Building Gogomi

Others are walking too!

I'm not the only one who experienced the joy and unintended effects of walking this year. Others did it too, after I released Gogomi to the App Store. It's been cool seeing my friends and complete strangers use it!

Talk is cheap, here's the wormery showing an anonymised map of people's walk traces in the Metro Vancouver area:

At the start of 2025:

At the end of 2025:

I've learned the stories behind a few of those traces. I know Desmond did 100% of Mt. Pleasant. Jack's going crazy all over Langley. Em and Thelma both walked 50% of their neighbourhoods in Vancouver and Coquitlam. Rob's almost through with Kensington-Ceddar, Rahel's exploring Surrey. A Pitt Meadows public official becoming a gogomite wasn't on my bingo card. And Tim, who emailed me and later met up for coffee, is on a quest to run all the streets of Vancouver!

And so many gogomites I don't even know about are probably out there!

What I shipped

1. Gogomi works with just a phone: Anyone can record their walks directly in the app! No more Apple Watch required (really big deal!)

That quote from the Excel team, "find dependencies and eliminate them", has been Gogomi's story. When I first started in 2024, you needed three (!) apps and an Apple Watch. Now, anyone can download the one app to start their walking quest.

requirements slimming over time

Date	Dependencies
April 2024	+ + +
September 2024	+ +
January 2025	+
August 2025

2. Added support for most of Metro Vancouver: I filled in missing neighbourhoods thanks to this custom map from K.L, and laid the foundation for Gogomi to work in any city around the world! (psst: there're two testers in New York and Seattle but that's hidden behind a feature flag for now)

3. Stabilised the sync system with a dual approach: People get reactions for their walks right after (immediate sync), or later in the day (scheduled sync). More on this in April's devlog

4. Lots of UI polish: Retouched a lot of views (once I found out about rounded fonts, I sanded off every surface lol), added some onboarding and cleaned up map controls. A volunteer helped me add live activities so people could know their walks were being recorded at the background

5. Lesser known features that I worked on but haven't done a good job letting people know:
• GPX import: Wanted people to be able to sync with their Strava but the API was too stringent. So instead, I added a way for anyone to import GPX files. Close enough!





• Footprints: After 'completing' Parkcrest-Aubrey, I wanted some kind of graphic to show just that neighbourhood. Came up with a quick matplotlib visual that shows the footprint, which people can get whenever they 100% their neighbourhood.

6. Milestones: One thing I'd like to do is practice more milestoning instead of just go-go-going. Here're a few from 2025:
• Published Gogomi on the App Store for real (after back-and-forth with reviewers)
• Finally got an official domain! gogomi.app (costs less than an UberEats order, why was I overthinking this?)
• Registered a corporation (Oboade Labs Inc) for Gogomi and bigger projects
• Grew from ~30 to ~60 active gogomites, without marketing! The waitlist also went up from 3 to 37 people interested in walking in their cities
• Survived my first outage when the database hit an OOM due to a power user's workload (they walked 5km every day of the year). Fixed with some batching and bin packing

Looking back

Being an indie-creator means wearing many hats, and I noticed I was feeling stretched thin over the year. For example, one night I'm in the swamp checking logs to figure out why the data system (running on a 'dev tier' db btw lol) was crashing due to OOM. And the next night, I'm sketching out the overall direction of Gogomi going watch-free.

All that flitting between depths added to the tension. Add the fact that I have a primary job with increasing responsibility and downward pressure, and it's obvious why the cracks showed eventually, or why I'd been keeping Gogomi under wraps. Didn't want to deal with outages from many sign-ups after posting a TikTok. Imagine dealing with that while on-call at work?

But in retrospect, I was being too hard on myself. Just look at the ship list for one side project! That not-enough feeling was bullshit! I feel more spacious letting go of that, and even more curious what 2026 would look like when I actually put Gogomi out there without restraint.

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Making 'Compass Wrapped'

I got back to Vancouver from a big funeral with an incessant urge to write. And after writing about that one time I saw a drunk man on the SkyTrain, I got curious how many times I'd tapped my Compass card (spoiler: thousands).

That curiosity manifested as Compass Wrapped, a Spotify-Wrapped-inspired breakdown for Metro Vancouver transit users. More about that in this dedicated blog post: Creating Compass Wrapped!

Judging from the page hits, at least 5000 have tried Compass Wrapped! The "busiest day" tile in particular was the one people loved. It got them like, "Why did I tap 12 times on Mar 24th? Where was I going?". Even the New West Mayor checked his too.

I'm shooting to get TransLink onboard, because that'll greatly open the playing field. With their support, this prototype could become something much bigger!

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Writing and telling stories

I had a secret goal of writing more in 2025. And it panned out: 8 Sauntervan posts, 9 personal essays, 3 technical blog posts, and 2 drunk texts, which is a big improvement from last year! I wrote a cathartic post cataloguing most of them, complete with a daemon on my shoulder telling me what I'd done wasn't enough (It was).

My favourites:

• [Technical] - Analysing 11 million Ghanaian names to maximise a hit song's reach: This is what I sound like. Absolutely unhinged. Data science meets Ghanaian pop culture. Got acknowledged by some writers and scholars I really admire (one praised my ability to combine technical depth with clear writing. As a scripturient technologist, I'm carrying that compliment with me to the grave!)
• [Personal] - A tie between mystical readings, about a brain state I experienced once and can't replicate, and you don't have to swing so hard, written at peak burnout
• [Sauntervan] - The Meridian: Halving Burnaby with Jo: captures the spirit of my quest to walk all of Vancouver

I moved everything from Substack to kevindeyoungster.com. Trades discoverability for having it all in one place, but that feels right.

Two friends recently said my writing "felt different" this year, especially towards the end. I still blush at that. Means I'm making progress sounding more like myself (as Kaleb Horton advised). In 2026, I want to go weirder. More of what only I can write, especially with LLMs churning out formulaic stuff.

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Riding bikes

Indoor

Spin remains one of my favourite activities. Something about riding stationary bikes in a dimly lit room moving to oontz-oontz music blasting from large speakers does something for me. So glad I stumbled into it. This year, I got to make AFROSPIN (cranking to afrobeats, amapiano, afrohouse) happen twice at SPINCO.

Vibes were immaculate as always. We started with a banger (Yuma). You could feel the air go still when Kamili came on, and left folks asking for more. It's still hilarious that I'm technically not even a SPIN instructor (but wouldn't mind becoming one!).

Outdoor

My second year of road cycling! According to Strava: 500km this spring-summer. Less than last year (which, to be fair, had three cycling arcs, mountain biking included), but every ride was fun, with friends and in a new cycling club!

I joined the cycling club, LC3, for a few rides around Metro Vancouver and had a blast with them. Folks like Perry and Theresa brought such energy and competitive spirit that I often forgot I was rolling with older folks (I might've been one out of the three 20-something year olds in the 100+ cohort this year).

The ultimate training arc back in 2024 was insane, getting a gravel bike just five weeks to the fondo and speed-running becoming a cyclist with my friends and others. I joined two of my cyclist friends to form Team Cool Runnings (after, you know) and we did the 2024 Whistler GranFondo together!

Of course, I was excited to do it again! But honestly, training this year was a bit lacking. That might've been because we were down one member so morale was tanking. Still, we bumbled along, training at the last minute as always.

This year, we got to check out the Demo Forest trail (very beautiful) and rode Stanley Park-UBC-Iona Beach to complete a century ride. Unfortunately, we had to defer our GranFondo entry to 2026 because of the terrible air quality that weekend, but I think it works out nicely since we'll be able to do that one with all three of us and with more energy!

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Reading

With books, I mostly go by vibes and borrow from the local library, buying on occasion (e.g. I'm collecting the Witch Hat Atelier series).

And what's weird is how whenever I'm reading a book, there's usually some song I'm listening to on loop that ends up complementing it. What I remember reading:

• The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez) - 🎶 Ama Gear - Dlala Thukzin
  • A dreamy mythological tale. Original!
• Anansi's Gold (Yepoka Yeebo) - 🎶 Ti De - Kokoroko
  • Ghanaian historical fiction featuring a trickster. While reading, news broke about a certain Ghanaian 'frauding' the international scene, showing the shadow of "you can just do things". The similarities were hilarious
• The Sword of Kaigen (M L Wang) - 🎶 Outtro - Vraell
  • I had this in the reading list for a while but had a mysterious urge, reading it when I did felt personally relevant to my story this year, wrote about that
• Tales from Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin) - 🎶 Zoltraak - Evan Call
  • So fun, and timeless, very different from what I usually read (more ethereal, with descriptions of nature I don't usually encounter)

I also caught up on some manga (Witch Hat Atelier (WHA), Ranger Reject, Gachiakuta). The latest chapters of WHA have cemented it in my top 3 manga. I love how it uses a magical fantasy story to tell about craft, and maybe its art style reminds me of those Enid Blyton books I used to read as a kid.

Tbh, most of my reading was the hundreds of little articles I'd saved to my Kobo. And while I'm certain I enjoyed a few, that I can barely remember any tells me I probably shouldn't be reading them as much. Like, am I saving this article because I find it interesting or because I'm in the mood for saving articles?

I also read a ton of newsletters (including Building Slack by Johnny Rodgers, whom I had the pleasure of meeting later in the year, and foxwizard's newsletter, I'm a sucker for the mythopoeic stuff). Some articles I remember: How to fix a Typewriter and Your Life, Century-Scale Storage, Numb at Burning Man, A Short Lesson in Perspective, A Battle with My Blood.

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Watching and Playing Stuff

Watching

I used the Sequel app to track what I watched this year. Highlights: Frieren, Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, Andor, Common Side Effects, The Rehearsal, K-pop Demon Hunters, Wild Robot, The Great. The most unexpected watch was Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray. I saw a thumbnail and thought "weird", then binged the whole thing over a weekend. A true surprise.

Some favourites from online: Isaac Marion (love how he tells stories), anything from Brennan Lee Mulligan, Techs on Texts, Jasmine Sun's interviews, Sublime's interviews (featuring Robin Sloan, Venkatesh Rao), Couples Therapy podcast with Hanif Abdurraqib (yes to black men with rich inner lives), Tom MacWright on Shutting down Placemark. How To Become A 37 Year Old Broke Loser was a shocker (one of the rare times I was impressed by YouTube's algo). Also: most things from Center for Action and Contemplation, and too many Nitefreak sets.

Playing Stuff

I sold my PS5 because it was gathering dust, even though I got myself Monster Hunter: Wilds after anticipating it all of last year. I only played for 2 hours and never went back. That was the last straw.

I transmuted the PS5 and my Switch into a Switch 2—sold both on Marketplace—and that was a great move. I spent a good amount of the first weeks of my sabbatical playing HK: Silksong and Hades 2, still amazing that those were released back to back. I had a great time (type II fun) with Silksong, and you can't go wrong with Hades 2, which I still pick up from time to time. Played Megaman X8 16-bit which is a fan-made pixel-art remake of Megaman X8, impressive piece of work!

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Looking after plants

I've been a plant dad for over 3 years now. I currently look after four: Philomena (monstera named after a campy Ghanaian rap song from '99 and because I confused her for a Philodendron), Faustie (ficus microcarpa named for their bulbous bottom), Morris (guiana chestnut named after a popular actor), Riri (a variegated umbrella plant I inherited from an elderly woman in East Van).

One of my favourite things is watching fronds start tiny and then, next time you look, boom, full-on leaves. Happens slowly and then all at once.

I also like how these plants are a good mirror of my mental state. If they're thriving, it means I'm paying enough attention outside of me. If not, well...Faustie didn't do too well after I overwatered (an early sign of my depression arc starting). Still not sure if they're recovering or just slowly dying. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I also volunteered with Still Moon Arts Society for some restoration work: uprooting blackberries, planting thimbleberries, removing morning glory vines from nearby plants.

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Assembling Lego

This year's builds were entirely Lego Botanicals, all with friends which made them better. Flower Arrangement with Deji at Milano Coffee. Chrysanthemum after a busy work day, at my friend Nab's, while we people-watched. Poinsettia, which was a gift from Tuti and we built right there and then at Grounds for Coffee on Commercial.

Oh, I also made a little scrapbook page of the lego sets I've built in recent years:

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Engineering at Microsoft

I'm wrapping up my fifth year as a software engineer at Microsoft (ikr, feels like just yesterday when I started!). This year: performance work, staring at flame graphs, plumbing SDKs and data pipelines, a lot of observability. Also, work to get Copilot Pages & Notebooks generally available. Can't share much beyond: I [NDA]'d the [NDA] to increase [NDA], and therefore shareholder value.

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Burning out

Since the year began I had this ominous feeling "layoffs layoffs layoffs" (not unfounded given the rumours). So I started saving more and cutting expenses. Then in March, on a flight back to Vancouver from Accra, I realised while journaling that the feeling was masking something darker. I wanted to be laid off! I jolted up in my seat and startled the person next to me. What!?

When I calmed down, I thought about my manager telling me "things are aligning" for me "to get to the next level soon", and all I felt was "meh" (if you're reading this, sorry Cosmo!)

I kept this dark desire repressed and threw myself into other things that brought me meaning, like working on Gogomi in the evenings. I didn't notice the vignette closing in. If you asked me what I actually wanted, I couldn't have answered.

I'd turned into a self-punishing task rabbit. Nothing I did was enough. I'd complete two items off my todos before midnight, look at the backlog, mutter "not enough" and keep going, burning the candle from both ends. I unknowingly isolated myself, spending 10+ hrs clacking away until my wrists started screaming.

One night, while I was pushing through the creaking in my fingers, a thought popped up: hey, you're making an app for walking...when did you last go for a walk? That was enough. I started walking Parkcrest-Aubrey again. That's when I found the bird in the puddle. On another walk, I bumped into an elderly woman from Sperling-Broadway. We traded stories. Something about the way she moved, open-handed, reminded me that I could move with a lot less clenching.

Motivation was draining fast at work. As if all my skill and talent had quit like a bored intern. I remembered something from my fav. plant care channel: "...another physical indicator is stunted growth. If you notice a lack of new leaves or a slow growth rate, it's time to consider a larger pot". I hadn't seen my leaves in a while.

Unlike back in May when I was almost crashing out, this time felt like a calm knowing. Still, I ignored it because the Software Industry was going through many more tectonic shifts. I knew how much harder it was to get a job. I'd been helping laid-off friends with their searches, and botched a Senior SWE interview out of complacency myself (grateful for the ego check). I was scared to leave (in this economy??)

Things changed at Nanaimo, at a friend's wedding near the end of summer. A book I was reading reminded me that I didn't need to swing so hard, and after a wonderful weekend, I ended up sitting on a log at the cliff edge next to the ferry terminal. I breathed in that salty air and watched seagulls do their late morning dives. A baby rabbit wasn't that far off, munching on some grass as its parent slept like a dark shadow under a bench.

All was silent, everyone agreed. 10 minutes before the boat's horn blew, I just knew. I planned for a 6-month sabbatical and started draining savings to fund it. Scared and excited.

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Rekindling

It took some work convincing everyone—friends, family, my manager—that I needed to take time off for a 6-month sabbatical, and was ready to make whatever tradeoffs necessary. My dad: "Why do you need 6 months to figure it out, why not 1 week vacation!?" (lol)

Roughly, I wanted the sabbatical in two phases: first to rest and recover from burnout, and second to figure out what the next step would be. Eventually, I did make it happen by taking an unpaid leave of absence that started towards the end of October. As I write this, I'm nearing the 3-month mark.

The past 3 months have been learning to rest, and I mean Rest. Only recently do I actually feel it in my body. I had to respect the negative space. Two weeks in, a bay-area startup reached out for a founding engineer. I said no.

Of course, I did allow some activity. Most of my time was spent like Frank Chimero's: reading things that brought me joy, laughing at Gumball, flâneuring around Metro Vancouver, spending more time catching up with friends and new people I admired, and staring at the hummingbirds that always visited my neighbour's balcony.

Personally, I noticed I started sleeping like my grandmother (it's hard to justify staying up late when there's no need for revenge bedtime procrastination), and caught sunrises more often. A regular routine was to go by Gabi & Jules on Hastings for some shortbread, then walk up to McGill library to do some writing. My best writing of 2025 was done across a grandma taking English lessons, and next to a teenager cheating on their physics assignment with ChatGPT.

The characteristic daemons of my burnout were "there's not enough time" and "you should be doing more". I spent the first weeks whipping up a counter-cycle: "there's plenty of time" (literally bought it), and "you don't have to". It's been a struggle.

I can say it's gotten better, taking the scenic route and intentionally slowing down. Not rushing when the train to Waterfront is about to leave, saying "I'll take the next one". A word for the sabbatical: "tilling the land sowing seeds". Regeneration. Growing down. Some questions on my mind included: "what does my voice sound like?", and "where does my strength come from?".

Friends say my writing sounds more and more like me. I do my best when I'm having fun, and being a little ludicrous, going rogue (see my website heading).

I notice that I do best finding leaks in the concrete and growing flowers and bushes, making things that make people go, oh this was here all along and I did not know?

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Looking forward

The season as a SWE at Microsoft is coming to an end, and I'm grateful for the 'holy disorder' that was 2025--that needed to occur to get me moving. I'm letting go of the training wheels.

People ask "what next?" expecting another job lined up. I say I don't know. That's what phase 2 is for. I wondered if I'd regret taking the 3-month leave of absence, but despite watching my total net worth drain slowly, I'm more resolute.

My compass is strong but pointing somewhere hazy. I enter 2026 saying: I don't know, and I'm revving to find out.

It was a full year. I burned bright, burned out and then learned(ing?) to rest. I trust my 2026 self to figure out the rest.

- 2025 Kevin

"But I will not give up. I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life with life" - Howard Thurman