A Year of Blogging (2025)

2 days ago 8 min read

As 2018 ended I had successfully blogged every week for the entire year as a new years resolution. Of course now 2025 has ended, but my 2018 resolution has not - welcome to my favorite posts from 2025.

I started 2025 off with a deep dive investigation into some apps I struggled to understand how they could get approved for the public. A couple of these applications were found installed on my grandma's phone siphoning money every week. Disgusted by this finding I dug into all the applications to find how deep the disgust went.

To this day when legitimate work applications are denied from Apple for the dumbest reasons, but applications like any of the ones I investigated are allowed - I'll never understand. I might have to argue with Apple support on the placement of a "delete account" button to make it more prominent, but some of these applications can make a 5px skip button to force people into a weekly subscription and lie about every data disclosure element possible.

I started hearing over Discord and Twitter that a famous Halo 2 modding program was reborn and in testing. This was a mythical piece of software that could render Halo 2 maps on your own computer for the benefit of visualizing designing maps. As someone who waited for the software decades ago I was in a perfect position to tell a 20 year old story for a great piece of software. My Halo 2 modding days were over, but it was a fun trip of nostalgia to boot up some modding software and mess with some Halo 2 maps.

Watching your Frontier bill slowly rise.

What wasn't fun was my Discover card emailing on a new transaction and it was my Frontier bill, except it was higher again. It just infuriated me because 1GB of service year after year should in theory be getting cheaper, but instead I was having the reverse. I reviewed broadband disclosures and dropped my bill by 50% for a year challenging contradictions on the website. I dread having to call again when a year is up, but I refuse to be one of those customers who just sit idle and let the price increase every so often for no reason.

Every year attending BSides Tampa is a blast with security focused talks and CTFs and more. This time I attended, but just caught up with some older Halo 2 / Xbox friends so didn't experience many of the talks themselves. I wanted to attempt the CTF hidden on the badge, so documented my progress as I solved it. There are so many ways to experience a BSides event and I was debating in my head attempting to compete for first solve on the badge next year. In the meantime blogging about a solve was just a fun thing to do, even if I felt bad making that solve public - I'll be sure to ask next year prior to publishing.

Visiting the Top Ten Steakhouses in Tampa in 2025

As Alyson and I started dating we stumbled upon an article that listed the top ten steakhouses in Tampa. We thought it would be a fun collection of date nights to visit every place in the top 10 and rate them ourselves. Very quickly we learned how expensive of an endeavor this would be so it became a monthly visit and took the entire year to complete. There are a few places we'd argue probably don't deserve a spot in the top ten and plenty of places that we haven't even visited that might deserve a spot. However, we aren't professional food reviewers and just looking for a fancy night out for date night so probably won't have a chance to visit every possible fancy steak place in Tampa.

At one moment I was organizing my office and found my Gamecube and Zelda: The Wind Waker was still inside of it. It took me back to remembering my favorite games of older consoles and handhelds so I had to sit down and blog about my favorite game of each generation of hardware. A few were very difficult to pick a favorite, but it was a fun time to reminiscence about old games and pick favorites.

Now that I'm a PC gamer its tough to pick a favorite, but I attribute that more to having way less time to game than the previous hardware generations.

As Halloween neared I had an idea to obtain a spin wheel and have visitors be forced to spin a wheel to obtain their candy. Alyson and I obtained a wide variety of really good candy and average candy to design the spin wheel with a few creative options of like chap-stick and light up bugs.

It went amazing! A few folks came back around for more and word spread quickly around the neighborhood that we had some crazy goodies at the house. The dark of the night and lack of candy ended our Halloween a bit sooner than planned. Next year we will have more candy and better outdoor lightning to assure we can account for the early birds and night owls trick or treating.

As Halo Infinite announced the competitive scene was coming to an end I tuned in to the last event for a rumored announcement of what to come. We knew from a previous announcement that Halo Studios was in midst of an engine change - leaving their propriety engine behind for Unreal Engine. I was excited to hear about a new multi-player or new game, but instead just another remake of the first game.

Looking back I was upset in the moment, but its probably too risky for a studio to release a new major game on a new engine. Probably re-releasing a smaller campaign only game to get comfortable with the engine is a safer bet to then work on the next big multiplayer game. Either way another long break from Halo just further cements the sad truth that Halo is not able to compete with modern games. When Fortnite still has over a million players online on a game pushing 10 years old, but Halo Infinite can barely have 5,000 people online Halo's time is seemingly over.

2025 Emerging Tech Leader of the Year in Tampa Bay

A few weeks prior to this blog I got an interesting email that said I was a finalist for an award in Tampa. As the event neared Alyson and I got to attend a fancy award show to see who won. To my surprise against some respectful leaders in my group - I won. Sometimes when most days are putting out digital fires and keeping clients happy its great to have a break to celebrate some success.

As I got to reflect back and look at this event I started thinking about the work I do in this space. Between the open source work I do, speaking at events around Tampa, attending technical meetup groups, mentoring others, building software in both work and hobby. I feel that's a good representation of a tech leader.

As I started reviewing analytics and realizing most of my traffic was non-human or checking my private messages on Twitter and finding hundreds of spam messages remaining led me to writing this blog. It seems most products online decay to a point that they are abused for spam in the weirdest ways possible.

If it isn't spam - its some bot, spider, LLM or more scraping content as quick as possible. The era of machines reading content partially written by humans to regurgitate back to humans is here.

This year we inched into 2026 before my 2025 blog post went live. A little early or a little late is how it goes each year with this post depending on the layout of the Sundays. Thanks for reading and onward to 2026 and weekly posts.

A Year of Blogging (2025)

Connor Tumbleson

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