2025 - A year in review

This post was published on December 16, 2025

And just like that, 2025 is in its final weeks, and with that, it’s time for me to slow down and take a bit of time off. It is also a moment to take stock of what I have been working on this year, and think about and write down the plans I have for 2026.

In my 2024 review, I wrote down ‘physical, mental and financial fitness’ as my main goal for 2025. Did I reach this goal? Well, to some extent:

• Physically, I’m on the right track, although there is a lot of work to be done still. I have started training for a couple of long-distance bike rides I have set my eyes on, and I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time on my bike in 2026.
• Mentally, I’m doing pretty well. I think I’ve been able to find a decent balance between work and the rest of my life, and the flexibility of being an independent consultant has definitely been a big help here. Sure, there were some ‘busy’ (I don’t like that word) times, but overall, I haven’t had any real challenges in this area.
• Financially, it has been a slower year than the last couple of years. In part that’s because I said ‘no’ to more things, but the way the economy is currently has also had an impact, mainly in the amount of training sessions I’ve run this year. More on that in a moment.

So, what have I been up to this year?

Training

As I said, overall, I ran (slightly) fewer training courses than I did in 2024. In total, I facilitated:

• 30 full day training sessions (25 on site, 5 online)
• 18 half day sessions (10 on site, 8 online)
• 4 workshops at conferences (all on site)

As usual, most of the on site sessions were in the Netherlands, but I ran in-company on site training sessions in three other countries (Romania, North Macedonia and Georgia), and the conference workshops took me to two more countries: Scotland and Sweden.

As teaching still is the thing I like to do best, I will put even more effort into growing my training business in 2026. I have a couple of training sessions booked already, some with return clients, some with new ones, so I’m off to a pretty good start, I think. I also have a conference workshop scheduled for Q2 of 2026 already, which should be announced in the next few weeks.

Also, earlier this week I published my brand new ‘Valuable feedback, fast’ course, which has already received interest from a few companies, so I hope that will be a major contributor to running more training sessions in 2026, too.

Mentoring

In all honesty I didn’t really expect to run any corporate mentoring sessions this year, but last month, I did start another three month mentoring engagement with a client here in the Netherlands. I’m really enjoying this, and growing someone’s skills in small steps through pair programming sessions in their context once again proves to be a very successful teaching method.

I’ve not been very actively advertising this service recently, but I do hope to have the opportunity to take on 1-2 more mentoring clients in 2026. Again, it is a lot of fun, and really, really effective, too.

Consulting

This year, I had two larger consulting engagements, one that lasted until March, and one that I started in October. This engagement will continue in 2026, which means I’ll once again have a lot of variation in the work that I do. I have tried to move away from hourly billing, but unfortunately that didn’t work out for this specific engagement, so we decided to go the way of the hourly rate.

I did have a fair few smaller consulting engagements, as in a few hours spent here and there, and those were all fixed price, so that at least is a step in the right direction.

Public speaking

Where I did 30 presentations in 2024, this year that number went down significantly, but I still delivered 21 presentations, which is a number I’m happy with. Of those 21 presentations, 11 were in person, and 10 were online talks. Most of the in person talks were in the Netherlands, but I also delivered talks in Sweden (at the SAST conference) and Denmark (at a company event).

Pretty much all of my talks were actually a combination of a talk and a live demo, just how I prefer it. The three topics I covered most were API security testing, mutation testing and contract testing.

For 2026, I’m happy to do less public speaking and focus more on workshops and training courses. However, I’m happy to do a talk when the opportunity presents itself. The first talk, an in-company presentation, is in the agenda already.

Other facts and figures

Apart from the above, here are some other things I worked on in 2025:

• I was on the program committee for the Test Automation Days for another year
• I released 5 new versions of RestAssured.Net (not counting beta versions)
• I published 10 blog posts on this site, including this one - a number I hope to significantly increase in 2026 as a result of wasting less time on LinkedIn
• I published two self-paced online courses, one on contract testing and another one on BDD and Reqnroll

Some final words

Again, as I said, it has been a slightly slower year for me compared to 2024. That’s fine, but I do want to turn that around and (further) improve a few things in my business and personal life. My main focus will be on growing the training side of things in work, while also taking more time to work towards my long-distance cycling goals. That’s going to be a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it anyway.

Have a wonderful festive season, all.

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