Jamie Brandon

A personal year-in-review for 2025 from an independent developer and researcher. Covers running the hytradboi online conference (481 attendees, 28 talks), progress on a hobby programming language called Zest (adding namespaces, recursion, compile-time evaluation, and grappling with novel memory management), consulting work including a ~4x median latency improvement in a Go codebase, and three published technical writings on query compilers and compilation strategies. Plans for 2026 include smaller experimental projects, reviving GitHub sponsorships, and deliberately introducing more variety and chaos after two years of over-optimization.