2025 Year in Review

2025 Year in Review

• 7 min read

Better late than never, as I’m writing this in early February 2026…

First, here are a few links to past years in review:

Now on to the various categories…

Blogging ✍️

In 2025 I had 14 new articles, down slightly from 18 in 2024. Still not a lot, but I’m focusing more on video content and other projects. Some notable posts from this year include:

Currently I have about 1694 blog posts on this site (up from 1682 last year).

Google Analytics 📈

One small problem - when I migrated my blog from GatsbyJS to Hugo in November 2025, I failed to update my Google Tag Manager Tag. You see, Gatsby sites don’t “just work” with Google Analytics - you need to configure a tag special for them because they’re a SPA site. I did that back in 2020 or so when I first went to that platform. And I forgot. And when I switched to Hugo I confirmed the tags were on the pages correctly but I didn’t actually check to see if I was getting data until… now. So, there’s a bit of a gap from Nov 2025 until Feb 2026. But I’ll extrapolate from the rest of the year.

In 2024 I had about 535k page views for ardalis.com. In 2025 I had about 255k page views. (with the last weeks extrapolated)

That’s… less than half from 2024. And I think a big part of it is almost certainly due to ChatGPT and AI summarizing content. Stack Overflow is seeing the same thing. But, unlike Stack Overflow, I don’t have any deals in place with Google, Anthropic, et al to sell access to my content to their AI models.

Most Popular Articles ⭐

Views are through 12 Nov 2025 - I didn’t extrapolate them.

  1. The More You Know, The More You Realize You Don’t Know (8,315 views)
  2. Solved - An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden (7,315 views)
  3. Force NuGet to Reinstall Packages Without Updating (6,423 views)
  4. Avoid Using C# Events in ASP.NET Core Apps (4,513 views)
  5. Generate SSH RSA Keys on Windows with WSL (4,284 views)
  6. How to Embed YouTube Video in GitHub Readme Markdown (3,249 views)
  7. How to Find All Objects in a SQL Server Schema (3,157 views)
  8. Stop Debugging and Start Running in Visual Studio (3,086 views)
  9. How to Easily Format Tables in Markdown (3,068 views)
  10. Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core (3,031 views)

Weekly Dev Tips Podcast Stats

I have (had) a podcast, Weekly Dev Tips. You can find it on the usual podcasting apps, its website, and also on YouTube.

Still haven’t published anything new to it since 2021. I keep meaning to get back to it, but YouTube and Dometrain content continues to take priority. The existing episodes are still valuable evergreen content though - check them out if you haven’t!

Weekly Dev Tips Mailing List

Still hovering in the high 4k subscriber range. I aim to send out newsletters weekly but admittedly I’m hit or miss. You can sign up here if you’re interested.

Social Media Stats

Here are my stats for various social media things as of February 2026.

ardalis GitHub Contributions 2025

Mostly inactive platforms/accounts:

BlueSky and LinkedIn continue to be my two top social media platforms.

Open Source Updates 🔧

In 2025, I released some significant updates to my open source projects:

Ardalis.Specification v9

This was a major release with significant improvements to memory usage and performance. Huge thanks to Fati Iseni for leading this effort. Key highlights:

  • Reduced memory footprint across the board
  • Updated TFMs to latest (.NET 8 and .NET 9)
  • Added TagWith feature for EF Core
  • Added EF IgnoreAutoIncludes feature
  • Refactored to zero allocations in several areas

See the full release notes.

New Courses and Books 📚

Sadly in 2025 I didn’t publish a single new book or course. I’ve been much busier with client work and it hasn’t left as much time for content creation (including newsletters and YouTube videos). Hoping to correct this in 2026 (but so far it remains unchanged). I do still have a bunch of courses that remain useful and applicable in 2026, which you’ll find below:

Dometrain

(View All)

NOTE: You can use code “ARDALIS” on any individual course to get 20% off.

Pluralsight

(View All)

Speaking 🎤

2025 was a big year for speaking! I did a crazy 5 conferences in 4 weeks during my Fall 2025 Speaking Tour, in addition to CodeMash very early in the year.

Here’s the rundown:

  • CodeMash 2025 (16-17 January 2025, Sandusky, Ohio)
  • JetBrains.NET Days Online (8 October 2025, online)
  • DevIntersection / CybersecurityIntersection (8-9 October, Orlando, FL)
  • Azure Dev Summit (13-16 October, Lisbon, Portugal)
  • NDC Porto (20-24 October, Porto, Portugal)
  • TechoramaNL (27-29 October, Utrecht, Netherlands)

That was pretty much it for me for the year. I missed Stir Trek for the first time in a long time due to two of my adult children having graduations the same day/weekend in two separate states, so my wife and I had to split up to cover both of them. We’ll see what 2026 holds for me in terms of conferences. So far I presented at CodeMash again but nothing else is booked, yet.

My talks and workshops focus on domain driven design, clean architecture, modular monoliths, SOLID principles, and ASP.NET Core. Sessionize actually has a pretty good speaker profile page now, which includes links to some of my presentations, and for the second year running they noted that I was a “most active speaker” for 2025 (oooh! ahhhhh!).

Travel ✈️

Most of the rest of this is less interesting if you just follow me for technical content. You’ve been warned.

The Fall 2025 Speaking Tour was an incredible trip. My wife Michelle and our twin boys joined me for the European leg, making it a family adventure across multiple countries.

Fitbit Stats 🏃‍♂️

According to FitBit I took about 4.2M steps in 2025. I started out the year strong, with Jan-May all averaging at least 12k steps/day, but things worsened in the latter half of the year, especially after the motor in my treadmill desk died in November (I still need to fix or replace it). I spent the first 9 months of the year being really disciplined about lifting and nutrition and fitness overall, but that all pretty much crashed and burned after the aforementioned European trip and then playing catch-up afterward and leading into the holidays and… more excuses. I need to get back into it.

Still playing soccer year-round, though, and coaching my now 11yo boys’ soccer team most Saturdays as well.

That’s It

Thanks for reading this far. This post is mostly for my own reference, but maybe you found it interesting or useful.

If you want to write your own year in review blog post, I wrote a checklist here. It’s probably longer than most people will want but you can just pick and choose what works for you.

Good luck this year and beyond!