2025 Year In Review

I think I can easily publish an article with this year’s results, because this whole year I was just working on rudrastyh.com. Almost nothing else. I stopped publishing year recaps in 2023 because that year was so full of events, and I got overwhelmed organizing all of that into a single article on my blog. However, you can find the 2022 and 2021 years in review on my blog.

Originally, there were some plans for this year, like snowboarding in the Himalayas with my friend, or visiting WordCamp Asia in the Philippines, but it just didn’t happen.

However, right now I am writing this from Bali, because I decided to let go of any control, at least for a couple of weeks.

New Plugins

It is definitely a record year in terms of new plugins. Whenever I had a new idea or a client of mine asked me for some functionality, I never hesitated to release a new plugin 😁

7 new plugins in total:

Aside from that, I completely rebuilt my abandoned plugin – Simple Variation Swatches.

Writing

During this year, I kept updating old posts and publishing new ones. I published 23 new posts and updated 48 old posts.

A New Tool

I also published a new tool, coded it fully by myself without the help of Cursor and stuff. I noticed that I am quite often searching for tools that help to unserialize data, because, for example, Elementor stores some data in WordPress options as serialized strings.

So, I decided it is time to create the Unserialize Tool.

New Competitors

For one of my plugins, a new tough competitor appeared. It feels like the sales of that plugin had dropped; however, when I checked the exact data, it doesn’t look so, at least not so much.

Funny thing, I didn’t do anything about it, except being in a bad mood. So, probably, it is my mistake this year, and next year I need to focus more on dealing with competitors instead of publishing new WordPress plugins.

I would even make a promise, but I know how it happens – I make a promise today, and tomorrow I get an amazing new plugin idea backed by the data 😁 So, no promises, but I will keep that in mind.

How do you deal with your competitors, guys? Let me know in the comments below.

A New Gaming Laptop

In March, I worked so hard that my daily ration was only coffee, bread, and cheese. After a while of eating like that, I (surprisingly!) got sick, and it was kind of severe 😁

To deal with that, I needed to focus on something, so I could just recover and not think about pain. So, I bought a gaming laptop – Razer Blade 16.

Of course, I kept playing even after my full recovery, but it really helped 🙃

P.s. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered was amazing!

Gutenberg Block Development Course

It is actually a big one. Not in terms of the money (unfortunately 😭), but in terms of how hard it was to achieve, and finally, I am happy with the result.

First of all, I want to say that I am not a native English speaker (as many of you guys, I assume), and more than that, that language is very difficult for me. For example, I am totally OK when I learn Japanese, but English, for some reason, is sooo difficult. It is like when you have talent for chess, but you don’t have talent for swimming, you still can be great in that, but you need to put significantly more effort into it.

And I had this idea for a long time – to create a YouTube channel or a course in English. With my level of perfectionism and the struggles with the language, it became nearly impossible.

However, when I published my Gutenberg course (finally!), I found a very old YouTube video that I recorded, one of the first ones. Let’s check the difference now:

In moments like this, when comparing where you’ve been before and where you’re now, you can be sure – almost everything is possible.

This year, I spent around 3 months (a whole summer) working on the course: designing course pages and functionality, preparing materials for the course, recording lessons recording lessons again with another mic. But I’m glad it is finally finished, so I can stop thinking about it.

WordCamp Bangkok

It happened just out of the blue, I wrote to my friend who was living almost in another part of the world and invited him to visit WordCamp Bangkok together.

Though we didn’t spend enough time in the conference itself, we explored Bangkok, almost always with laptops, and discussed our future projects and ideas.

Conclusion

Looking back, I can say that overall, this year was kind of rough. However, I can give myself some recommendations for the future, from its results:

• There is nothing wrong with focusing on one specific project (or goal) and pouring all the energy into it. The tricky part is usually choosing that project or goal.
• If you feel somewhat uncomfortable with a person, avoid future contact at all costs. I often forgot how I felt and initiated new contacts (from boredom, I guess) and felt miserable again.
• The same applies to places that didn’t feel good; no need to visit again.
• Another important moment – every time I changed my plans, thinking about saving a bit of money, it always turned out that I paid more.
• It is good to have some events on the horizon to which you’re looking forward, for example, next year, it could be visiting WordCamp Asia in Mumbai.

I wish everyone a great 2026! ✨

# Journal

Misha Rudrastyh

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