Easy to only see what's gone wrong this year. Harder, but worth doing, is actually tracking what's genuinely improved. So here's the honest list.
Rust
A year ago I was still fighting the borrow checker constantly. Now it mostly just makes sense — I write things the way Rust wants them written the first time, more often than not. The panel backend is proof of that. That's real, measurable improvement.
Asking for help
I used to sit on problems for hours before admitting I was stuck. Now I ask earlier — in Discord servers, from people who actually know the answer, without the ego cost that used to attach to it. That change alone has saved me a genuinely large amount of time.
Writing
This blog exists and it's better written now than the first posts on it. Clearer structure, better sense of what to cut, less rambling to get to a point. Writing this much, this consistently, has made me noticeably better at it — which is exactly what you'd hope from doing something repeatedly.
Setting boundaries around what I engage with
I'm better now at recognising when something — a conversation, an environment, a situation — isn't good for me, and stepping back from it without over-explaining why. That's a genuinely hard skill and I'm meaningfully better at it than I was.
Infrastructure management
Backups, monitoring, proper firewall configs, systemd services done right — the stuff I used to skip because it felt like extra work now just happens as part of setting anything up. That's the difference between someone who's had things break enough times to learn, and someone who hasn't yet.
Being okay with things not being resolved
This one's newer and less complete, but it's real. I'm getting slightly better at sitting with things that don't have a neat ending — the school situation, the mutism, all of it — without needing to force a resolution onto them before I'm ready. That's progress even though it doesn't look like progress from the outside.