2025 end-of-the-year post

University, Projects, Music, AI, Motivation · 
31 mins read

Annual recap of 2025 and what’s next.

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Ahh, yes, December. The time of the year when we once again feel like time is passing too quickly…

Last year, I was overwhelmed by my university schedule and finished the yearly round-up post quite late, so I’m starting a little earlier this time. Since I’ve mentioned it, let me start from that!

🙇 University

info Note: As a reminder, to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Italy, you must typically complete a three-year education process in which you must earn 180 CFU/ECTS (University Credits), 60 per year. 1 CFU/ECTS represents approximately 25 hours of total student commitment.

If you are curious about what I’m studying specifically in my Computer Science major, a complete list with the course syllabus for each is available at this link.

My first year of uni ended towards the end of May, and from there, a four-month exam session began. I still had to take the exam(s) for five other courses out of eight in total for Year 1, and as of now, I passed all of them except one, which I’ll study during the winter semester alongside the second-year courses. Of course, none of them were “easy”, and I’m glad that I’ve made progress, but I’m always behind schedule despite my honest efforts to keep up.

In Italy, a bachelor’s degree is supposed to only take three years, but it is arguably poorly calibrated, and roughly 50% of CS students don’t finish on time (source: AlmaLaurea). Still, it appears that the workload on Italian university students used to be even higher in the past, so I don’t want to complain too much.

I realized that I can’t make significant progress when I physically go to university, because lessons are quite intensive (at least personally speaking), and I always come home exhausted and unable to concentrate, while studying at home at my own pace has been much more efficient and useful to me. But it’s also true that there are more distractions and fewer interactions at home (you can’t ask questions to colleagues or professors). Plus, most professors don’t want to make lesson recordings available to encourage attendance (which is not mandatory), so you miss all the explanations if you don’t attend classes. I’m learning to strike a balance with that.

I’m still very fortunate to be able to study without having to work at the same time. I’ve heard of people who chose to work while studying even though they didn’t need to and later regretted it, as well as others who had no choice because of economic necessity. While university (and living costs in general) is much more affordable here than in other countries, it’s still not free (+1500€ of fees every year, transportation costs, rent, etc.), and many students struggle to make ends meet if they lack financial support.

Considering how demanding and time-consuming studying is, I believe being a student should be recognized as a form of work and better subsidized by the government, at least for those without that vital economic assistance. However, this raises many additional questions and challenges on how to do it, and the current government does not seem particularly concerned with the interests of younger generations.

Every once in a while, I still ask myself whether it’s worth spending time studying some of the more obscure topics my courses require us to know, especially when that means setting aside personal projects and hobbies that could help me develop skills the industry actually values (and that make me happy).

It’s probably true that I won’t need many of the things I’m studying right now, but it’s also true that others are fundamental pieces of knowledge, and without them, I wouldn’t get very far. I also can’t expect a course designed for everyone to teach only what I personally like or am interested in, while ignoring everything else.

In my first year of university, there was no custom path to choose, but at least partially in the second year and much more in the third, there are many courses to choose from and I’ll hopefully be more motivated and interested in studying them if I get to choose what I want to learn more directly.

University hasn’t made me more excited to write code, and I’m not the only one feeling this way. I don’t really know a solution but my response and advice to that is still the same as what I wrote a few months ago in a Reddit comment that I want to share here too:

Full translated comment

I study computer science, I'm your age, and I also worked on various projects before university (though not startups). Then I started university and realized that, if I wanted to finish it in a reasonable amount of time, it would have to be my sole focus, and I'd have to give up everything else for a few years—at least to avoid spending years behind schedule or, worse, dropping out without a degree. It's completely normal for university to require a lot of time for studying and to leave little time for anything else while you're attending it. If you're in your second year, I think you've realized by now that university is a long-term cultural investment, whose benefits you'll see (we'll see) more clearly over time.

As for the loss of motivation to program, two things come to mind: (1) computer science isn't just about programming (even though it's fair for it to be your favorite activity), and (2) I believe the cause of the demotivation is that your pre-university projects were only a "taste" of the most enjoyable parts of a programmer's job, stripped of all the more complex aspects that you're now encountering at university but that are essential in larger, professional contexts. At least, that's how it was for me.

So try to see this academic path as an opportunity to acquire the knowledge needed to create projects that are far more ambitious, complex, but also more useful and original than what you were capable of before. And it's okay if you're not creating anything right now; we don't have to be constantly "producing" something. Put your passion for programming on hold (but don't extinguish it), set yourself a big—even unattainable—goal that gives you direction and the right motivation toward graduation, which must become your absolute priority.

And if you really can't resist the urge to create things and work on something of your own, as is the case for me, keep in mind that your thesis (if all goes well) can also be based on a personal project related to your course of study. If you manage to build something you like by applying the knowledge you've gained from your classes, you'll have killed two birds with one stone 😉

🌀 Too much stuff & My creative side

A recurring topic in my life, this year too, has been the desire to work on many different things at once, along with a growing interest in niche topics across very different fields, mostly in music, programming and art (as my macro-interests).

More than ever this year, I’ve felt that I have a creative side that has always been pushing to come out, but until now, my life circumstances and environment never really encouraged (sometimes even pushed against) this.

I’ve had short bursts when a particular activity or hobby of mine felt like the most enjoyable and satisfying thing I had ever done, something I wanted to pursue forever. But this has happened with so many of my interests and so many times that I’ve always had to interrupt working or spending time on those activities because of a lack of mental resources, having spread my interests across so many things.

But I can’t help it. I find so much joy and excitement in experimenting and celebrating the little successes when creating something. I find so much joy when discovering a community of people with my same artistic and musical interests online. I find so much joy in looking back at my favorite works that I created, and the variety of them all. And if they are bad, I can always improve by trying again.

I know I should get more specific now, telling you about what I actually created, but I can’t because of two problems:

  1. almost everything is unreleased or unfinished or not great (or just planned);
  2. due to university, I didn’t have enough time this year to fix problem #1.

Earlier, I was reading the post linked before (from 2 years ago) where I was talking about something similar and actually, I disagree with this sentence I wrote: “If I spend a lot of time on a project, it has to be a relevant one, or I’d rather do something else entirely”.

I’ve learned that getting good at something requires a lot of experimentation without worrying about being perfect or making a finished product (failure is learning!). It’s okay to make mistakes or imperfections while experimenting, because staying in the safe zone is pointless, and striving for perfection while also pushing yourself way beyond what your current skills allow leads to frustration and a mountain of unfinished work.

But I still have this regret when I spend time doing something that doesn’t turn out as valuable or worth sharing as I had hoped.
And again, this is because university is the most important thing I want to finish the earliest, because once I do that, I think the possibilities for my future open up (not sure if it’s really true though; of course a lot still depends on me).

Under this deleterious mentality of optimizing every moment of my life, if I spend a lot of time on a project or activity, it has to be a relevant one, or I shouldn’t do it. If I do hobbies first, uni stuff later, I feel bad for each moment wasted and I over-optimize my experimentation, which removes the point of the activity entirely.

A suggestion would be to do the opposite: first study, then work on my projects. Which is what I almost always do, and every time, I end with no time or energy for hobbies in the evening…

This whole situation is why this year I didn’t really work on anything important (as I was already expecting), but I used vibe coding a lot, without being proud of it, to quickly make some tools and things that I needed/wanted to see done during this year, as you can see in my repositories page on GitHub (not all are vibe coded but many of the following are): a simple Support page to gather all donation links in one place (I didn’t want to use Linktree or depend on other similar services), a Code Wrapper Anki add-on to put selected text between <code></code> HTML tags, PicPitch Collage (I needed it to make nice-looking screenshots showing multiple flashcards of my decks in the same view, then I made Anki Flashcards Grid Preview as a more functional tool for it, integrated into Anki), Switch 2 Game Update Tracker web view based on a (not really up-to-date) community database, a LaTeX to SVG Compiler which I need for my flashcards, a custom version of SQL Joins Visualizer, a PDF to SVG Cropper also for making my flashcards, and a few more.

Looking back at this behavior of mine in a deeper and more detached way, I could say that I’ve used AI as a coping mechanism for my need to make projects and create value. Even if useless, having made at least some new stuff this year and helped a few users on GitHub makes me a bit more valuable to others. But that is neither a healthy habit nor one I intend to maintain in the long run. BTW, if you are wondering what my ethics for generative AI are, I made a post just about that a few days ago.

Now let’s see one of the big reasons for the revival of my creative ambition this year.

🎮 Hytale

Hytale trailer screenshot Website & Announcement Trailer

I first saw the Hytale announcement trailer when I was 14, a few weeks after the publication, as far as I remember. It was the first time in my entire life I really felt a deep excitement for a game coming out.

I wasn’t a big Minecraft player; I’ve been more of a Nintendo / co-op games player for a long time, but my feelings for Hytale, I think, were just as strong as the ones of bored Minecraft players who wanted for years a wave of innovation in the block games genre, which Hytale definitely promised to deliver.

But also, even if I was quite young in that period, I was thinking of game dev being (one of?) my dream job, as it combined programming, art, and music altogether, and Hytale’s modding capabilities and great accessibility to create content in-game were so exciting!

I quickly started following every new update (blog posts, tweets, events…) and that just made my hype and vision stronger. In the meantime, I finished high school and, while I wanted Hytale to be released, I was also glad it hadn’t already since I knew I wouldn’t have been “ready” for it, both for time to play it and technical and creative knowledge to mod it decently.

In the past few years, posts from the Hypixel team were becoming more and more scarce, but my excitement for the game was still the same as the first time. I just wasn’t thinking about it so often anymore. Meanwhile, I worked on various programming projects to learn new skills, cultivated hobbies and started university.

Then, this year on June 23, the devastating news came out: Hytale was cancelled.

At first, I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t understand how it could be possible, and hoping that a solution would be found for Hytale to see the light, but the more I looked at tweets from developers, the clearer it was that Hytale was over for good.

hytale.com/news/2025/6/... This makes me so sad. Cancelling @hytale.com will never be something I accept or understand. You could have scaled back the scope a bit, released what you had as alpha or at least give the community you created the source code to let Hytale grow in a crowdsourced effort.

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— Samuel (@sam-med.bsky.social) June 23, 2025 at 7:20 PM

Up until that point, I didn’t plan my entire life and future prospects around Hytale specifically, unlike some (ThirtyVirus), mostly because I was still too young and I guess I wasn’t going to sacrifice other aspects of my life so much for a game that wasn’t even out yet. So while this news was heartbreaking, I could still have many other things to work on for my future career, like my own games, apps and maybe even music (though not for a living, unless with luck and persistence).

But Hytale always felt like the best of both worlds, complete with an incredible community that would support creators, boost the game, and possibly even introduce me to new friends, connections, and opportunities.

Luckily, what followed the cancellation was not what anyone expected, i.e., the biggest comeback in the history of video games IMHO, when Simon, Hypixel’s CEO, re-bought Hytale again from Riot and, after a long story that you can catch up on YouTube and X if you missed it, brought us to the release date for the early access on January 13, 2026.

But even after all this waiting and the game coming in just a few weeks from now (I already pre-ordered it, something I generally never do), I’m still not ready. I mean, my skills, both creative and technical, are much better than in 2018, but they are barely enough to do basic work.

I feel an urgent need to create and contribute to Hytale every time I open Twitter or the official Discord channel, because I’m so in love with the vibe, development and community of this upcoming game. This has never happened to me with any other game before; that’s why it’s such a big deal.

And just to put myself into practice (since I’ll never be ready without actually working hard on improving my skills) and also to gain some more visibility, I’ve been making a few models in Blockbench to be slightly more ready when the game comes out, but even with Slikey (Hytale’s Technical Director) kindly encouraging me to keep up my work, I still come to realize that this is not the should do.

Starfish Blockbench model A starfish, my first Blockbench model.

I’m a little behind with university, and just after Hytale comes out, the exam sessions will start for me and my CS colleagues, meaning that I should study every day in every moment not to feel bad for wasting time or risk not passing an exam. I can’t put off some exams because they are preparatory to the courses of the next term, and I don’t want to delay everything so as not to feel even more behind.

Hytale has made me (re)discover my attraction to the more artistic side of creation, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t really something that school, society or people in general encouraged as I grew up, but instead made me almost forget about it. I believe I’m not alone in this: most kids are super creative throughout childhood but oftentimes society makes that aspect fade away as they grow older, in place of a more realistic and constrained view of the world.

Anyway, also online content creators and social media (of which I tweaked the recommendation algorithm to show me more art and creative stuff too, not just memes, politics, friends, etc.) played a role in this small but big change in my interests. Of course, I still love programming projects and more technical content, I just opened my perspective even more and discovered new things I really enjoy (as if I wasn’t already into too much stuff 😂).

So I love writing code, I love creating art, I love producing music, I love making videos, and I love the communities that formed around all those wonderful activities!

Do I fear spreading myself too thin while trying to be everything all in parallel? Yes. That’s actually the recipe for unsuccess, because to “be \” instead, you’d generally want to “chisel away” distractions and noise to become deeply focused on an activity, make progress and eventually become great at it.

Maybe I’ll just alternate my time and focus on just a few or a single of those activities at a time, with the downside of not progressing as fast, not becoming as popular and not making as many innovative works at first as a more focused person would do, but I can’t help doing those amazing activities as long as I have the drive and capacity to do so.

So, since I can’t wait another 1-2 years concentrating solely on university, I’m thinking of being slightly less restrictive with my time spent studying and allowing myself to make a little bit of progress every day (or every time I can) in any of the activities/skills I mentioned above, so that I don’t completely fall behind with what’s happening in the meantime, and when I finish university, I’ll be more ready to get a job with a creative skill set already (mostly) built, or work independently if I have enough success to be in a stable economical situation. Well, unfortunately, the latter is much less likely, but still possible with much effort and some luck on my part.

This way, I remove any excuse for procrastination (no more “I will start this when I finish uni”) and I will get years of slowly built and matured experience instead of having to get back up to speed with my creative knowledge after years of just studying for technical CS exams.

🦋 Leaving Bluesky

At the end of last year, I decided to switch from Twitter/X to Bluesky. The experience was initially great, and I was really hoping for it to replace X, but over time, Bluesky became more and more empty and useless instead, and after Hytale’s comeback, with developers commenting and interacting on X, I decided to come back to that platform. More details about my reasons are in the embedded post below.

Sad 😞 This is a huge missed opportunity. Maybe Bluesky wasn't ready when it exploded. Now it slowly keeps fading away and its user base shrinking.

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— Samuel (@sam-med.bsky.social) July 29, 2025 at 4:36 PM

As Hytale new updates (which I'm really excited for) and most of my favorite content/creators are still only on X, and on Bsky there's barely any interesting or useful content left now, I'm honestly just not enjoying this platform anymore. So, after a year here, I will move back to X indefinitely.

— Samuel (@sam-med.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 9:22 PM

I’ve been using X again for a few months now, and despite all the very harsh criticism I was reading on Bluesky, I just nudged the recommendation algorithm (which is better than Bluesky’s one for my needs) towards showing Hytale content, art, music and other creative stuff or very popular posts, and I’ve never really had any problem or seen my feed inundated with fake or ragebait content, so I can say that X is still usable, at least for now.

I would still prefer to use an open, ad-free, bloat-free, nazi-CEO-free alternative to X, of course, but only when all the content and creators I’m interested in regularly post there too.

🗂️ Content consumption

📰 Informational content

In order to stay informed throughout the year, I’ve been able to efficiently consume (even though I dislike both of those terms in this context) a lot of non-artistic content, such as news and podcasts. I’ve also gotten good at identifying high-quality ones and ignoring the rest.

I’ve rarely read articles but rather listened to so many of them while doing other activities that don’t require focus (oftentimes it’s when I’m walking). My default for reading an article has now become Chrome’s great built-in read-aloud feature, and it’s all synced with my PC if I need to get tabs from there (they are ever-growing).

Absorbing so much of that kind of content over time has been making me much more aware of the world, under all aspects: political, economic, social… and also allowed me to have a more solid foundation for my political and ethical principles. I can also see how much more corruption, greed, and ignorance there is in the world now, unfortunately. Likely, though, there are also good people.

I’ve also watched many YouTube videos, but way less than before I started uni and I still have to catch up on so many of them. I don’t have time to make a compilation of my favourites, I don’t even remember, but if you are searching for some new channels to learn or entertain yourself, the “Favourite Channels” section I added on my YouTube homepage might be very interesting and worth checking; there’s so much to dig into there!

🔮 Fictional content

But what about the other content? Movies, video games, books?

Unfortunately, due to my habits and the weird mindset I told you about earlier, those are always (unjustly) at the bottom of my list of priorities, so the following lists are very short.

🎬 I watched (all recommended):

🎮 I played:

📕 I read:

🎧 Music

This year I’ve listened to so much new music!

On Spotify, my primary music platform, I’ve created numerous playlists (including the artwork) to save the best music I’ve discovered over time, and the resulting playlists have now become a very valuable collection for me. You can find them both on my blog Playlists page and on my Spotify profile, and I would be so happy if you found some good songs by listening to those playlists!

Some of them are pretty long, but I tried to keep only my very favorite tracks in a single, complete and relatively short playlist (under 300 songs), jokingly called Certified Absolute Ultimate All-Time Greatest Songs Ever (no skips, period.). If you could only choose one of my playlists, it would probably be this one, and I think it can be appealing for many people, as it contains both mainstream and less popular music, but without going into the too unusual and less “digestible” songs. Still, music taste is mostly subjective.

My Spotify public playlistsMy Spotify public playlists

I also created a private “listen later” playlist (like Watch Later for YouTube) to save music I want to listen to but don’t have time for right now. Every time I listen to a new song, I then place it into one or more of the playlists I find more appropriate for that song’s vibe and genre and remove it from the listen later playlist. I’ve gotten quite good at determining whether or not I like a song based only on my first listen, as well as identifying the specific vibe it gives me.

This playlist was meant to be temporary, but just like my browser tabs, it kept increasing and is now over 100 hours long. Still, I was able to reduce its size between August and November, and I intend to recoup the majority of those songs next year, returning to near-zero total hours. This was the graph of the total hours remaining over time, if you are curious (it’s made with a Python script):

Listen Later playlist progress Listen Later playlist progress during the second half of 2025.

Aside from that, this year I rediscovered SoundCloud and why it’s such a great platform: not only does it host countless songs and remixes that simply aren’t available elsewhere, like on Spotify or Apple Music (mostly because a third-party distributor isn’t required on SoundCloud, allowing you to publish demos, works-in-progress, and unofficial remixes without issue), but its social features also make it super fun to use. I quickly found myself discovering amazing new artists and musical niches I never expected to enjoy just by navigating the social graph, listening to artists’ reposts, and exploring the “Fans also like” section. Comments are also a lot of fun and the audio waveform can be quite useful.

I’ve been cultivating a deep appreciation for a range of EDM subgenres (Complextro, Color Bass, Future Bass, Melodic Dubstep, and more), and recently Twitter has also played a big role in surfacing to my ear many seemingly unknown yet incredibly talented artists I look up to (just checking some of my recent likes on SoundCloud, I see artists like Vanatice1,2,3, SkvlKat, novel, Kiru, Desx, Fax…), many of them post their songs and/or experimentations exclusively on SoundCloud (some even have an alt account where they freely post cool demos or musical ideas).

I’m also getting to know many small but important labels, collectives, and community projects (recent ones I’ve seen are artbyFORM, Silkenwood, Neoluminum) that surface music that finally feels incredibly human and creative in ways rarely encountered elsewhere, because it isn’t optimized for the mainstream.

I was missing out on so much by only using Spotify (and, in part, Bluesky). It took me a while, but now I don’t :)

This proximity to the creative process and to these communities, even if I’m not involved directly (yet), makes me so excited and motivated to actively participate in this living ecosystem, give my spin to music from other artists or just get more adventurous and expressive with my own ideas.

I may not feel ready to publish full songs just yet, but I do want to experiment and make more music over the coming months and years, possibly more than this year, and see what emerges, how my sound evolves, and how much progress I can make!

🌳 Nature

I currently live in the hills of Italy, and the greatest advantage of this for me is the abundance of greenery and nature that surrounds me. There are many dirt paths where I can walk to unwind and relieve stress, and when I’m done enjoying the natural soundscape, I can catch up with listening to articles, podcasts and new music, staying active both with my body and mind.

Last year, as I wrote in this blog post, I began planting new trees in an empty field next to my house, with the goal of turning it into a lush, biodiverse, and beautiful garden. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about planting techniques and different tree species, and this year I added several more trees and some flowers to complete the design. It wasn’t without challenges (roe deer rubbed their antlers against some of the more delicate young trees, damaging and possibly killing a few) but overall, I’m very happy with the results and now all that’s left is patience as I wait for the garden I envision to grow and finally take shape.

Garden collage 🌷🌱🐛🦋🐝🪲🐌

I’m also growing some small plant and flowers from seed. I’ve made a Notion database with all the species I’ve planted, if you are interested :)

🎨 Art & Drawing

Last year, I didn’t set any specific goals for 2025, but one long-standing goal I’ve had is to learn how to draw. Yes, even in the moment where artists are one of the most vulnerable workers to be replaced by an unethical and nonsensical use of AI to replace their art. At least, lately the general public is starting to recognize that human art is much more valuable than cheap AI slop (my favourite viral examples of this: Gumball hand-drawn animation & Gumball AI-made looking human art, vegan wolf ad, Porsche commercial)

I’ve already made a few sketches throughout the past year, and watched several guides on basic drawing techniques. I also completed the entire first lesson on drawabox.com and followed (most of) the homework and exercises in there.

That said, I didn’t draw as consistently as I would have liked. Next year, I plan to focus on it more. I still need a nice profile picture and I might need to do some designs for Hytale before modeling in Blockbench, if I’ll make some content on that too. Drawing (and image editing) would also be useful when I need a cover art for my music in the future, so I definitely have some reasons to learn this.

On a more positive note, over the past few months, I’ve finally decided on my alias for music, “SAMPL3R”, and created a new logo in Inkscape that I’m really happy with (see below).

One thing I’m still unsure about is the rest of the typography beyond the initial letter, as well as whether I want to have a mascot or animal associated with my artist name (similar to how Illenium uses a phoenix or Seven Lions uses a lion). That’s something I’m still thinking about. Also the main color may not be 100% final.

My old and new S logo My old and new S logo.

This year I also started gathering art and animations I like and made a huge folder for later reference, and my social feeds are filled with art more than ever, so inspiration isn’t lacking!

I’ll stop here before this post gets way too long XP. No list of achievements this time either, just hoping to create some great things next year as always. Until next time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Banner image made in Adobe Fresco to practice with two-point perspective drawing.


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