2025 in review

On September 23rd, 2025, in a Berlin hospital room, I became a dad. Emma Elanor Margheim entered the world and promptly rearranged every priority I thought I had.

She’s currently asleep, so let me tell you about the rest of the year.

Becoming a Family

The year began with a milestone: on January 13th, Geniya became a German citizen. After oodles of paperwork and appointments and waiting, she walked out of the Ausländerbehörde as a dual citizen. We celebrated with sushi.

By spring, we knew Emma was on the way. In June, we escaped to Südtirol for a babymoon—a last hurrah of lazy mornings and mountain views before our family of 2 become a family of 3. We hiked (more like walking, but in nature), ate too much, and tried to imagine what life would look like in a few months.

Then September 23rd arrived, and we began to find out.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until living it: Germany’s support system for new parents is remarkable, coming from someone raised in the States and just simply unaware of what the whole process could look like. A midwife—a Hebamme as they are called here—visited our apartment every single day for the first week after Emma was born. Then weekly for the next two months. She checked on Emma, checked on Geniya, answered our endless questions, and made those early weeks survivable. No bills. No insurance negotiations. Just care.

Looking ahead, knowing that universal childcare exists here—that Emma will have a spot in a Kita—takes an enormous weight off our planning. Starting a family in Germany has meant never once worrying about medical debt. That peace of mind is hard to overstate.

In November, my parents flew over from the States to meet their grand-daughter. A week of them holding Emma, of showing them our Berlin neighborhood, of watching my dad figure out the U-Bahn. It was the first time they’d seen our new life here up close; it was cozy and fun.

The Career Arc

2025 marked my second job change in just over two years. I’d joined Test IO when I moved to Berlin in 2019 and spent five years there—as a senior engineer, then team lead, then engineering manager, and eventually director leading 40+ engineers across five teams. Near the end of 2024, I moved to Prevail.ai as a Senior Engineer; I wanted to get back into writing code daily. Smaller team, different challenges, back to building.

Then in November this year, another shift: Principal Engineer at Impruvon Health. Healthcare tech, Ruby and Rails on the backend, real problems affecting real patients. The onboarding was dense—calls about integrations, architecture discussions, first tasks shipping within weeks. I’m still ramping up, but I’m contributing. Feels good.

The through-line across all of it: I keep finding my way back to Rails, to Ruby, to teams trying to build something that matters.

High Leverage Rails

The biggest project I shipped this year wasn’t code—it was a course.

In February, I launched High Leverage Rails with Aaron Francis and Try Hard Studios. It’s a comprehensive course on building production-ready Rails applications with SQLite—the database I’ve been advocating for years.

The thesis: learn the fundamentals deeply, and you can build anything quickly. The age of the starter kit is ending. Responsibility requires understanding.

Working with Aaron was a highlight. He’s built an incredible media operation, and collaborating on something at that scale pushed me in new directions. Hatchbox and Honeybadger came on as sponsors. The launch went well. And now there are developers out there building real applications with Rails and SQLite because of something I made. Wild.

Open Source

My open source work this year centered on a few key projects:

Acidic Job continued to evolve—durable execution workflows for Active Job. The idea is simple: background jobs should be resilient to failures, restarts, and chaos. The implementation is… less simple. But it’s getting there, with RC releases throughout the year.

Chaotic Job emerged as a companion gem for testing job resilience. It lets you simulate failures, timeouts, and all the ways jobs can go wrong—so you can prove your workflows handle them correctly. I talked about it at Tropical on Rails and ChicagoRuby.

Solid Errors hit v0.7.0 in June—a database-backed exception tracker for Rails. This release was special because it was almost entirely community-driven. PRs from contributors, issues identified by users, a release that felt collaborative.

Litestream Ruby got similar treatment—v0.13.0 shipped with all community contributions. The SQLite ecosystem keeps growing.

And then there’s Plume, my SQL parser for SQLite’s dialect. I spent months on this—learning parser patterns, hitting 37,000+ passing tests, creating syntax diagrams. It became my RubyKaigi talk and remains one of the most technically challenging things I’ve built.

My Ruby Triathlon

In April, I gave three talks on three continents in three consecutive weeks:

  1. Tropical on Rails in São Paulo — “Resilient Jobs and Chaotic Tests”
  2. wroclove.rb in Wrocław — “On the tasteful journey to Yippee” (a project Joel Drapper and I are slowly working on)
  3. RubyKaigi in Matsuyama — “Parsing and generating SQLite’s SQL dialect with Ruby”

I called it my #RubyTriathlon. Geniya called it “that thing where you’re gone for most of April.”

The highlight was RubyKaigi and getting to hang out with the Ruby community in Japan, watching Matz talk about the future of Ruby, eating incredible food, and wandering Matsuyama. The lowlight was the 12-hour-33-minute flight from Warsaw to Tokyo, my longest ever.

Later: SQLite Office Hours at RailsConf with Mike Dalessio, a talk at ChicagoRuby. Five speaking engagements. Four continents. One very tired me.

Staying Connected

Beyond conferences, the Ruby community showed up in smaller ways all year.

In January and February alone, I had 19+ “Chat with Stephen” calls—video chats with developers from around the world. Some wanted to talk SQLite. Some wanted career advice. Some just wanted to connect. One of those calls was with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel. I basically begged him to consider expanding the Laravel services to the Rails ecosystem. Maybe one day; a man can dream.

I appeared on podcasts: Remote Ruby, a few episodes of In Dialog, others I’m probably forgetting. I gave a virtual talk to Ruby Turkey. I kept the Naming Things Discord running—it’s invite-only, but it remains one of my favorite corners of the internet. Like a virtual hallway track at a Ruby conference.

In December, after years of meaning to, I finally launched a newsletter. Added a signup form to the blog, sent my first issue. It felt like a missing piece clicking into place.

Writing

I published 6 blog posts this year, but the bigger development was launching a Tips section in December. Short, focused techniques—one concept per post.

The theme across all my writing: platform-native web development. Every month, browsers ship features that used to require JavaScript. I became obsessed with documenting what’s possible. Turns out: a lot.

I will be doing a lot more in this space in 2026 for sure.

Life in Berlin

Some snapshots from the year:

The movie pass. Early in the year, we got a UCI Luxe subscription—unlimited movies for a flat monthly fee. We saw everything: Nosferatu, Anora, A Real Pain, Emilia Perez, Mickey 17, Sinners, Final Destination 6, Ballerina. That last one, Demon Slayer, Geniya let me watch on my own while she was 37 weeks pregnant; she’s a champion. Once Emma arrived, the movie pass got canceled. Priorities shift. 🤷🏻

The studio. In July, I decided I needed a proper space for recording and calls. So I built one. Framed up a corner of our apartment, wired fans, hung insulation and acoustic panels. By August it was done—not perfect, but mine. As Aaron Francis says, you can just build things.

The opera. Swan Lake at Deutsche Oper Berlin in March. Ein Sommernachtstraum earlier that month. A Sicilian cooking class in January. Ballet. These felt like the “before times” in retrospect—the last stretch of being able to do things spontaneously.

The license. After years in Germany, I finally got my driver’s license in July. Test drove a BYD. Still thinking about it.

Sports. The Eagles won the Super Bowl in February (Fly Eagles Fly). LSU won the College World Series in June (Geaux Tigers). I watched both from Berlin, at inconvenient hours, and regret nothing.

By the Numbers

Travel

Flights 21
Miles 43,142
Time in the air 98 hours
Countries visited 9

I flew 1.7x around the Earth. Berlin appeared in 10 of my 21 flights. I never flew on a Friday—not once, for reasons I can’t explain.

Writing

Speaking

Open Source

What I Learned

A few things became clear:

You can just build things. Studios. Parsers. Courses. The barrier is usually deciding to start.

The platform is getting really good. We need less than we think we do to build excellent web apps in 2026.

Community matters more than content. The best moments weren’t the talks. They were the conversations with old and new friends.

Support systems matter. Having a midwife visit daily, never worrying about medical bills, knowing childcare exists—these aren’t luxuries. They’re what let you focus on what matters.

Looking Ahead

As I write this, Emma is just over three months old. She’s has been smiling on purpose for a month or so now. She likes being held upright so she can look around.

For 2026, I’m keeping it simple:

To everyone who read a post, attended a talk, joined a call, or sent a kind message this year: thank you. The Ruby community remains one of the best places on the internet.

Here’s to 2026. May it be slightly less chaotic and equally wonderful.

— Stephen