New Year, New... Everything
As the calendar ticked over from 2024 to 2025, it brought with it a wave of change in my life - the synchronicity mostly not deliberate - but a lot of simultaneous new-ness nonetheless.
A new job, a new car, a new MacBook (after a stunning 10 year stint from its predecessor - RIP), a new code editor, a new terminal app, a new game-changing productivity app, and the little cherry on the cake is my youngest also starting pre-school, which brings its own little routine tweaks.
New Job
The biggest change is obviously the first item in that list! I made the decision early last year that I needed to take the next step in my career. It was probably a few years overdue to be honest, but Adtrak has been the ultimate comfort zone for me, which takes some effort to wilfully leave. But it also meant I didn't need to be in any major rush and could be quite particular about my next step.
The job hunt was long and arduous at times; each time I got a foot in the door it was a several week, several stage process, requiring a lot of prep, focus and energy, which when ultimately fruitless can be quite a draining experience.
But all's well that ends well, as I eventually found success with the best opportunity of the lot.
So, I worked my last day at Adtrak on Christmas Eve, and began a 6 month contract as Senior Frontend Engineer at Intercom on 6th January this year.
Although only a fixed-term contract, the opportunity was a no-brainer for me to take, and I'm excited to finally be working with React day-to-day. In 6 months time, the ideal scenario would be that I enjoy the role, they like me, and have room to be able to offer me something permanent. But if any of those things don't happen, it's still a fantastic opportunity to work for a high-level tech company doing amazing work, and I no doubt will gain priceless experience during my time there that will be invaluable in finding the next slab on my path.
New Hardware
To touch on the rest of the changes I mentioned, my mid-2014 MacBook Pro - despite still running smooth as butter - was forced into retirement due to some kind of hard disk failure that prevented any further OS updates. Which in turn eventually prevented other apps from being updated, and thus the time had come to step down from full-time duty.
With a resale value of approximately nil, it will spend its retirement cultivating some foundational computer literacy for my 7 year old son (if he can remember its absolute reliance on life support, aka a plugged in charger at all times).
And so the new kid on the block is a rather stunning 16 inch, 36GB, M4 Max MacBook Pro in space black, which will hopefully see me right for at least another decade.
New Software
With the blank canvas of a new machine, I took the chance to make some changes to my day-to-day tooling, which involved jumping on a couple of [to be fair, pretty cool looking] bandwagons.
Code Editor
The first change was making the switch from VS Code to Cursor. With the latter being a fork of the former, it's a pretty seamless transition to make, with all existing extensions and settings able to come along for the ride.
It's early days yet but the AI features already feel like they're facilitating a big productivity boost, and the suggested edits are spookily aligned with my brain's intentions.
It's my 4th code editor in what I think is 19 years; Dreamweaver (yes I'm that old), Sublime Text, VS Code and now Cursor.
Terminal App
In a similar vein, I'm also trying out a new terminal app, having been a loyal iTerm user for the last 6 years or so. Warp is a bit busier but much more feature-ridden, one of which is of course a built-in AI agent.
(Can you even buy a toaster in 2025 without some kind of AI functionality?)
It can help you debug errors, suggests your next command, can generate commands based off natural language inputs, and has lots of little UX niceties like being able to move your cursor position with a click, and use the usual keyboard commands like CMD+Z.
Again, it feels like it will enable another significant productivity boost, both in terms of cumulative minor speed-ups, and with troubleshooting issues.
All-in-one Productivity Tool
The tool which feels like the most game-changing for my day-to-day computer usage is Raycast, which does... well, basically everything.
App launcher, file search, custom hotkeys, clipboard history, snippets, emoji selector, reminders, calculator, notes, image editor... the list is practically endless thanks to the ever-expanding extensions for every app imaginable.
Of course it takes a bit of setup initially, but when you've got all your hotkeys, quick links and extensions set up it can accelerate your general Mac use 10-fold.
A few weeks in, I highly recommend it and would already struggle without it.
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Have a great 2025 ✌️