2025 Review

Family, Vacation, Meetups, Hobbies, Freelancing, and more

Feb 1, 2026 · By Andrej Friesen · 7 min read

Happy New Year 🎆, and I hope you had a great time over the Christmas holidays 🎄!

Note: I wrote this way earlier, but never published... 🤭 But I keep the happy new year!

What happend 2025?

Becoming a father

I think this is, without a doubt, the biggest change, but also not really. My girlfriend and I became parents for the first time. 🍼

I took some time off for parental leave to adjust to this new phase of my life. First, to help my girlfriend in the beginning, but also to start getting to know our daughter. Kudos to all women, you are, without any doubt, tougher than all men. And I am happy to be a man. 😅

I am writing, therefore, from my perspective. The first months were particularly hard for me. I had no emotional bond or connection to the baby, unlike my girlfriend. Admittedly, she had some more time to build that bond during the pregnancy. It took me about 3-4 months to really like her.

In my opinion, becoming parents is romanticized and creates wrong expectations. It's the happiest day of your life! Not really. You will never feel such joy! Mh, not sure. Everything in your life will change! Yeah, sure, but can't we be more relaxed about that? I mean, we made that decision, right? You will feel a sudden new purpose in your life! Nah mate, same goals as before. Just one more thing to take care of and have fun with 😊

It's just a new phase. Everything is new. You can not learn that. You have to experience it. And everybody is wrong, and right. You can get tips and try them out. In the end, it works what works. And do not forget yourself and your partner.

She is 5 months old now, and we did our first plank/push-up together. Starting the year with good intentions for more exercise, it is 😉

Vacation in Norway

My girlfriend and I went to Norway this year in May. She was pregnant around the sixth month, but we wanted to do one last vacation together before we became a family of 3 👨‍👩‍👧 (4 if cats count as well)

Amazing country. Finally, I have seen the Fjords with my own eyes! If you like hiking four hours without seeing a single person, May is a good time. We were there before the season began. The only downside, we could not use all the roads because they were still blocked with meters of snow. So some scenic routes were not possible for us.

We also had bad luck with hiking to a glacier. I think we went for 3 hours one way. We just had to climb one hill, and then we could have seen a glacier. But the trail was blocked by all the melting water, and we could not pass it. Therefore, we had to go back 3 hours without seeing the glacier.

To fix that, we went to a glacier museum, which was next to a glacier that you could see from far away. 🏔️

The one surprise: The food was just bad. Everywhere, burgers, fries, and pizza. No good food culture in the area we visited.
I expected a more fish-based diet. The only really good meal was at a gas station! The chef did cook us a fresh meal with fresh vegetables. That was amazing!

It was a nice trip 🗻

Other trips

As always, we went to the Netherlands. We are always in Zeeland in Ellemeet, near Renesse and Scharendijke. Man, I love that country. Everything is just so bike-friendly. We were worried because we could not attach our bike trailer to the bikes. Nothing to worry about. The Dutch have you covered. We got this cool electric bike, which can hold a regular Maxi Cosi baby carrier!

Self-Employment

In 2025, I started to do some more freelance/self-employment. Friends asked for setting up laptops, Windows, a printer, scanners, etc. Not my preferred type of work, but they are nice people, and it was nice money during the parental leave anyway.

I started to do some smart home consulting with a friend as well. We set up a website and listed our services on the German classifieds site Kleinanzeigen (English Craigslist).

What have we done so far?

Integrate a heating and water system into Home Assistant. The client had a Modbus adapter already, but was not sure how to connect it to Home Assistant. So I helped him to set up the adapter he bought with MQTT and ebus to get everything working in Home Assistant.
Additionally, he also had some problems with Proxmox VMs. I nailed it down to a memory allocation issue. Not enough memory left for the hypervisor OS.

Then I have a long-term client with a lot of projects.
Currently, mostly writing ESPHome and custom C++ code.

The first project is an ESP32 per room connected to a GPIO expander board. This expander is connected to various things. A 4-way light switch I programmed to make the light cooler, warmer, brighter, and dimmer. The light is also connected to this ESP32 via a DAC and has a warm and cold bulb. Very neat project.

The second project is an ESP32 connected to a motor controller for window covers. Multiple of them are connected to a single ESP32. I had to get the specs for the motor controller and send data via an MOD RS485 Module to the SMI motor controller.
It's very hard to test because I don't have the hardware, and the client lives far away.
Solution: I bought a USB to RS-485 adapter and wrote a small Python server to print the messages it is receiving.

Then some minor Home Assistant help here and there within a remote call.

What is the plan?

Some day I would like to do my own thing. But I think this is not it. I love the topics, but B2C clients are more price sensitive. Still searching for the right business model that does not overburden us with clients who do not want to spend too much money. Perhaps we should consider switching to businesses in the end. Still figuring this out.

Meetups and Events

This year, I attended a few events and organized a meetup as well!

Hackaday and Slovakia Trip

I went to the Hackaday 2025 in Berlin and made some friends there as well. We even met up in Slovakia at Peter's place for some hiking later in the summer as well⛰️ I had a great time!

Home Assistant Meetup at IFA Berlin 2025

I was not really interested in IFA, but there was a meetup happening. Therefore, I took a 6-hour train ride to hang out with a few folks from Nabu Casa, the Open Home Foundation, Trevor and Justin from Apollo and other Home Assistant nerds.

I forgot to take a picture, because I never think of this. At least I got a Home Assistant sticker flower signed by Frank, Marcel, and others from the Home Assistant projects.

Home Assistant Community Day

On May 24th, 2025, the first Home Assistant Community Day was organized. I did not want to travel that far, so I organized my own meetup.

I thought it would be fun with more people, so I invited a couple of popular YouTubers in the German Smart Home scene. To my surprise, a lot of them came along! You can read more about that on the blog post.

Funny enough. Almost all of us did later meet up at another event of another YouTuber later this year. I think we will keep in touch 😊

I am actually planning another Home Assistant Meetup, and there will be over 140 people joining! Including some members of the Open Home Foundation! How cool is that?

3D Printing

A new hobby began when I got a 3D printer at the start of 2025. To this day, I have not designed much. Almost everything is either ready-made 3D print files or generators.

The best projects are by far: