To summarise my 2025 experience, let me start by saying this: 2025 was a year that asked a lot from me and gave back even more. That might sound like a cliché, but it’s true — from community building and certification marathons to SmartHome tinkering and events where I almost lost my voice explaining EVPN overlays… we really lived it. If 2024 was about foundational growth and survival, 2025 was about thriving through challenge, sharing the ride, and enjoying the quirks along the way.

Right out of the gate at the start of the year, I doubled down on giving back to the lab-community ecosystem. After seeing so many folks on their expert certification journeys, I took time to formalise what had previously been a scattered group of chats and private messages into something more structured — living lab groups where everyone can help each other, share configurations, discuss tough scenarios, and even goof around with memes while solving our SSB-Tasks. What started as a hunch turned into multiple active groups covering the full range of Juniper expert tracks — including Enterprise, Security, Service Provider, and my own beloved Data Center track — with scheduled meetings, document exchange, and a real sense of peer support. Smaller groups formed and the Labgroups were very successful – resulting in lots of people passing their JNCIE Exams 😊 This wasn’t just about sharing configs — it was about creating momentum for the next expert-level push.

Moving into spring, April brought with it perhaps the highlight of the year: attending the Champions Summit 2025. For those of you who’ve never been to a huge networking event before, let me tell you — it’s one thing to lab in isolation and another to spend four days talking protocols, edge cases, and Oh-My-God-WHY IS THIS BIT FLIPPED with humans who are just as obsessed as you are. The Summit was packed with great sessions (even if some were slightly infused with sales vibes), tons of hallway chats, deep technical discussions, and unforgettable moments catching up with peers from around the world. What made the event particularly surreal — and an honour I’m still processing — was being recognised as Top Technical Champion for the EMEA region. That moment was so awesome and it was such a great feeling sharing this with all of you and celebrating together!

Now, in between all the networking festivities and conversations about how everybody’s Wi-Fi still sucks except when it doesn’t, I did manage to keep a toe in some proper certification prep. Around mid-year I confirmed my first challenge of the season: scheduling my JNCIE-DC lab attempt. November 17th loomed like some Indiana Jones encounter where, instead of boulders and booby traps, you face EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, underlays, overlays, automation tasks, and those little subtasks that always take longer than you think. While this first attempt did not end with a pass, it ended with something just as valuable: clarity about what’s still needed, areas that now make sense, and confidence that I can tackle it again. If failure in a certification can be called “productive,” this one was exactly that. The lab didn’t beat me — it educated me.

While hardcore certification work was ongoing in the background, I didn’t abandon the stuff that keeps me grounded in the physical world. My obsession with SmartHome gear produced some honest real-world data this year — specifically, statistics on Shelly devices from 2024 into 2025 that frankly told me a few hardcore reliability stories (and a couple of horror stories) about long-term sensor performance. Some of my units failed far sooner than expected, while others are holding strong — which, for anyone building serious IoT infrastructure at home, is nothing short of required reading. On the home-automation side of things, I also got my hands on a SLZB-MR3 multiradio adapter, a nifty little gateway that unifies Zigbee, Thread, and Ethernet in one box. It’s one of those gadgets that makes you go “why didn’t we have this forever?” — choosing power-over-Ethernet and avoiding the spaghetti of USB dongles was a joy, and it opened up a new level of reliability and flexibility in my automation infrastructure. While it’s still early days with full deployment, the first impressions are extremely promising.

Let’s be honest though — advancing tech and certifications doesn’t make you immune to the occasional existential debate about whether routing is art or science or why the internet hates your home MTU. But it does make for good stories, right? Back on the professional track, the REST of the year was heavily shaped by technical exploration and community orientation: sharing slides and notes from webinars on building EVE-NG labs with Juniper devices, giving people actionable insights that they can actually use in their day-to-day labs or prep cycles, and keeping an eye on how tooling and virtual labs continue to evolve.

Looking at the arc of the year, 2025 was not about one blockbuster achievement — it was about layered progress: strengthening communities, tackling the toughest certifications I’ve ever faced, learning from both triumphs and “almost there” moments, and integrating tech into life both at work and at home. I’ve never felt more clarity about where I want to go next: deepening DC mastery, helping others with their journeys, and continuing to grow not just as a network engineer, but as a peer in a community that actually supports each other.

So here’s to 2026 — may it bring success, deeper insights, and enough weird network behaviour to keep us laughing at the lab bench.