In the world of infrastructure, we know that every cluster must be monitored. We never launch a major update without checking the node status and ensuring redundancy. For our professional and personal lives, it should be the same.

2025 is coming to an end, and if I had to summarize this year, it wouldn’t be a simple hot migration, but a true architectural evolution, with a few production incidents. It’s time for a full Health Check. No filters, just data, infra, and feelings.

Here is my post-mortem audit of 2025 and my roadmap for 2026.

2025: Unfiltered Retrospective (The Health Check)

This year marked a critical turning point in my career: my first full year as a Team Lead, while remaining a Senior Consultant expert in hyperconverged infrastructures at a Nutanix Pure Player: Mikadolabs.

From Technical Expert to Team Lead

For the uninitiated, moving from “Senior Consultant” to “Team Lead” is a bit like moving from managing a single cluster to orchestrating an entire datacenter. The scale changes. We no longer just manage IOPS and latency, but humans and planning.

On paper, the blueprint was clear. In reality, execution requires constant vigilance.

Overall, the stack held up. The team delivered, and infrastructure projects were successfully completed. I learned to delegate operational tasks (sometimes painful for a purist) to focus on organization and process improvement. Seeing a team member skill up on complex subjects, not necessarily technical ones, thanks to my guidance brought me a different satisfaction, but just as powerful as resolving a critical outage.

Let’s be transparent: everything wasn’t smooth. The hardest part for an ultra-technical profile like mine is stepping away from the console.

I like getting my hands dirty, tuning performance, auditing clusters. Becoming a Team Lead meant accepting spending less time on Prism Element or the command line, and more time in meetings or planning. I sometimes felt like I was losing my direct “connection” with tech, that imposter syndrome that stalks those who move away from production.

It’s a precarious balance that I continue to adjust for 2026: remaining one of the team’s expert references without becoming a bottleneck.

2025 in Data: Log Analysis

A good architect doesn’t rely on guesswork; they look at the metrics. And this year, if I hadn’t opened my dashboards, I would have had a totally biased view of my own performance.

That’s where data becomes relevant: it doesn’t lie, unlike our brain which tends to erase successes to focus on shortcomings.

The Blog: “Scale-Out” Growth

The traffic figures are quite good for a personal tech blog.

The KPIs of the year:

• Production: 60 articles published (an average of 5 articles/month). Swiss clock regularity.
• Traffic: 39.3k Views (+868%) and 23.8k Unique Visitors (+924%). Note: The growth figures compared to 2024 are a bit biased because the tool I used to track blog traffic changed in the last quarter of 2024.
• Engagement: A community growing on LinkedIn that is starting to comment and interact, a sign that my content is finding its target.

We observe a direct correlation between publication density (especially the peaks in May and the regularity of the last quarter) and the explosion of organic traffic. It is proof by example that technical SEO, coupled with in-depth content (not simple ChatGPT articles), pays off over time. The blog has gone from “confidential” status to a true consulted resource. Many clients (not to say “all”) have already told me they read the blog regularly. Thank you, that’s what drives me to continue!

Sport: The Perception Bug

This is where the retrospective becomes surprising. If you had asked me yesterday: “Julien, were you athletic this year?”, I would have answered with frustration: “Yes, but not regular enough for my taste, I feel like I’ve stagnated”.

So I extracted the logs of my activities (Running and Cycling, thanks Strava) to see the extent of the damage. And there, surprise: the logs contradict my mental monitoring.

Activity	2024 (Baseline)	2025 (Prod)	Differential
Running	106 km	487 km	x 4.5
Cycling	444 km	1987 km	x 4.5

It’s a textbook case of a “False Positive”. My brain focused on the “off” weeks (only 2 weeks out of 52 with 0 activity), forgetting the global volume.

In reality, I multiplied my activity volume by 4.5 compared to 2024. I covered nearly 2500 km all sports combined. That’s not too bad, but I intend to do better in 2026!

The lesson for 2026? Trust the data. Like in prod, when you think there is a latency problem, you look at the curves first before rebooting. I wasn’t “irregular”, I simply changed scale without realizing it.

2026 Goals: My Tech Radar & Roadmap

A review is useless if it doesn’t allow updating the roadmap. For 2026, I don’t foresee a revolution, but a targeted evolution of my technical and personal stack. The goal? Reduce technical debt and prepare for the future.

1. Tech Watch: K8s and AI (Pragmatic)

There are two major subjects on which I intend to skill up, not out of “Hype”, but out of operational necessity:

• Kubernetes (K8s): It has become unavoidable. Even in a hyperconverged world, container orchestration is the standard upper layer. It’s a subject I’ve put off for a long time, due to lack of time. So I want to learn the basics, and go beyond to master architecture and advanced troubleshooting.
• AI (User & Integrator): I’m not talking about playing with prompts to generate images of cats or parody songs. My goal is twofold: optimize my daily workflow (AI as an assistant) and above all understand how to technically integrate it into solutions (API, automation). AI will not replace the architect, but the architect who uses AI will replace the one who doesn’t.

2. Side Project: Automated Audit

This is the big “Dev” chunk of the year. As a consultant, I spend a lot of time auditing infrastructures. I am working on developing an automated audit application.

The idea is simple: script intelligence and recurring checks to save time on data collection and focus on high value-added analysis. It’s a project that mixes my infra skills and my desire to code. Stay tuned, I’ll surely talk about it here again.

3. Human Infrastructure: Preventive Maintenance and MCO

Finally, let’s talk about my Hardware: my body.

The 2025 logs showed me that the machine is capable of handling the load, but the configuration will have to be optimized. My 2026 goal is to invest a little more in my health just as one invests in critical infrastructure:

• More sport: Continue the momentum of 2025 to aim for absolute regularity and increase volume with more structured training.
• Less stress: Better partition professional and personal life, and learn to pick my battles.
• Healthy Food: Pay a little more attention to my diet to boost the benefits of physical activity.

My wishes for you: Be curious, be resilient

To conclude this first publication of 2026, I won’t settle for the usual formulas. In 2026, I wish you two essential qualities: Curiosity and Resilience.

Don’t be intimidated by the mountain. Computer science, like any field of expertise, is tamed step by step. Be curious, dare to test, dare to make mistakes. It is the only way to learn.

I also wish you Resilience. In our projects as in our lives, everything never goes exactly as planned on paper. There will be unforeseen events, errors, moments of fatigue. It’s okay.

True strength is not never falling, but knowing how to bounce back. Be lenient with yourselves when it doesn’t work on the first try. Accept the downtime, learn, and restart. That is true sustainable performance.

To all, I wish you an excellent year 2026.