The Year We Nearly Broke the Internet (But Definitely Broke My Bookmarks)

As we close out 2025, it’s time for the obligatory year-end retrospective that nobody asked for but everyone secretly enjoys. Unlike those other “Wrapped” summaries that make you feel inadequate about your Spotify habits (pls don’t use Spotify, tho…they support ICE), this one celebrates a year spent curating digital detritus.

No TL;DR today.

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By The Numbers

The Daily Drop was a mostly humming content machine in 2025, and by “machine” I mean “hrbrmstr frantically typing at a sleepless 0-dark-30 while questioning his life choices.”

The Raw Stats:

• 204 posts across the year (168 regular, 36 bonus)
• 265,227 words – 2,413 unique URLs (2,932 total mentions)
• Posted on 173 out of 365 days (47.4% consistency, which we’ll try to do better about in 2026)
• 22.1 hours of total reading time if you consumed everything

That averages out to 1,300 words per post, or about 6.5 minutes of your life per Drop. At 11.8 unique URLs per post (13.9 per posting day, though the distribution is pretty skewed), I’m basically running a link-hoarding operation disguised as a newsletter.

Seasonal Patterns: 

• Q1 started strong with 59 posts and 77K words
• Q2 maintained momentum with 51 posts and 66K words
• Q3 held steady at 52 posts and 63K words (summer consistency) –
• Q4 wound down to 42 posts and 58K words (holiday fatigue setting in)

Most Prolific Month: January with 23 posts and over 30K words. Apparently I front-load my productivity before reality sets in.

Posting Schedule Reality Check:

• Mondays: 50 posts (24.5% – gotta “start the week” with existential dread about new tools)
• Thursdays: 45 posts (22.1% – apparently my noggin’ works on Thursdays)
• Tuesdays: 43 posts (21.1% – Typography Tuesday FTW)
• Fridays: 35 posts (17.2% – winding down for the weekend)

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The Year of Living Digitally

2025 was the year where the line between “useful tool” and “digital hoarding” became increasingly blurred. We dove deep into everything from R packages that make data visualization painless to monospace fonts with personality disorders.

DuckDB Devotion: If there was a recurring character in 2025’s Daily Drop saga, it was DuckDB. What started as occasional mentions evolved into a full-blown obsession that probably crossed into “intervention needed” territory. From using it as a CSV processor to building entire data pipelines that would make traditional database administrators weep, DuckDB proved that sometimes the best tool for the job is the one that makes you question why you ever bothered with anything else. Whether it was wrangling RSS feeds, analyzing post statistics, or turning shell commands into SQL queries via the shellfs extension, DuckDB became the Swiss Army knife I didn’t know I needed. The fact that it can read JSON from curl output, process it with SQL, and export results in any format you want while being faster than most “enterprise” solutions—that’s just good engineering. Special mention to all the creative ways we found to avoid traditional ETL pipelines by just…asking DuckDB to handle everything directly.

Command Line Champions: The terminal remained where the real work happens, with standouts including tools that made file watching less painful, SQL operations more bearable, and time calculations actually human-readable. Special mention goes to mise, which threatens to replace half the tools in my daily driver stack and might actually succeed. (More on that in tomorrow’s inaugural 2026 Drop.)

Typography Tuesday Tradition: What started as occasional font coverage has become a weekly ritual. From Berkeley Mono to Fantasque Sans Mono (which perfectly captures the “wibbly-wobbly handwriting-like fuzziness” we all secretly crave), we proved that yes, I will absolutely spend 45 minutes evaluating ligature implementations.

Security & Networking Deep Dives: Because someone has to keep track of all the ways the internet is trying to break itself. From JA4 fingerprinting to transparent TCP/TLS connections, we covered the tools that help us understand what’s actually happening on the wire.

The R Corner: For those brave souls still wrangling data frames and fighting with ggplot2, we covered everything from {fplot} (which finally automates distribution plots intelligently) to various data wrangling utilities that make the daily grind slightly less grindy.

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Peak Content Moments

Longest Post: A 2,958-word epic on the absolute worst day in American history: January 20th.

Shortest Post: A mercifully brief 268-word July 4th post titled “Invoking An Infrequent Author’s Indulgent Privilege”.

URL Overload Champion: September 11th’s “Toss-Up Thursday” managed to cram 34 unique links into a single post. No regrets.

Bonus Post Frequency: 36 bonus posts throughout the year, with January, June, July, and September each earning 4 bonus rounds.

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What Actually Stuck

After a year of sifting through the internet’s offerings:

1. There’s always a better tool — and it’s probably written in Rust
2. Typography matters more than we’d like to admit (and yes, Times New Roman vs. Calibri is apparently political)
3. The terminal is eternal — every fancy GUI eventually gets replaced, but bash endures
4. Documentation is an art form — good docs can make a mediocre tool shine, bad docs can kill a great one
5. Open source continues to eat the world — and we’re all just along for the ride (at least until AI kills it off)

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Writing this final post of 2025, the usual end-of-year reflections apply. We’re still fighting the same battles: making technology more accessible and trying to build things that actually solve real problems instead of creating new ones.

For 2026: More tools, more tips, more terrible puns in section headers. The internet shows no signs of slowing down its production of fascinating oddities, and I show no signs of developing better judgment about what constitutes “essential reading.”

We’ll keep exploring the weird corners of GitHub, celebrating developers who care about craft, and occasionally stumbling across tools that genuinely change how we work. The next great utility is always just one repository clone away.

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The Traditional Sign-Off

Thank you for reading, sharing, and occasionally implementing the things we’ve covered this year. Whether you’re here for the command-line tips, the typography discussions, or just to see what I’ve dug up today—I appreciate it.

Here’s to 2026. May your builds complete and your commit messages be marginally more descriptive than “fix stuff.”

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on:

• 🐘 Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev
• 🦋 Bluesky via https://bsky.app/profile/dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev.web.brid.gy

☮️

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FIN

Dropped, not wrapped.