Claudio Lassala's Blog

Here’s the 11th edition of my Annual Reviews.

Previous Year

Continuing from 2024…

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro

• Experimented with writing automation for Spoken Blog and Read Better series
• Published two music videos: Divide and Conquer (One Take) and Hindsight

Logic Pro

• Finished and published the two songs mentioned above

That marked my complete migration from PC-based tools (Vegas and Mixcraft) to Mac-based tools for video and music editing.

Voice Journaling and AI Transcribing

• My journaling system and practice keep evolving, and I’m getting a lot of value from it

Time Perspective

• The exploration continues, and it is my Back to the Spiral Newsletter‘s main framework

AI Productivity

• That was one of my goals for 2025, and it worked out great: blogs, talks, newsletter, books, work (in several ways)

Visual Thinking

• I’ve read a great book about it and continued exploring the topic. Understanding how others and I think is an ongoing area of exploration for me
• Fast prototyping, turning what I see into something others can see

Book Reading and Learning

• Solid consistency
• Published a lot of content about my process

Riding

• If 2024 was a bad year for riding, 2025 was worse

Coolest things I’ve learned

• In 2024, I mentioned bike maintenance. In 2025, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. No time. Stressed out. I wanted to ride, not work on bikes.

Now, 2025…

Blogging

• I’ve set a new record of posts published in a year: 92
• Both views and visitors went up, so I hope some of my content resonates with others
• Out of the Top 10 most-viewed posts of the year, 7 of them were posted in previous years; I like knowing that the older content is still relevant
• In August, I celebrated 20 years of blogging. I had a goal to celebrate, but I had no idea how. At the last minute, I decided to publish a book with the main lessons that stuck with me over this period.
• The coolest thing about my keeping my blog this long: I have written and published a LOT of my opinions and approaches over the years. In the same way I have shared many of those posts with several people, I’ve been sharing them with AI tools so they know how to produce content the same way I would. I showed an example of that in “Can AI Really Pair Program My Experiment with BDD TDD and the Prime Factors Kata“.
  • I was flattered to learn somebody created an “askClaudio” custom command in Claude Code, prompting it to crawl my blog and write AI instructions from it. 🙂
• I’ve also added an Other Publications tab to my blog to include links to articles or posts I wrote for other sources (at least the ones I can still find a link to)

YouTube

• I had a goal to publish more content on my YouTube channel, and so I did: I posted 54 videos
• Views, watch time, and subscribers went up. I hope that the content is helpful to anybody out there.

Books

• I intended to publish a short book. I didn’t publish the one I intended (I made good progress and will likely release it this year)
• But, released two short books that were not planned at all!
  • 20 Lessons from 20 Years of Blogging: A Journey Through Writing, Growth, and Practice
  • The NEED, PROBLEM, SOLUTION Playbook: How AI became part of my workflow—one real example at a time

Public Speaking

I need to do a better job at keeping track of my talks. I let AI loose on my notes, and it tells me I’ve given 15+ talks. That sounds about right, but I’m positive it’s not counting several internal talks I gave at Improving.

One of the best things about public speaking was leveraging AI to streamline my content creation process and analyze my talk transcripts to extract blog posts and generate new talks. Huge multiplier.

Giving my transcripts to NotebookLM and using its “audio overviews” to create debates and critiques has been an excellent way to improve my content.

Music

I started the year strong by releasing two original songs in January: Hindsight and Divide and Conquer (One Take). Both songs were recorded at the end of 2024.

I then had the ambition to revisit an old, long song (about 13 minutes) that had never been properly recorded. I relearned all guitar parts, mapped out the click track, and recorded a guide guitar track.

I was planning to invest in a new V-Drum kit to replace my (very) old one.

As I started practicing playing the drums to it and rewriting some parts, my audio interface stopped working.

And then a series of events drained the funds I was saving for that.

So I redirected my musical efforts for the rest of the year to playing my acoustic guitar and working on my singing.

Work Environment

My home office’s setup is still the same.

I did upgrade my work environment at the Improving office, though, by adding another 34-inch widescreen monitor, bringing the total to three screens (the laptop’s screen is the 3rd). Still one screen short compared to my home office, but I’m making that work.

I’ll have a dedicated post to talk about that change.

Tech

After three years of enjoying my Heavys headphones, always keeping them in their case when not in use, taking extremely good care of them (it still looks brand new!), they stopped working.

I reached out to them and didn’t like the answer I got (“buy a new one with a 30% discount”). No, thanks, I’ll look for a brand with a better durability record.

Learning

• I’ve been taking a long Google UX Design course on Coursera
• I took the awesome Professional Scrum Product Owner class we have at Improving
• Less input, more creation and shipping
  • YouTube Premium
  • Audible

Improving

Speaking of Improving:

• In April, I set a new record for how long I’ve stayed at a company, and in August, I celebrated my 9th anniversary with the company.
• I’ve only run one book club. That’s a low number compared to previous years, but we had two groups and great conversations.
• At the beginning of the year, I had a goal of pairing with another Improver to co-present an internal talk, possibly once a quarter. It didn’t happen each quarter, but I did get 4 co-presented talks! I enjoyed each one and will likely keep doing so this year.
• I presented a 4-part series on productivity, which I plan to revisit and offer through my YouTube channel.
• On some of my mindful breaks, I go to the pool table to hit a few shots, always trying to learn something. Sometimes I hit some amazing shots. Most of the time, nobody sees it.
• I’ve leveraged AI on a few occasions to bring to life some ideas I’ve had for years, but never set time to work on them. I’m pleased with the results.
• I have used AI tools every single day, all year long, learning how they can boost my productivity as a consultant and solution/software developer, and sharing everything I can with Improvers and through this blog, my YouTube Channel, Improving’s blog, and webinars.

Soundtrack

I listen to music every day. The list below is a subset of my soundtrack in 2025:

• Full discographies: Devin Townsend, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead.
• Various albums by: Opeth, Kiko Loureiro, Warrel Dane, Sanctuary, Body Count, Serj Tankian, Jinjer, Dream Theater, Alexia Evellyn, Lacuna Coil, Jinjer, System of a Down, Nevermore, Rush, The Warning, Halestorm, and Testament.

Duolingo

Still a daily thing.

Most Useful Things I Learned

How to use AI to make me and those around me better. That was my main goal for the year.

I gave an LLM a ton of information to help me prepare this annual review. It gave me a very good summary of my journey throughout the year:

• Q1: Experimentation and learning
• Q2: Integration into workflows
• Q3: Teaching and evangelizing
• Q4: Production mastery

It explained each point based on what it found in my notes. It included this interesting meta-pattern:

“Human intent + good architecture + pragmatic scope + tests → AI can build end-to-end solutions with genuine 10x speedups.”