2025 was a pivot year for me, and pivots are always significant. If it had been only positive, there would be nothing to write about, nothing to learn from, and the whole year would have been terribly boring.
A little anxiety about the world out there
Let me start with the “anxious” part of the title. Some of you surely feel this tension too, especially the older ones. On a personal level your life is beautiful — arguably more beautiful every year — yet you’re increasingly seized by gloom, or even anxiety, about what’s happening in the world, in geopolitics, in society at large.
It started with the invasion of Ukraine, it continues with a second Trump term, and the ground is shifting hard here in Central Europe too. The light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting fainter. My father has an old saying for moments like these — roughly, “the world is going to hell.” I used to laugh at it. Now it fits. I won’t dwell on this much further, but I try to be honest here, and this framing can’t be missing.
Let’s instead focus on what I actually lived through last year, personally and above all professionally.
From freelancer to business owner
First and foremost, I’ve probably already transformed from a freelancer into a business owner.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s just one of my roles. I’m still a content author, a performance and web enthusiast, a boss and co-owner of a company, a product person, a community guy, and above all a dad.
In 2025 my self-perception around making money shifted. I spent well over twenty years freelancing, and the inertia of that mindset is enormous.
Evolution.
Being a solo freelancer and being an entrepreneur with your own company and people in it are completely different leagues. The mental and skill-based transformation from the first to the second took me roughly five years.
Throughout that time I kept asking myself one question: What will you do if your business fails, or if it simply stops being fun?
My answer was always that I’d just go back to freelancing. That held until the second half of 2025, when I started answering instead that in such a case I’d go and build a new business. Not bad — I wouldn’t have expected that of myself.
PageSpeed.ONE: consulting is flying, but we want to push harder on the product
The business, of course, is PageSpeed.ONE — a great team of people who help companies speed up their websites and, in turn, improve conversions or traffic.
Last year was excellent. Thanks in part to a new colleague, Tomáš, we moved into consulting on backend and infrastructure (Cloudflare gave us a bit of a run for our money) and specifically on WordPress. We also focused heavily on other platforms, mainly Shoptet and Shopify.
I personally leaned hard into sales, and the numbers show it. What surprised me was how much I ended up enjoying it.
We worked with an estimated 30–40 new clients, including names like Česká spořitelna (one of the largest Czech banks), and we also did more work for retailers like Heureka and Datart. Brilliant.
At the same time we were building our SaaS speed-monitoring service. We made nice progress on it, but we didn’t have as much time for it as we’d have liked. We’re not the first to discover, painfully, that time and attention are finite, and that the shift from agency mode to product mode is always very hard. This will be the main goal for 2026.
FrontKon and Frontendisti.cz: from community to company thinking
Another big mental shift happened with Frontendisti.cz, the Czech frontend community. We spent a lot of time figuring out how to secure the future of both the community and the FrontKon conference, which until now rested on the large volunteer investment of me, Tomáš, Břetík, and many others. I’ll be honest: in the first quarter I had one foot out the door, at least from organising FrontKon. But what was needed here was a change of mindset.
I think we got a new drive — at least I did — especially for the coming editions of FrontKon, which in 2025 essentially became bigger than the entire Frontendisti community. It’s an event that’s already outgrowing its community. We have ideas in our heads that should make that increasingly clear in the years ahead. At least I hope so!
Under Frontendisti, Robin and I also moved our podcast over, under a new name, FrontKec. Thematically and strategically it belongs to the community, while I’m gradually winding down the Vzhůru dolů project — as you’ve surely already noticed.
That’s a lot of transformation, a lot of growth, a lot of change and demanding management problems. It would be strange if no little crisis showed up, right? Oh, it showed up, you bet it did.
The little crisis
In hindsight I can see the crisis lasted almost half the year. A crisis of overload: too many big topics at once (not just work, but personal too), too little deep work, and the resulting bouts of insomnia — alarms that, when they start buzzing, mean you need to change something quickly.
I’ve been through it several times in my career, usually during my various freelancing transitions. It happened, for instance, when I started selling training, while I was writing one of my books, or when COVID arrived and gutted a big part of my livelihood.
I know there’s always a way out — taking a meta view of your time, self-analysis with a book in hand, changing how you organise things, decisively ending some activities — but this time I reacted fairly slowly, so I suffered for needlessly long. I’m not sure why, but I’d say the overload this time was so big it blocked the alarms. Oh, and I’m also getting nicely old.
(Out of) shape
When I look at what I wanted to change, move forward, or achieve in 2025, I can be very satisfied. Except for one thing: my physical fitness.
Stress does its thing, age does too, the metabolism isn’t what it used to be, and my classic maintenance activities (a bit of running, walking to and from work) clearly stopped being enough.
I’ll have to solve this too this year, so for the first time in my life I’ve joined the heap of clichés who want to lose weight and get in shape come January.
By the way, if you’re interested in cultural tips for reading, listening, or watching, take a look at my personal or work recommendations from 2025.
”2025 was great!”
One of the year’s projects was getting my older son into secondary school. If you don’t have kids finishing primary school — or you’re not in Prague — you can’t imagine what it involves. There are many candidates for the academic high schools and very few spots.
In the end it turned out great. He got into his second-choice school, he’s very happy there, and he went through a transformation of his own — he settled in really well and is generally independent when it comes to preparing for school.
On New Year’s morning, Honza woke up and called out, “2025 was great!” My wife and I exchanged a glance. That’s really wonderful, we imagined — how he can appreciate it all. How he can appreciate that, with his effort and ours, he got into a good school, and that he’s doing quite well there.
“2025 was great,” he calls again, and adds: “…because I finally started drinking and smoking weed!”
So to you too, dear readers, I wish for 2026 that you always chase your own dreams, and not other people’s.