Cat's review of 2025

This was a strange, hard year. For me it was a year of many changes and much work, and investment in laying foundations and planting seeds. It is not yet possible to evaluate the effectiveness of these labors, so I am going into 2026 hoping that this year of somewhat monastic work, striving and survival will yield something good.

At any rate, it brings me joy to list some of the good-in-the-moment things that kept me company this year:

Books

While writing my book (THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOFTWARE TEAMS, coming 2026!), I read a great many books, and reread books I had read only parts of, and reread the books I read to ensure I was reading them correctly. It was a damn lot of reading. A few new ones either introduced me to a lot of good science or helped me understand how other scientist were grappling with the big social challenges of our work, or have become my go-to recommendations for folks outside the field looking to update their views. Each of these is written by a social scientist and contains references you can check and trace yourself. While written for general audiences, each also includes helpful commentary and contextualization on methodological validity and rigor:

• The Power of Us by Van Bavel & Packer

• 10 to 25 by Yeager

• Belonging by Cohen

• The Collective Edge by Fisher

Speaking

I spoke, wrote, podcasted and interviewed; a major highlight for me was getting to visit Budapest with wonderful people for the first time when I spoke at Craft Conf! Another big highlight was keynoting at posit:conf, of which there is a full video available:

I also enjoyed virtual talks, including this one, which I accompanied with a reference list here:

I did a number of podcasts, including speaking with Scott on Hanselminutes about Psychology and Software teams, and of course, we produced more Change, Technically. Our most popular episode of the year was YOU DESERVE BETTER BRAIN RESEARCH I rounded the year out with a friend-conference-seminar combo trip, giving a more personal talk at Monktoberfest about my 2025 encounters with underresourced and understudied health conditions and what it feels like to become a data outlier in a world of incomplete evidence, and how this continues to inspire my work as a social scientist:

I had a very contemplative time attending my first Dagstuhl, a five day event with primarily academic software researchers, themed around Creativity and Generative AI. I was honored to be invited. I enjoyed organizing an impromptu problem-solving hackathon in the famous wine cellar, based on the conviction I have that you can better theorize and study things that you also try to directly encounter, make and build, and empathize with. During that hackathon, I also drafted the first version of a research tool I'd like to try to use in 2026. I left with complex feelings about my relationship to academia and academic science, which is not new, but certainly heightened in 2025. I have always identified as an interdisciplinary applied scientist, and found it challenging to maintain the effort it takes to navigate the many conventions and silos of academic fields and subfields. Writing my book definitely sharpened my sense that we need research studies to be useful and actionable. As a now-fully-independent researcher who funds my own travel, across the year I also found myself thinking a great deal about what is worth it or not worth it in tech and how much people want out of you in events and content production. Social science work is frequently undervalued, even when people find it insightful and important, so I began to establish some stronger boundaries this year around what science communication I said yes to.

Writing & Moving on

A key goal for my 2025 was of course: finishing my book! If you watch my Monktoberfest talk, you will know why this became a bit more challenging than anticipated. I was in a great deal of chronic pain for most of the year, but I wrote and read and thought anyway. Tasks for 2026 include organizing a monumentally large pile of supplemental research that I read for this project, and creating more digestible visuals and storytelling to go along with the rigorous research behind the book. The book has gone through review, is out to some advance readers, and I am just blown away by the response to my advance reader request form!! It was more than 20x what we expected :). You can still throw your hat into the ring using that form which I'll keep open for a few more weeks; I should be able to give folks a discount code even if we can't send everyone an advance copy. While managing unexpected and life-upending health challenges, and while writing my book, I closed down the Developer Success Lab in May. This was the first time in my career that I'd been given the opportunity to fully build out a small social science lab of my own and execute on my vision of open science for developers at that scale. I am very proud of what we did with that chance, and I hope the work from the lab continues to help people. Additionally, even with the lab closing, we still published our No Silver Bullets study in 2025, the type of project I had envisioned since beginning the lab bringing together robust statistical techniques with the immensity of software data. I think this was an ambitious project that makes a unique contribution to a very contentious and difficult topic.

At the same time, 2025 was the most difficult year Ashley and I have ever experienced for academia and her work advancing diversity and education in STEM. I am so immensely proud of her and all she has done, and every single person she has protected, fought for, and kept in science this year. That is not work that can be put in an easy bullet point list anywhere, but it is the most important story about our 2025. Please continue to care about science and scientists. I spoke briefly about this as well as more generally about psychology and software teams with Redmonk:

Finally, in 2025 I launched Fight for the Human, where I wrote multiple original pieces and gratifyingly, saw that project grow beyond my initial goals. While 2025 rocked my resources and ability to really grow the newsletter and research resources there as quickly as I'd hoped, 2026 will be a year of investing in this space. This also became a space to host and share some of my Developer Science Office Hours, where we enjoyed things like a chaotically fun research design workshop and topics like advancing Empirical Security. My most popular piece of writing so far there has been Why I Cannot Be Technical, which sparked thousands of views, and much controversy in people online debating whether I knew how to use a computer or not, which did give me a bit of a chuckle in a year full of pain, so that's good.

A few focusing hopes for 2026

I'd like:

• Fewer medical bills or at least more security about our household being valued enough in the world that we can face them

• A bit more time to read frivolous books instead of massive meta-analyses

• People to consider sharing and promoting good social science as a vehicle for tech culture change, not just rage

• To find more colleagues to connect with in tech after coming out of this book-writing, health-dealing, lab-closing valley

• More room for joyful, creative projects that let me build things and experiment with low stakes iteration

• To invest a bit more in organizing, curating, and librarian-ing over the last four years of my work backlog

• For measurement to be seen as another human activity and skillset, not a dirty word, in software

• To put an ambitious secret research project that I have designed, and which has garnered some absolutely wonderful surprise support, into motion :)

Much, much love to every person who has been kind to me this year, sent good messages, offered support, quietly shared our work, brought humanness to our online encounters. I hope you all move into a bright new year.