mostsignificant monthly - January 2025 issue

mostsignificant monthly - January 2025 issue

This is a re-post from my monthly newsletter with curated tech news, insights, and blog posts worth exploring.

2025 was off to a turbulent start. I’m still unsure where the AI hype is headed — or who will lead it. China’s DeepSeek showed that small teams remain a force to be reckoned with, while Silicon Valley’s billions aren’t always the deciding factor.

What was news-worthy in January 2025?

  • 🔎 After Meta’s controversial decision to roll back fact-checking, Google searches for “how to delete Facebook“ increased by more than 5000%: TechCrunch

  • 💰 The 69,000 Bitcoin (worth roughly $7bn) seized by the US Government from a hacker who stole them from Silk Road will be sold soon: Ars Technica

  • 🤖 NVIDIA’s worth dropped by $600bn when a new AI competitor from China gained a lot of attention. But is DeepSeek really better than ChatGPT? Mashable

  • 🚕 Self-driving cars dominated CES 2025 — but none were from traditional U.S. or European carmakers: TechCrunch

What was read-worthy in January 2025?

  • 🏭 Did you know that an AI-powered search is estimated to consume 10x more energy than a regular search query? Tech companies have become experts at hiding the true emissions of their data centers: The Register

  • 🍿 Netflix annual internal three-day conference shares analytical projects across the organisation. A publicly available three-part series dives into analytics engineering at Netflix: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

What did I do in January 2025?

  • 📱 I migrated my first mobile app to React Native 0.76, adopting its new architecture, and wrote about the process: Medium or GitHub

  • 📖 I reread Eric Evans’ classic Domain-Driven Design. In 2003, he introduced the concept of ubiquitous language, advocating for engineers to speak the same language as the business. I wrote a review: Medium or GitHub

Podcast Bonus:

  • 🎮 The Pragmatic Engineer talks with Jonas Tyroller, co-developer of Thronefall, about how a small team built a game that sold 1M+ copies: Apple or Spotify or Youtube

Have a great start to February 2025. Stay healthy!