Copilot, Blazor, and a Mac Mini in a Pear Tree — koskila.net in 2025
It’s that end‑of‑year ritual again — a short pause to look back at what actually happened, what broke, and what was surprisingly useful.
This year mixed wins with plenty of frustration: Frustration with unreliable hardware and Windows, cold start with macOS, the challenge of balancing family, work, and personal projects with speaking at conferences again; and of course the ongoing learning path with agentic software development.
On the other hand, I've had awesome wins with finally cutting WordPress loose, learning to embrace static site generation with BlazorStatic, and actually enjoying the arguably mundane (read: non-coding) challenges at work.
Introduction
After two decades of fiddling with websites and over a decade writing this blog, 2025 felt like a turning point of sorts: I finally cut WordPress loose and went all in with a static site generator based on Blazor.
And I finally got so fed up with my Dell XPS laptop, that I switched back to a desktop - although it's a Mac Mini this time. And while the transition was easier than I expected, it still wasn't without hiccups. And despite only picking up my Windows laptop a few times a month now, it has still succeeded at blowing up twice this year, which I have blogged about:
- 2025 Holiday special: Windows first run fun!
- Lights are on but nobody's home — my Dell XPS broke again!
But continuing with the positives, Copilot (both the M365 and GitHub flavors) saved me a lot of time in 2025 — when carefully guided — and the site traffic stayed steady despite the noise around AI. And at work, being able to manage a team and deliver value without coding myself has been a challenge I've enjoyed tackling.
Outside the keyboard, family life (which is great), continued annoyance of home ownership (which isn't great) and tax changes (which are awful) continued to reshape my priorities: More time with the kids, but a tighter budget, and a continued commitment to supporting Ukraine through purchases and partnerships.
And being awarded Microsoft MVP again for the 7th consecutive year was definitely one of the highlights of 2025 - this time for M365. I've been an MVP for Azure and OfficeDev before.
Koskila.net in 2025
I've traditionally taken some time at the end of each year to reflect on what has happened on this website of mine during the year. I might be a little bit late, but other than that, this year is no different, so here's a quick review of 2025.
The obvious difference is that I've finally gotten rid of WordPress.
Goodbye WordPress, hello BlazorStatic
Every week, I'm fighting against the urge of writing another article about BlazorStatic and static site generation in general, because I don't want to be the meme:
Although maybe I prefer this one even more:
It took me months to implement most of the functionality I had in WordPress, but now that almost everything is working, I'm super happy with the site.
It's faster, more reliable, and I can actually control the content and the presentation without fighting against PHP, WordPress and its plugins.
And I fought the urge of writing about it more 🤠
I do like working with Blazor, writing in Markdown, and I don't mind GitHub Actions for building, and GitHub Pages for hosting the site (although I am open to alternatives).
That said, I'm still missing some pretty big stuff like commenting and search, and there's a bunch of bugs to fix, but overall - I'm super happy with the change.
Anyway - what did I achieve with the website in 2025?
Accessibility improvements
Last year, I implemented AI-powered summaries for the new articles on the website, to help people with reading difficulties get the gist of the articles more easily.
Additionally, I performed a comprehensive accessibility audit of the website, and immediately gave up on fixing them while still using WordPress!
Now that I've got control of the platform, I'm able to better address the issues, and I've already fixed a lot of them - and using AI tooling, I've added reviews for readability and some basic accessibility checks to my writing (building...) process.
Vibe-driven development
I don't get to code much at work anymore, being responsible for the overall delivery of the team. This has made me appreciate the times I get to code on my own projects even more.
But even then, I've been struggling to find the time and energy to work on my projects. Having a full-time job and a family means that my free time is limited, and I often find myself simply out of time or energy to do fun stuff.
Sad, isn't it?
However, since the vibe-coding tools have matured a lot during 2025, I've instead focused on asking GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to do all the fun stuff for me, while I just concentrate on the boring parts like writing specifications, reviewing code, and testing.
And BOY does it need a lot of testing! If you've visited the website often in 2025, you have probably noticed that there have been a lot of bugs (like localhost-based links, disappearing elements, surprising styles, and so on)!
Despite working on the instructions files and writing blog posts about it, Copilot will still gladly go off the rails, forget the instructions, and implement things inconsistently if you don't keep an eye on it.
It is still overall a huge time saver, though - and not only is the Coding Agent getting better, but I'm also learning how to best use it in different scenarios.
And of course - the site is much nicer to work on than WordPress ever was, and I can tolerate some development woes.
koskila.net in numbers
Somehow, I've found the time to write 55 articles overall - which is MORE than my usual commitment of 1 article per week.
Traffic has been steady at almost 300 000 unique visitors annually (or over a million if you trust CloudFlare, but I have no idea how they come up with that number).
That's so many people it continues to blow my mind. Thank you all for reading my stuff, even though most of it is just me ranting about tech problems I have 😅
Anyway, what were you all reading the most this year?
Most popular posts of 2025
Here are the most popular articles of 2025:
"Performing cleanup" - Excel is stuck with an old, conflicted file and will never recover.
Haha, this one was incredible — who would've thought that an article about Excel getting stuck with a conflicted file would be the most popular article of the year?
Besides, I blame OneDrive 100% on that one. Excel can do no wrong.
-
Ahh, classic. Entra ID can be a pain, although this one is either on you (or the app developer) to fix.
Any kubectl command throws connection refused error
... and now for something completely different! I messed up my kubectl config, and this article explains how I fixed it.
How to remove Skype for Business if it sneaks back onto your machine
Skype for Business is the gift that keeps on giving despite being killed off years ago. I just had to install Windows from scratch again, and there it was — Skype for Business, back from the dead.
But the article explains something even more dramatic! Skype for Business started sneaking back in, even on stable, non-fresh machines — even machines where you had already once removed it.
This article explains how to get rid of it for good.
Fix winget 0x8a15000f (data required by source is missing)
Oh my — this article I wrote in 2023 was a lifesaver again this year! Winget is great, but when it breaks, it breaks hard. For me, it was broken on a fresh Windows install, and I was super happy I had documented how I fixed it earlier.
What about AI and Copilot?
See something in common between these articles?
They are NOT about AI. Not even about Copilot. They are all about solving real-world problems that people face in their daily work.
Draw whatever conclusions you want from that...
The only AI-related article that got over 1000 views was about Copilot gaslighting the user about them having turned off web search in work mode: M365 Copilot gaslighting fix on Android
It's also noteworthy that my rants about Windows and my backhanded compliments for macOS — both of which I enjoy writing — got almost no views. I mean, sure - I AM writing this blog for myself, but still - it's interesting to see what people are actually reading.
Crawlers visiting koskila.net
Interestingly, this year there's been a big shift in the bots crawling the content - Googlebot isn't the top crawler anymore! Instead, it's OpenAI now:
Google and Bing bots are still on positions 2 and 3, respectively, but still - I think this is an interesting change.
What's up in 2026?
So - what am I planning for 2026?
I've enjoyed being a manager and team lead this (last) year, but I do miss coding. So in 2026, I plan to continue my vibe-driven (but artisanally backed) development experiments, and try to find more time for coding on my own projects.
And there sure is plenty of work to be done on the website! Experimenting with GitHub Copilot Coding Agent will continue to be a part of this process.
I hope to speak at a few conferences again, and I do have some lined up - I'll be in Tallinn in January for CTTT26, and in May you'll find me in Köln for European Collaboration Summit 2026.
And of course, family life will continue to be the most important part of my life. And I'll try to find new creative (and tax-deductible) ways to support Ukraine. 😉
Thanks for visiting the site in 2025, and see you in 2026!
And if you happen to meet me at a conference, don't hesitate to say hi!
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