Check below if you want to read my 2025 Review. 2025 was one of those years where everything moves at once — work, community, and the personal projects you thought were “just a hobby”.

Introduction

At work I stepped into a new role and into a project that’s both technically and personally meaningful to me: building an automated private cloud platform that delivers client services (desktop, thin and virtual) at scale. I won’t name the customer or the exact context for obvious reasons – but it’s connected to a mission I fully support: protecting stability and, in a very real way, protecting our world.

At the same time, my personal life didn’t slow down – and neither did https://hartiga.de. The blog, the homelab, the weekly writing rhythm, and the community around it all accelerated quickly.

This recap is long, because 2025 was crazy. But maybe that’s exactly why it’s worth writing down: if you want to understand what my life as an MVP looks like, if you’re curious about the social media numbers behind the scenes, or if you’re simply looking for a real-world story to compare your own year against – this one is for you.

Work in 2025 – from “many things to one big thing”

For a long time I did the typical consulting mix: multiple customers, multiple topics, delivery work plus business development, and constant switching.

It looks productive. It drains you. Context switching is a killer.

In 2025 I moved into a very large international project with weekly on-site trips. The biggest change wasn’t the scale or travel – it was focus.

Once the constant switching stopped, I noticed it immediately: energy stabilized, thinking got calmer, and creativity came back. Not because I suddenly had more time, but because my brain stopped paying the switching tax.

Context switching feels like productivity. It’s often just mental fragmentation.

MVP in 2025 – still there, still grateful

It’s a yearly reminder that consistent contribution matters: writing things down, sharing lessons learned, answering questions, and helping people avoid mistakes we’ve all seen too often.

It’s rarely glamorous. It’s mostly consistency – even when life is busy. In 2025, that consistency showed results I can actually measure: growth of the blog and growth of the community around it. And yes – I’m proud I maintained it.

In 2025 I started networking more intentionally and I am very thankful for connecting with members of the community and MVPs from all kind of places around the world.

LinkedIn and why I am not excited about its development

First: Thank you. My 2025 Review shows a great development.

15,000 followers on LinkedIn and nearly 5,000 newsletter subscribers still feels unreal sometimes. It shows why consistency matters and you can tell this from the following statistics.

My Top 5 LinkedIn posts in the 2025 Review:

🤯 Modern Active Directory security design is changing fast

☢️ Massive Update to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.

❗ The Azure landing zone architecture has been updated

Do you need to vizualize who has what permissions in an Active Directory?

🎉 Active Directory is 25 years old!

Here’s the truth: if you understand the algorithm, you can trigger visibility. And it’s harder to get the same reach with real, non-AI, handcrafted technical depth. Format often beats nuance. Hooks beat fundamentals. This has been a challenge for a lot of technical content creators. We all need to support that kind of content more or soon all what we will have is “clickbait” and “AI generated copies of stuff”.

So my decision going forward is simple: I’ll use modern tools where they help, including AI – but hartiga.de stays the place for tested, validated, practical content, not “content for reach”.

This Blog – Focus, Migration, Dragons and Fundamentals first

This year the blog felt for me like it “grew up” – mainly because of consistency and a clearer focus: Windows Server, hybrid infrastructure, Azure Arc, and practical architecture.

Here are the statistics from the last 16 months.

I had to migrate the blog to a new hoster with a non-shared IP address. This happened 12 months ago after losing reach and it took months to get search engines to consider the website to be “reliable and worthy to search” again. Nobody celebrates that, but it matters. If your platform isn’t solid, your content won’t reach people reliably.

I need to thank Hostinger for their platform that helped me to focus more on content and less on technical issues of my blog. If you want to use that service and support me, you can do that using this affiliate link with 20% discount for you: Start your blog with hostinger

Finding my visual voice: dragons

I’m also genuinely happy that I found my way to visualize my stories with a personal brand around dragons. It fits how I think about IT: protecting what matters, hoarding knowledge, and making “dry topics” memorable.

Finding my story: Fundamentals first, automation later

My blog focuses on fundamentals, not automation. And I’m happy that so many people want to understand first instead of automating what they don’t understand. If you get the basics right, automation becomes powerful. If not, you just scale mistakes faster.

Content and story in my 2025 Review

2025 was shaped by a few repeating themes:

• Windows Server fundamentals and operational hygiene (the boring stuff that keeps things stable)
• Hybrid architecture thinking: identity, blast radius, Tier-0 reality checks, day-2 operations
• Homelab as a proving ground: testing patterns before recommending them

I continue to not chase shiny features. I’m trying to make environments more resilient by improving the fundamentals. If you are interested in any area that i haven’t covered yet, please let me know.

Thank you!

To the community!

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and challenging ideas without turning it into noise. That’s what makes this worth it. I appreciated the most getting challenged on my points of views and being engaged in discussions with all of you.

To my wife!

And to my wife: thank you – because none of this works without you.

This year was my homelab and blog hobby (and the weekly time it takes), plus weekly travel for the project. While I’m on-site, you handle the real life at home: logistics, everyday stuff, and all the invisible work that makes everything else possible.

That support doesn’t show up in stats, but it’s the reason I can keep going without burning out. This is my personal learning in my 2025 Review.

A Personal Project: A book for kids about Nala

If you’ve been around my content for a while, you’ve seen my 13 year old dog Nala show up more than once. Some things matter beyond IT. The story my wife wrote is a wholesome contrast to “Always choose the right DNS / Active Directory domain name for your 2024 home lab” , and “Azure Arc – Secure a Tier 0 resource – 2025“.

The book “Nala und ihre Geschichten: Kleine Abenteuer mit Herz und Pfote” is around the last 13 years and is based on real stories and events of my wife, Nala and me with a magical and entertaining twist. If you are looking for a gift for kids in German language, we would welcome your support.

Get the full hardcover and very colorful book here:
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Nala-ihre-Geschichten-Kleine-Abenteuer/dp/B0G3BXWBXW or take the kindle version here.

2025 Review – The Summary

More focus. More consistency. More community. My biggest learning was to fully understand that context switching actually costs energy. Shipping fundamentals, one step at a time, is still the way to go for you and this blog and its community.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Bluesky or check my newly created Adaptive Cloud community on Reddit.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreas-hartig/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hartiga.de
Adaptive Cloud community on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdaptiveCloud/