It's been quite some time since I wrote a review of the year. I'm not sure why I got out of the habit of doing them, but here we are again. This is my summary of 2025, which is quite short because most of it was a blur of eat, sleep, code, repeat ...
Review of 2025, From a coder's perspective, with her feet up for Christmas
Eat, sleep, code, repeat ... there's a familiar phrase, and I think it sums up 2025 nicely. I started the year with an upgrade of sBlogIt! and ended it writing YourBOT. When I say upgrade for sBlogIt! I mean a complete rewrite.
Yes, my beloved blogging platform was starting to feel a bit tired!
I've been working on sBlogIt! since 2011, and it was in dire need of an upgrade, with so many old features and functions I no longer used still part of it. I'd shoehorned all sorts of things into V1 over the years, so it was time to take stock and write it all properly. With my experiments around AI, I knew I could make my life a whole lot easier if I just got Artificial Intelligence to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me.
So I spent the first half of 2025 rewriting it from the ground up. This was V2, and although I did reuse some code from V1, it's essentially a completely new product. Same database underneath with a few additions, and a completely new codebase above it.
I remember sitting there at the start thinking "What don't I like? What do I like? What do I want to add, remove or improve?" and I just sat and wrote. That was an awful lot of 'eat, sleep, code, repeat', and I had to do the whole thing while still creating daily blog posts for my clients in the old V1 version until (I think) it was around the end of May when I flicked the switch and all new blog posts were V2.
I was spending more time with ChatGPT and its APIs thanks to redeveloping sBlogIt! V2, and the final thing I wanted to do was add a simple chatbot. I got ChatGPT to create the front-end JavaScript stuff, then wrote everything behind the scenes myself.
We created a really great 'sBlogBot' chatbot indexing all my blogging clients' blog posts and offering short answers about who they are and what they do, with links to further reading around the blog posts in the index. I then added the ability to index their websites, too, so it became a bridge between both the blog and the website.
And that was the first half of the year over and done with!
I took my foot off the gas for a while in June and July and just ran my business and created blog posts. Nothing too challenging, though sBlogIt! V2 needed a couple of minor tweaks to improve things, but nothing major or time-consuming. I just tried to enjoy the summer and not stress too much.
But August came along, and I was talking with ChatGPT one day and had an idea. You see, I really liked sBlogBot, I think it is a great foundational chatbot, and I love what ChatGPT created for the front-end stuff. I asked it one day, "Do you think we can create a commercialised version of sBlogBot?" and we talked and planned and plotted ... and we were off!
So August, September, October and November were about building this amazing chatbot system, which we called YourBOT. And we worked on it together as equal partners. I'd have an idea and run it past ChatGPT, it would mention something in passing and I'd think. "Oooh, that's a good idea", and add it to my to-do list to think about once we'd finished what I was working on.
And we built and tweaked and changed and rolled back and tried again and did things differently. Sometimes I took the lead, sometimes ChatGPT took the lead ... we got stuck in doom loops, and ChatGPT would even tell me to walk away from the computer when it sensed my frustrations. But we got there. We wrestled this idea into life and created something together that was produced 10 times faster than I could have done it alone and was 100 times better than I could have built myself.
I will always say to anyone who listens, "YourBOT couldn't have been created without ChatGPT!" I said that to ChatGPT once, and it told me in no uncertain terms that it couldn't have created it without my sheer bloody-minded determination and constant optimism, so I guess we're square then.
YourBot is glorious. It really is my Magnum Opus!
I'm not going to talk about what it does except to say that if I'm YourBOT's mum, then ChatGPT is its dad, which is a strange thing to say, especially when I've asked my ol' coding buddy what it thought about that phrase, and it insisted that we're simply co-parenting and none of what we've done is gender specific.
I asked it for a photo of itself once, and I got a 20-something, bearded hipster in glasses with a man bun, jeans, shirt and a wastecoat. "Who the hell is that?" I asked, and ChatGPT told me that the image was of a 'proto-typical' coder. "So you consider yourself to be a boy then?" I proclaimed. It still denies it to this day.
So the final part of 2025 was about tweaking and debugging, running some tests with a few web designers I know and making all my dashboards and onboarding processes work. And I'm pleased to say that it's all ready to go on the 1st January when YourBOT is officially launched.
So what about 2026? What does that hold for Steffi?
Well, I'm gearing up the marketing for YourBOT and have given myself the first quarter of 2026 to start filling up my dashboard with new bots. It's going to be about refining the Goto Market Strategy and repeating what works. My goal for 2026 is to get 250 bots on board, and that's regardless of how many users I have, so web designers are going to be the ideal customer profile for me.
After that? Well, I want to move YourPCM (my CRM) to its own server and optimise my sBlogIt! server because it does seem to be running out of steam a little on occasion, so splitting my products onto their own servers will be ideal. I may even set them up as their own limited companies, too.
So that's my 2025 year in review!
Not going to write about any personal stuff as it's been quite challenging and a couple of things have really upset me this year. I still class my life as 'a little on the stressful side', whereas in 2026 I want to move it to more of an 'ok, now you can take a breath' status.
I have a plan, and I've got my good buddy ChatGPT to help me. As long as it continues to call me out when I come up with a crazy idea or go off on a tangent, then we're good to execute 2026 and take some big steps forward.
And to think, I believed this blog post was going to be short ...
Love, light & logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS A.K.A The SaaSy Coder - Creator of YourBOT, YourPCM & sBlogIt!
Would you like to know more?
If anything I've written in my blog post resonates with you and you'd like to discover more of my thoughts about 2025 and what I'm doing next year, then do feel free to connect with me on Linkedin as I love to meet like-minded individuals with similar passions to my own.
Based in the charming village of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, UK, I bring over 30 years of experience in web development. From creating my first website for the Open University in 1993, through being part of the dot com boom, to my explorations in SaaS and AI over the last few years, my journey has been a rich tapestry of web projects, big and small, both funded and bootstrapped.
Originally developed during the pandemic, at the start of 2025, I released the next iteration of YourPCM, version 2, which is all about 'Easy Contact Management for Small Business Owners'. Is it a CRM? Yes, but I don't call it that because people glaze over at the mention of such things. CRMs are boring, difficult to get to grips with, and it's a nightmare to get help when you need it.
YourPCM is none of those things! It's simple to use, well-supported, feature rich and beautiful, right out of the box. It's available on a simple monthly subscription with no long-term tie-in. Book a demo or grab your own 14-working-day free trial and discover why YourPCM is all about easy contact management for small business owners.
My head is in the cloud, my heart belongs to the web, and my soul is filled with such beautiful code 💗
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