Maybe it's because I'm a data scientist and not a dedicated programmer/engineer, but setup+tooling gains this year have made 2025 a stellar year for me.

DS tooling feels like it hit much a needed 2.0 this year. Tools are faster, easier, more reliable, and more reproducible.

Polars+pyarrow+ibis have replaced most of my pandas usage. UDFs were the thing holding me back from these tools, this year polars hit the sweet spot there and it's been awesome to work with.

Marimo has made notebooks into apps. They're easier to deploy, and I can use anywidget+llms to build super interactive visualizations. I build a lot of internal tools on this stack now and it actually just works.

PyMC uses jax under the hood now, so my MCMC workflows are GPU accelerated.

All this tooling improvement means I can do more, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.

I should probably write a blog post on this.