Summary of 2025

I imagined that 2025 would be a relaxing one after the activities in Prague and travelling. But in the end it was a ride as always. And like every year, I have a lot to sum up for 2025.

Goals for 2025

• guitar, juggling
• visit DeepSpot in Poland this winter
• take a freediving course for the next level - greater depth
• in summer trips: friends; possibilities: Pilsen!, Olomouc - Vykleky quarry! Highlands? Beskydy, Jeseníky?
• visit quarries near Pardubice and Chrudim
• explore quarries in the Highlands, around Pilsen
• visit Poland, Poznan, explore the city and its surroundings and see what quarries are on the way
• visit Olomouc in September
• travel to Vietnam
• in Thailand visit the town of ChaingMai
• to set up a company and separate the backup business into a separate entity
• personal development, body and soul care
• regular training regime
• create another video course
• comment on current topics and events or shocking topics, ideally in the IT field, in the form of short videos
• write articles and publish them on a monthly basis on the blog

Freediving

During the summer of 2025, I was freediving in CR. Specifically, I was going to quarries. Being an IT freediving specialist makes me a master of my time. So I had plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to train. So I was able to practice my technique and get comfortable at greater depths.
Subsequently, dives to 10m became commonplace for me and gradually I got to 15-16m depths as well. Several times I had the opportunity to train with a buoy on a rope at greater depths and so in the summer of 2025 I got to 20m depth. In truth, I'd get to greater depths in a similar way, but because I didn't have an adequately warm wetsuit, so from 15m in the water in the quarry I was very cold and therefore very uncomfortable. From these training sessions I concluded that for freediving in the Czech Republic a minimum of 5mm wetsuit and gloves would be a must.

Therefore, I subsequently focused on buying more equipment. I tried the 5mm neoprene from Decathlon, but it didn't fit. I tried a 7mm neoprene, but that didn't suit me. Mainly because of the fit. I finally managed to buy a 5mm neoprene from abroad on sale, which fits me well. At the same time I bought neoprene socks and gloves. Just for cold water, gloves are also a must.

I learned the correct turn at the end of the rope. In the beginning, due to the unusual position and the strange feeling, it was impossible for me to make a proper turn. And just the right turn is important for safety at greater depths.
At 15m I feel absolutely comfortable and at the time of writing I have pushed the comfort to 20 and 25m Subsequently, in 2026, I got to even greater depths in one breath.....

Thanks to freediving I was motivated to visit a lot of new nice places. I have already mentioned a lot of these places in the Czech Republic in my article freediving. Another great place for freediving was the Thai island of Koh Tao and then the Philippines. I would like to write about both in a future article.

Another apartment?

I have been thinking about buying another apartment because I already have the experience of buying one. My ideal idea then is a combination of co-living and short term rentals. Specifically, my idea looks like this: I would live in the apartment, one room would be for a long-term tenant and then I would provide a room or two for guests as short-term rental. So far, however, I've assessed it as a big commitment. Because running a short-term rental business is challenging and would tie me to one location.

I've also thought about buying an apartment in a foreign country. Primarily in a foreign country where I would go myself in the winter. However, I think it's better for me not to buy anything for now, but to rotate countries, cities and explore the possibilities. Then I can use living in the Giant Mountains and Prague as a base.

Overall, there are worries with any rental, so long as one already fully owns one property oneself, it's easier to invest in yourself, in the company and in ETFs.

So the new thing for me was at least registering and paying property tax.

Investment platforms

On recommendation I decided to try the Czech investment platform portu.cz. Buying there is simple. But basically I see no reason to use this platform except that it is completely in Czech and from a Czech company.
Currently it has one advantage and that is that as a Czech company it provides DIP = Retirement Investment Product. When you can have some tax advantage when investing in standard investment products on the stock market. Not in some overpriced funds provided by banks.

Personally, I prefer an investment platform Degiro. Degiro is probably the most user-friendly platform for me, with a good selection and reasonable fees. It's a good platform and is also ideal for beginners. Among other things Degiro has lower fees than Portu.cz .

At the same time I opened an account with Interactive brokers. The platform is in English and less clear. I wouldn't recommend it to beginners and I personally don't like to use it either because it's hard to navigate. However, I always like to try something interesting new, so I use it.

Health

As a cyclist, I have a strong lower body. I have only done regular upper body strengthening in the past and only for a few winters. That is, most of the time I haven't devoted to upper body. At the same time, I'm not skinny, but I do have some weight. Among other things, because I have muscular legs. Therefore, pushups and especially shrugs were beyond my ability for me. So I decided to focus on my upper body as part of my balance. For the last two years or so, I have been working hard and relatively regularly to improve my upper body. Today, even at my weight, it is no longer a problem for me to do 10 push-ups. Likewise, I can now do at least two pushups when I warm up.

I'll mention for the record that I could do a lunge when I was a kid. But school ruined my physical fitness, and gym class even built up a rejection of sports in me.
So after graduation, I had to repair my attitude towards movements and sports. And overall rebuild my love for sports and most importantly put my body in good physical shape again. Fortunately, at that time after my studies I went back to cycling, which I later took up racing. Of course, I learned in depth the theory of how to train. and tested and practiced it in practice. And so for years I have been considered not only an IT specialist, but also an athlete.

As for regular training, I unfortunately travel a lot, so getting into a regular workout routine is quite challenging. I am usually able to fit in some morning stretching though. At the same time, when I travel, I carry a rubber band that I use to strengthen my inner stabilization muscles.
I usually adapt my activities to the season, but I try to spend as much time as possible outdoors to counteract the large amount of time I spend working hard on the computer.

Travel

As planned, I visited Vietnam in 2025. Where I stayed for two months. I will discuss it in more detail in the article.

Subsequently, I returned to Thailand again, where I visited the city of Chiang Mai. The visit to Chiang Mai was short, but it was very nourishing cycling. I plan to write up the details of my stay in Chiang Mai in a separate article. I then moved on again to the town of Pattya. and then happily returned to the Czech Republic. PS: I had jetlag upon arrival, So I fell asleep on the bus and slept through my stop on the way to the Giant Mountains and subsequently had to order a taxi, to take me home.

I didn't have much time to travel over the summer. I was mostly taking care of chores and taking care of providing short-term room rentals in my apartment. I haven't even found the time to make a regular informal work visit to the highlands :(.

I did however find time to at least make a short visit near Pilsen where we had a discussion about business.

I had planned to visit Dresden on business. Dresden is a beautiful city and a short drive from the Czech Republic and easily accessible by highway. I wanted to attend a PHP reunion there and promote my back-up and other services. But again, there was no time.

I did manage to visit Poland at least at the last minute, specifically the city of Poznan, as I was going there on business. It was not summer anymore and I had to use public transport to get around the city. But at least in my free time and promotional videos and photos I found time to move around the city.
The trip was strictly business. So I worked hard in Poland, attended a few meetups that didn't impress me and I didn't meet anyone interesting to interact with. However, the main purpose was a business meeting, which we successfully repeated.
Details of my business trip to Poland are in the article Poland and staying in the city of Poznan.

I also planned to visit Deepspot in Poland, which is a deep pool designed for diving and especially freediving. But due to time constraints, I ended up scratching it off my plans for 2025.

I planned to spend the winter in the Czech Republic and maybe have some customers, who would require a face-to-face meeting, because I could provide that with living in Prague. But as it turned out, there are only ordinary companies in Prague and the capable ones don't require sitting in an office anyway. So there was no reason to stay in Prague.
So originally I was thinking about Canary Islands, for example, just for a month or two months, but in the end I hastily decided to go to Asia again, because for less money there's better housing and food. I'm thinking specifically of staying in Thailand, because Thailand has a good level of infrastructure and services.

Meeting

I met a nice and communicative Jan Zifčák. Details about how he evaluates his stay in Thailand, how remote works and how he combined this in the video: Jan Zifchak - remote work from Thailand:

Nowadays, I only meet quality people on a regular basis, but to appreciate that, life sometimes brings some very crazy people in its path. I met one person who was very rude on FB and only brags there but doesn't advise anyone. He even promised to write a better article about Thailand, but it was just empty talk and even after many weeks he did not create anything and thus he got convicted. Personally, I don't understand why someone is rude instead of giving advice or at least keeping quiet, but actually that's typical of people, who can't create any value. It's everyone's choice, maybe childhood trauma, and I'm neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. And the best solution is to realize that such people exist and then stop watching them.

Life has taught me that if I want something I have to make it here myself. That's why I started my own men's circle. Moreover, a discussion with a friend motivated me to do it. I actively run and maintain a men's circle, which I consider a great success. And especially a necessity for men these days. Thank you to everyone who participates!

Business

I'll probably turn down inquiries for contractors outright because it's not a business. In the Czech Republic, working as a contractor is mostly just the so-called "shvarc system". This then implies many disadvantages, including no professional growth and no freedom in life.
But of course I am always willing to listen to any possibility of quality cooperation. Better dealt with by reading the details of what someone needs help with.

As for the AI, one part of it is hype. But of course even I'm incorporating AI among my work tools. AI helps me mostly:

.
• generate images
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• do text proofreading
.
• better than a search engine when I get a tailored answer
• ideal for explaining the basics of any topic
• when given a well-specified small task, the AI creates that part of the program for me

However, AI cannot diagnose a complex problem, and because of this I am confident that my experience and insight will keep me in the market.
Thanks to AI, many new applications are and will be created. Some will even succeed in the market. And as the complexity of these applications grows there will be a need for an expert to address the complex functionality and solve the problem. That's what customers are already paying me for. So AI for me just means bringing in more work.

Snapbackup

I've been developing my SnapBackupper backup project this year. I run this backup as a service. It's quickly deployable and these backups are also protected from Ransomware attacks. So that I can maintain and develop the service well, I've purchased a new Lenovo Thinkpad P14s laptop, for which I addressed UEFI flash and battery consumption.

Founding a company

Who would have expected me to start a company and be a business owner? I wouldn't have expected it myself! But it was the logical conclusion to take my business somewhere else again. I had the paperwork ready at the end of 2024 before I went abroad and I arranged to set up the company right at the beginning of 2025. After the creation of the company, I started to operate straight away fully digital and remote.

Video course

I was planning to do some more video course. For example, a course on creating web applications in the symfony PHP framework. or a course on GitLab CI/CD.
Finally, I had prepared a handout on DevOps Gitlab CI/CD , so I recorded the course, made my own video elearning platform and a video DevOps Gitlab CI/CD course has been published since early 2026.

Promotion

As I do every year, I continued to publish articles and videos. I have tried to continuously make mainly themed short videos, because it's a lot less work to make a video like that, plus, thanks to the algorithm working like a drug, short videos get more views than long technical videos nowadays.

What I learned and tried

I was considering a course on boat driving - "skipper C" licence, but then I assessed that the time commitment of such a course would be prohibitive and the subsequent practical application (being a skipper) would also be prohibitive. But having it as a short-term summer job would be interesting. One possibility is to do such a course as an experience while in Thailand, for example.

In early 2025, and then also in late 2025 when I was in Thailand, I rented a scooter. That way, I could again take advantage of having a motorcycle license and practice my riding skills on a single-track motor vehicle.
Since I have experience riding a bike in the city of Prague, riding a motorbike in Asian countries is no shock to me :D. On the contrary, due to the consideration of others, I feel safer there than riding a bike in Prague.

Scubadiving - Advance open water

I did a follow-up scuba diving course in early 2025: Advanced Open Water. After completing this course, I was licensed for instrument diving up to 30m depth.
My max dive was 25m. Subsequently in 2026 I did a dive of 30m.

Cooking Thasjke food

I took a cooking course in Chiang Mai, Thailand and got a local cookbook. I have been cooking since I was a kid so I have decades of cooking experience. And because my cooking skills are admired by everyone in my shave, whether they're men, women or chefs, I've thought many times about going professional. It would therefore be interesting to put my newly acquired experience in cooking Thai food to good use by opening a Thai restaurant in the Czech Republic.

HSL video server

I tried to create my own streaming video server. And followed by a production run of my own video server to which a client can connect, i.e. a video player. This allowed me to create my own video elearning platform, that doesn't depend on a third-party video service.
I can see the potential of using this knowledge and experience to create other types of video platforms as well.

Kubernetes

I have been running a production server with Kubernetes for over a year now. Was it easy to get it up and running? NO. Is running Kubernetes easy? NO. But for an experienced IT professional who understands Linux, Linux technologies, and containers, Kubernetes is just another technology.
Thanks to my broad overview, Kubernetes wasn't difficult for me to learn. Of course I don't understand Kubernetes 100%, but what I need to solve I solve smoothly, because I have theoretical knowledge, practical experience and there is documentation for Kubernetes like any open-source. Nowadays, it saves a lot of time to have an AI to advise. Only for solving complex problems AI is useless, and I end up getting the job done anyway thanks to my practical expertise.

What does it mean to understand Kubernetes?
If a corporation has a requirement to know Kubernetes, the first thing to understand is what the position is. Because realistically the requirement is not for Kubernetes knowledge, but for the ability to use Kubernetes somehow in that position.
The programmer should be able to edit and possibly write deploy files. The DevOps specialist should be able to prepare an automated application deployment to Kubernetes. The Kubernetes specialist should be able to diagnose problems of running applications in Kubernetes, but in fact, typically he/she will not encounter Kubernetes installation, root superuser level administration, or Kubernetes cluster modification/optimization.
This also implies that an experienced Linux admin who understands containers and application development, so learning how to use Kubernetes as a developer or DevOps specialist is just a matter of time. Even installing a complete Kubernetes cluster is an easy thing to do for such a person. Then it comes down to the fact that such a true expert, the new technology will want to run in test mode first, rather than installing Kubernetes for production.
Of course such experienced people, for whom it's a piece of cake to learn a new technology are few and expensive.

Voice over WIFI, voice over LTE

I wanted to test the functionality of "voice over WIFI" and "voice over LTE" technology, abbreviated as VoWIFI VoLTE. Which is a technology that allows you to make phone calls for the price of being on your home network, assuming you have Internet. For testing, I had a SIM from a Vodafone operator that doesn't block this technology. (If you have O2 or T-mobile then calling before the Internet won't work.)
As a result if you are on WIFI or have mobile internet, you can make calls while abroad at the price of your home tariff. So for example if you have some so called "unlimited tariff" you can call Czech numbers and EU countries for free.

Personally, this only worked for me on one phone and only if, I first connected to the Internet either via LTE/5G or via wifi and only after that I had to activate the SIM and thus login to the mobile network. During this procedure I could see that the Internet call was activated and when the call was made I could also see that the call was being made over wifi. See screenshot:

Further information in the article: How to make free international calls (from your Czech number)

Living in Prague

I have registered with a GP in Prague. I will not change my residence to Prague, as I do not see any reason and do not plan to stay in Prague for life.

Does it make sense to live in Prague? In my opinion, there is no reason to live in Prague. I've explored Prague and yes there is a little bit going on, but most of the action and interesting people who are masters of their time don't even live in Prague.
Prague's infrastructure is not miraculous, Prague is overgrown. The same services are available in other smaller cities, and in those cities those services are easily accessible by bike or on foot.
For me the only interesting thing about Prague is that there are regularly lots of professional IT events.

Long term for me it makes sense to settle somewhere in the countryside where there will be peace, nature, forest and a lake to swim.

Women

The fundamental problem I see nowadays is that women are taught to date only at parties and under the influence of alcohol. Since I am a responsible and serious man, I am not interested in such party girls. Moreover, I don't smoke, I don't drink alcohol. And because I live a really healthy life, I sleep at night.
Addressing at work and on the street is considered forbidden in the Czech Republic and probably in Western countries as well. and because of that, women today ask themselves "where can I get a good one?". Unfortunately, this is how corporate feminism has screwed women. If they want to help, I give them good advice and then it's up to them.

If a man wants to date today it's a real challenge, especially if he's not an extrovert.

Picking up a woman is easy. However, I'm not sure if it makes sense to invest my precious time and energy into establishing a relationship. I have absolutely eliminated women from the US from my dating pool. I am willing to date European women (which includes Czech women), but they don't strike me as suitable for a quality long-term relationship or starting a family. Of course there are outliers. For example, I have already observed during my studies in high school, in a class of 30, I didn't want to have anything to do with half the girls, and about 2 or 3 girls always surprised me very pleasantly. However, neither then nor now, women are not my priority I have plenty of my own interests and since 15 years I am able to take care of myself fully. So I see no reason to rush into a romantic relationship even today. More valuable to me is a real friendship between men. And I take starting a family as a responsibility to society and as a charity/charity for a woman.

Long term research has shown that there would be some potential among about half of eastern women or Asian women also have potential. But for Asian women, the cultural difference is particularly large.
As for the different language, I don't see the problem there. It is possible to have a relationship with a woman with whom there is no common language. A lot of communication is not needed. An online translator is fine for everything necessary nowadays. After all, misunderstandings can easily arise even between people who speak the same language. The important thing is if both parties want to communicate and if they want to understand each other.

At the time of writing this summary, I am in the Philippines, and what struck me there is that Filipinas speak English fluently and are pro-relationship. So it might be worth researching further to see if there are more to choose from.

How do I personally choose a woman? I have these three basic and fundamental rules when making contact:

• A woman must be communicative
• A woman must come to me
• In the beginning, I will only spend pennies on a woman. On the other hand, I expect her to pay for me at some point.

Summary

The year 2025 was again a challenging one. I realized that, given my activities and demands, my life will never be easy again, because I want to hold my destiny in my own hands and not just go with the flow and wait for someone else to do the important work for me and for me. and important decisions that only I can best make for myself anyway.