🚀 Base42 Recap 2025

Sorry for the late post — we travelled through the multiverse. Git conflicts were involved. Possibly on purpose.

There is a traditional marketing rule that says you should publish your yearly recap sometime in early January, ideally when everyone is still pretending they will stick to their New Year’s resolutions. As a hackerspace that lives in a garage and occasionally bends the laws of physics, we decided to ignore that rule completely. Instead, we are publishing our 2025 recap at the end of the Chinese New Year, as a small tribute to our lovely Asian community, Pagoda, which is an essential part of the Base42 story.

This year is the Year of the Fire Horse, a sign that appears only once every 60 years, last seen in 1966. The Fire Horse is associated with boldness, speed, high energy, and the potential for dramatic change. Honestly, that sounds suspiciously like our event calendar. Also, today is the Lantern Festival, which marks the official end of the New Year season before life returns to daily routines. The wish behind it remains simple and universal: peace and happiness for family and friends. Considering the state of the world, that wish feels more relevant than ever.

So this is officially our last chance for a recap. Let’s do it properly.

🛠 About Base42

Base42 is a basement hackerspace, born in a garage and named after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As you may remember, 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Inspired by Douglas Adams, we decided that if 42 is the answer, then we might as well dedicate ourselves to building the question together. Our core principle is simple: together we are building the meaning, trying to create something good for society, for our friends, and for the open-source community.

The probability of success for a garage full of geeks attempting to influence the local tech culture was approximately 0.00000042 percent. The actual result was somehow, undeniably, yes.

The purpose of Base42 has never been just to host events. It is to create moments that make a difference, generate positive energy, and leave a lasting impact. It is a place with chill vibes and informal energy, the kind that reminds you why you fell in love with technology in the first place. It takes you back to the first time you built something from scratch, learned a new skill, or fixed a bug at 3 a.m. and felt proud to belong to the geeky world.

🎮 Global Game Jam

We started 2025 the only logical way: with Global Game Jam organized by MGI, because many of us entered the world of technology through games in the first place. Before we were engineers, designers, cybersecurity experts, we were players trying to understand how things worked. Games were our first debugger and our first design document.

For 48 intense hours, around one hundred participants filled the garage with laptops, cables, caffeine, and dangerously ambitious ideas. Mechanics were invented at 2 a.m., redesigned at 4 a.m., and heroically patched at 7 a.m. It is the kind of event where you start by asking deep philosophical questions about gameplay, narrative, and whether 42 is truly the answer to life, the universe, and everything. By hour 36, however, the real question becomes whether the answer is actually a hot shower and six uninterrupted hours of sleep.

Somewhere between those two questions, magic happens. Strangers become teammates, ideas become prototypes, and exhaustion becomes a shared badge of honor. And by the end, when you stand there presenting something that did not exist 48 hours earlier, you remember exactly why you fell in love with building things in the first place.

The energy from that weekend could power a small country, or at least keep us motivated until the next registration opens.

🎨 UX/UI Conference

Shortly after that, we helped organize the first major UX/UI conference together with the amazing crew from UXplore, led by a powerhouse team of brilliant ladies and supported by a few brave gentlemen who successfully survived rooms full of strong design opinions. With more than 250 participants, it marked a milestone for the design and tech communities in our country. Developers and designers shared one stage, and for a brief, beautiful moment, everyone agreed on spacing, typography, and user flows. We can confidently say the conference itself had excellent user experience, which might be the highest compliment a room full of designers can give.

💔 A Difficult Spring

As spring arrived, the tone of the year shifted. In March, tragedy struck Kochani, and the entire country was left in shock. Nearly 70 lives were lost, most of them young people, and for weeks it felt as if time itself had slowed down. In the face of tragedy, technology, events, and everyday discussions suddenly felt small in comparison to the weight of reality.

In May, together with the Macedonian .NET Community, we helped organize a humanitarian Global Azure Day in honor of the victims and in support of the affected families and survivors. Around 200 participants gathered not only to discuss cloud technologies and modern architectures, but also to donate and contribute in a meaningful way. It was powerful moment when the tech community came together not for networking or innovation, but for solidarity and compassion. It reminded us that behind every line of code, there are people — and that community matters most when it shows up for each other.

🤖 Meetups, AI & Tech Communities

Throughout the year, Base42 ran at full capacity with monthly meetups. PyData alone hosted nine gatherings, with artificial intelligence and large language models dominating the conversations. We discussed how AI is changing the way we build software, how to use it responsibly, and how to stay curious instead of scared. Some people were experimenting with fine-tuning models, others were integrating APIs into real products, and a few were just trying to explain to their parents that no, ChatGPT does not actually “know everything.”

And while AI sounded futuristic and complex, somehow the real drama still came from Python versions and broken environments. It turns out that even in the age of machine learning, the most powerful force in the universe might still be a properly configured virtual environment.

BeerJS, .NET meetups, cybersecurity sessions, AWS talks, Google Developers Group events, Angular Macedonia gatherings, ProdACT meetups, Microsoft Dynamics discussions, Advent of Code, and many more filled the calendar. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether we should host another event and started asking how many chairs we needed this time.

Many weekends throughout the year, Base42 quietly transformed into a global Capture The Flag battleground. A dedicated group of cybersecurity enthusiasts gathered with one mission: compete at the highest level. Their focus and persistence paid off with impressive accomplishments and high scores on the global leaderboard. We are incredibly proud of this crew. They achieved impressive results and high rankings in global competitions, proving that a small garage can produce world-class talent.

💻 Doniraj Kompjuter & Open Source

One of our favorite communities, Doniraj Kompjuter, donated nearly 4,000 computers this year, helping bridge the digital gap and give devices a second life in the hands of students and families who truly need them. If you have an old laptop or computer collecting dust, bring it to Base42. We will make sure it finds a better purpose. On top of that, Doniraj Kompjuter donated an incredible server rack with 1TB of RAM to our space, which instantly upgraded our definition of “overkill” and “future-proof.”

With the new rack in place, we launched open-source projects into the wild, built a QR code generator, a competitive programming platform, a text editor, a new mobile application, and even worked on a drone project. Of course, there are also a few projects that are technically still not finished. They are not abandoned. They are simply in extended beta. Possibly waiting for the right alignment of planets. Or a free weekend.

🎲 Gaming, Tabletop & Community

Somewhere between all of this, a new community rolled into Base42. Warden Gaming brought trading card games and board games into the garage with a simple but powerful mission: shuffling cards and making friends. What began as a few decks on a table became regular gatherings full of strategy, laughter, and very serious debates about rules that were absolutely interpreted correctly.

Every weekend, Warhammer armies are carefully assembled, painted with monk-like precision, and deployed across tabletops like miniature sci-fi operas. Strategies are calculated with the seriousness of production deployments, and dice rolls are treated like high-stakes system calls. Alongside the Warhammer battles, Zandana sessions brought even more tactical energy to the tables, while Dungeons & Dragons campaigns opened portals to entirely different worlds. Character sheets were studied as intensely as documentation, and storytelling blended seamlessly with strategy.

It turns out that whether we are optimizing code, tuning AI models, or planning battlefield formations in a fantasy universe, geeks will optimize everything.

🎤 What The Stack 2026

Did we forget about the biggest event? No. We organized the biggest developer gathering of the year, an event that honestly deserves its own blog post. Together with DevEd, Angular Macedonia, and the entire IT community, we helped create a conference that brought together more than 800 people. There were four stages, 32 speakers, great coffee, beer (because engineers) music, and a game corner showcasing titles from Macedonian publishers. The afterparty escalated beautifully with rock and metal music by Why Not, and when speaker Domagoj unexpectedly grabbed a guitar and joined the stage, it became one of those legendary moments no schedule could have predicted. Students, senior programmers, engineers, and gamers all shared the same space, proving that the community is united by passion more than anything else.

🎮 Game Dev Rev & Milestones

Later in the year, we proudly supported Game Dev Rev, the first national game development conference organized with MGI and the local gaming community. The event brought together regional studios, indie developers, industry veterans, and representatives connected to the European gaming ecosystem. North Macedonia officially became part of The European Games Developer Federation. It is still slightly surreal that a small garage basement helped contribute to such a milestone. Apparently, even big federations sometimes start in small rooms.

🎨 Art, Podcasts & Workshops

Art found its permanent home in the garage as well. Three new graffiti pieces transformed the walls, thanks to Nikola. Pagoda organized four Gunpla workshops, which absolutely count as precision engineering. They organized a cyberpunk art exhibition and promoted Kalajdziev’s book. We welcomed two 3D art exhibitions and presentations by Zafir. Base42 became a place where soldering irons and spray cans coexisted peacefully.

Podcasts were recorded within our walls, including episodes by Debeli Gikovi, and we quietly started preparing our own geeky podcast. The studio is already painted, the microphones are set, and we are currently in the extremely complex process of choosing the name. As every developer knows, naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science. Let’s just say, it is coming soon.

The year wrapped up with another game jam organized by Galactic Omnivore and MUGI, themed around white hats. During that same intense month, we organized an electronics workshop that sold out in a single day, with half of the participants being women, which made us especially proud.

We also hosted two cybersecurity workshops with Bozidar. The first sold out immediately, and the second lasted four full days with six trainers guiding participants deep into ethical hacking and digital defense. Neon lights. Hacking. Mind-blown.

🧠 Hackathons & Ecosystem Support

There were so many events happening that at times the calendar looked like a production server under heavy load. Among them, we hosted the Strip Trip Hackathon, where participants were pushed to think creatively under pressure and make things that were anything but ordinary. It was intense, chaotic in the best possible way, and full of ideas that refused to stay inside the box.

At the same time, we proudly supported our friends who organized the Ecommerce Conference and the AI Summit. Because for us, community is never competition. When one event grows, the entire ecosystem grows with it.

Some prototypes almost worked. Some projects definitely worked. A few experiments violated at least three known laws of physics. Thousands of humans and possibly a few aliens visited Base42. Thousands of coffees and beers were consumed. One arcade machine remains broken but emotionally supported. There was also at least one solution that mysteriously only worked on Fridays, and we decided not to question it.

🚀 Looking Ahead

In 2026, we will continue our primary mission: figuring out the right questions. As Deep Thought once calculated, finding the ultimate answer takes time. Fortunately, we are patient, slightly chaotic, and well supplied with snacks.

We are already three months into 2026. We have organized new events: LAN party, Trivia Night, monthly meetups, chess tournament, internships for high school students who will end up teaching us…Many surprises are on the way. The universe is clearly not done with us yet.

Base42 remains a small garage with a jacuzzi and sauna unused for their original purpose, but it is also a living, breathing organism made of communities, ideas, experiments, friendships, and late-night discussions. It proves that you do not need a shiny building or a perfect marketing strategy to create impact. You need people, curiosity, courage, effort, and maybe a towel.

So thank you to every community that called Base42 home in 2025. Thank you to those who trusted us with your ideas, your events, and your time. Thank you to our friends who built conferences and invited us to support them. Thank you to everyone who shuffled a card, rolled a dice, wrote a line of code, painted a miniature, plugged in a server, recorded a podcast test episode, or stayed late just to help move chairs.

The universe may still be calculating the ultimate question, but one thing is clear: it is much more fun when we calculate it together.

And yes, the answer is still 42. ✨