Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection.

Work

I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefully have more to say publicly soon about the work I’ve been doing. I’ve had an opportunity to write something that should become public in the coming weeks, but it hasn’t landed yet.

Organizationally, I’ve stayed on the same team for my entire tenure at the company, but things move so quickly and have evolved in such a way that I’ve never felt like I’ve been standing still. I’ve leaned more into TL-ing this year, which is an unending but enjoyable game of plate spinning. I was also promoted to Staff Engineer early in 2025, which was a really welcome vote of confidence.

I’m learning that, while I find myself gravitating to working on developer tooling, the underlying area that I enjoy is infrastructure defined broadly. I get a lot of satisfaction about keeping things running and raising the waterline for stability.

As a side work project, I spent some time this year working internally on AI devtools, which was quite fun. That space changed a ton over the course of the year, to the point where the things that I was pushing for in December 2024 are basically obsolete. I’ve written a bunch about this recently, so won’t go into detail here. My primary takeaway and piece of advice from the progress this year is: use the new tools. Be an early adopter and get an intuitive sense for what’s coming.

Writing

This post is the final in my daily writing experiment for December. While I’m glad it’s now complete, I found it to be a really useful exercise. I didn’t enjoy writing every day, but at least 60% of the posts felt generative and like I got something out of having written. I’d say I’m happy with having written at least 80% of them, which feels like a good hit rate.

The downside of the daily writing month is that I exhausted many of my “low hanging fruit” writing ideas. This was one of the implicit goals: to do a winter cleaning of all the ideas rattling around in my brain to make space for new ones. I look forward to writing more in 2026, but at a more sustainable cadence.

Favorite Media of 2025

Running

Per Strava, I ran 1,311 miles across 207 activities in 2025. I PR’d my marathon distance (3:24:40), PR’d my 10k distance at the Lake Union 10k (41:32), and PR’d my 5k distance (19:57) with my first ever sub-20-minute run. So, a pretty good year for running! Running wasn’t my primary focus this year in the same way it has been in years past. But I continued to lean on it for a source of routine and mental clarity. It appears that paid off in the stats.

2026

I have rather high uncertainty for what 2026 is going to bring, but in an exciting, generative way. 2025 was a difficult year personally in some ways, but many paths seem open now in a way that they didn’t at the beginning of the year. There is much yet to be done. A couple concrete events I’m looking forward to: embarking on my first silent meditation retreat (after having noncommittally considered doing one for several years), and running my first trail race in January.

Happy New Year! (And a special thanks for those who followed along with my writing throughout December!)

Cover Image: Boeing 737 taxing at Boeing Field, Seattle, WA