Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings. The first issue of the year, as with previous years, is a review of the last year that just ended.

This year, I decided to take a longer break from the newsletter and spend time with friends and family. All of December was a blur, and I barely felt the holiday season. It's the first time in a few years that I entirely disconnected from Outlook, Slack, Pagerduty, etc.

Given the importance of reviewing the prior years, I wanted to do this exercise in the form of Roses (What went well), Thorns (What could be better), and Buds (What I look forward to).

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Things I enjoyed in the last year

• Uniball ZENTO Gel Pen this was my daily driver for 2025, amazing, glides through the paper

• Shift Happens is a book about the History of Keyboards. I've been enjoying reading it from time to time to see how keyboards used to work before mainstream operating systems became prominent.

• Cozy content on YouTube: there are more channels than I can name, and it seems to have taken over my front page for most of the year. Example one, two, three.

Things that went well

• Got promoted to Sr Staff: this is one of those things that I have attempted a few times in the past, and didn't succeed. I told myself that this was the last time I tried, and just keep focusing on my own improvement. But somehow it happened, and I'll take it.

• Moved a bit towards more strategy work: I've started to move away from coding in the critical path of projects, relying on other teams to execute the main parts of projects. This has allowed me to focus on other tasks, more strategic in nature.

• Formed a good support network at work: I took a serious effort to connect with more peers and mentors in the company, and have managed to keep up with multiple people throughout the year, and I hope to keep that momentum in the year ahead.

Things that could be better

• Not insisting on being right: this is one of the things I keep attempting to be better at. Sometimes I try to move projects toward a solution I think fits better in the long term, or "more correct," whatever that means to me. I want to insist less and probably only call out if anything is going to create an incident down the line. There are multiple correct solutions to a given problem, depending on the context or on who is closer to the problem.

• Empowering others to act: I've had mixed results with this; I haven't found a "recipe" that works most of the time. In general, I've learned that I need to adjust my methods to the person, as not everyone can handle the same level of uncertainty when dealing with a problem. On the flip side, I've had a few peers ask me why I want to do this, instead of making the issues go through the standard project planning and scheduling, so I don't need to empower people, and teams can work on these initiatives. I don't think I have a good answer, mainly because many issues won't be prioritized high enough to be fixed in a short timeframe.

• Moved a bit towards more strategy work: I had this on the things that went well, I think, while I've been slowly moving towards strategy work, the things I've kept I've taken too long to let go, creating unnecessary delays. I plan to be more strict this year, and try to let go faster or even delegate from the start of projects.

Things I look forward to

• Hearing more perspectives! I'm looking forward to asking more questions, learning more, and engaging with more people.

• Being better at note-taking: I gave up on my Obsidian notes in the last quarter of the year, and by December, I was feeling lost about what was happening in each project.

Your turn!

I hope you get to achieve everything you set out to do this year! Let's get it, or not, if that's what you so choose. Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!