My Year in Review: 2025
Hiee! Welcome to my year in review post for 2025. This is the first time writing a post like this and the only reason I’m even writing this is because of this tweet by Aaron Francis who I really look up to among other people.
And unlike my other posts, I’ll keep this one short. I have a few things to write about which I believe will cover my entire year. So let’s get started.
Learning to drive and buying a car
Learning to drive was something I had been putting off for years. Not because I did not want to, but because I did not have a car to practice with and it felt like a task that required a level of confidence I did not yet have.
I joined a local driving school at the start of the year and tried to learn as much as I could, but you can only get so far when someone is constantly hand-holding you.
A few months passed and I finally decided to get a car. I went to a used car store with a friend and bought a 2013 Hyundai i20. I named her Grace. For a home that never had a car, this felt like a significant milestone, and I was genuinely proud of myself. Say hi to Grace:
The car sat at home for a while because I was too scared to take it out, but I finally gathered enough courage and started taking her out in the early mornings. I then slowly started driving in the day and then at night. Fast forward to Dec 2025. I am now fairly confident in my driving and have been taking my family out when needed.
This was something I only dreamed of in 2024, and I am glad I was able to make it real in 2025.
Growing as an engineer
I switched jobs in mid-2024 and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I never felt more confident as an engineer and prior to this I was only a frontend guy who was good at writing React components but fast-forward to this day, I mostly do full-stack now.
Thanks to my new job without a frontend/backend split, it made me realize that working across the stack is much more fun than sticking to one side of it.
I’ve always been more of a performance centric guy and I just hate slow software. I try my best to make the software I write fast. My biggest strength I believe is making complicated things simpler. I have this ability where I can look at a piece of code or listen to a solution and tell if it’s doing too much for what it is supposed to do.
A recent example of this was a system we had for tracking stream viewers and their count. It relied on Durable Objects and websockets to broadcast updates. While Durable Objects are a powerful primitive, the system was buggy and overly complex.
I rewrote the service from scratch. The new solution was dramatically simpler and worked consistently. It still used Durable Objects, but dropped websockets entirely because they were unnecessary. Instead, it relied on short-polling. The entire implementation was under 40 lines of code opposed to the 200+ for the original implementation.
It was just a Durable Object with a few getters and setters and an in-memory map to track viewers. Each request timestamp was compared to determine whether a viewer was active or inactive.
On the frontend, it was just a React hook:
const { viewers, count } = useStreamViewers({
streamId: stream.streamId,
});This shift in how I think and build was one of the most meaningful changes for me this year.
Building projects
I always end up not finishing my side projects, but hopefully this time it will change. I started building a database client similar to TablePlus and other apps. It’s a desktop app and I’m writing it in Tauri. The main goal is to understand databases better, get into desktop app dev and learn some Rust in the process.
I would like to make it as fast and as feature-rich as possible and it will probably take a while because I want to do it right. If it works, it will be free to use and will of course be open-source.
Started writing
I always knew I could write, but I never realized I could write long-form posts and explanatory articles. Most of my writing till now existed as short snippets shared on Instagram about life and random thoughts. This year, after quitting Instagram because it felt like a complete waste of time, I realized that my love for writing had not disappeared.
So I decided to write again and built this site. It is an Astro site that serves Markdown content, and there really is no better format for writing than Markdown. At least the devs would agree.
This style of writing was new to me, and I did not know exactly what I wanted to write about so I just started with what I knew. My first post was about Improving Performance of Async Operations in JavaScript.
It was Jan 2025 when I published my first article and it is almost Jan 2026 now. Isn’t it fascinating how time flies so quickly?
I haven’t written a lot yet, around seven posts so far, but I am happy with how it’s going. Besides technical posts, I am also writing about my personal experiences, which makes the blog feel more meaningful to me.
I did not start this blog to reach an audience, but simply because I love writing. It feels like it is going well and that alone makes it worth continuing. So yes, I will try to write a lot more in 2026.
Friendships that survived distance
Not all friendships are created equal, and this year made that clear to me. I consider myself very fortunate to have friends that I can truly call home. Despite living in different countries (US, Canada) and timezones, I never felt like they weren’t there for me. I do the same for them.
I don’t believe in such things, but there’s a popular belief that if friendships last more than 7 years, they are likely to endure for life. As the time goes by you get to know who sticks and who doesn’t and those lessons are valuable. So now I have a family and not just friends and I am thankful for that.
I also learned that being physically close to someone does not mean being emotionally close, which helped me stop forcing one-sided effort and be more intentional about the connections I keep.
Just a reminder that you shouldn’t have to keep forcing things just because they once worked without effort. People change and you gotta accept that and make peace with it.
Looking back, this year was not about major changes but about prioritizing the things and people that matter and making peace with the choices I make.
Well, that is my year in review for 2025. I move into the next year with more clarity and fewer expectations. I look forward to writing another review next year. Thanks for reading this, have a good day!