2025
Another year in the books, wow!
Per the tradition I started one year ago, I'm going to reflect a bit on the past year and make some goals for the upcoming one.
Personal #
Another big year for me personally: my son was born! I now have an amazing four year old daughter and a wonderful (if inconsistently sleeping) eight month old. The family feels complete!
I am, of course, exhausted. I typically blame this for missing out on some of my personal goals for the year—most notably that I did not improve my fitness or nutrition. But this is a cop out: plenty of people, including my wife, are able to maintain a good level of fitness and nutrition while caring for young kids. I shall do better this year!
And honestly, that's enough of a personal goal. I'm raising two young kids right now, so if I can do that and improve my fitness/nutrition I will consider that a great year, personally.
Professional #
Work is going well. I'm at just over two years with Microsoft as a Senior Software Engineer. Over the past couple years, we did a lot of work migrating an acquisition to Microsoft. That was successful but hard. This year, I hope to be able to focus increasing the product's maturity within the Microsoft ecosystem. Some parts of this work will help the product scale (Microsoft scale is very real!) and other parts of this work will deliver better customer experiences.
Having finished a couple years in "big tech," I have started thinking a lot about the unique benefits and challenges of the environment. I'll probably write a separate blog post about this because I think it's really interesting. Big tech is definitely not for everyone, but I feel like I have had the opportunity to grow as an engineer in ways that I wouldn't have pretty much anywhere else.
Side projects #
I didn't do much with side projects this past year. I think that will continue since I'm pretty busy/tired. I do, however, hope to write more this year.
Some topics I want to write about include tech leadership and product-minded engineering. I'm hesitant to write on the former because I don't feel very authoritative on the topic and there is a lot of great material out there already. The latter is a bit more appealing because I have done a lot of product engineering work and do consider myself to be a strong product engineer.
Onward #
I'm excited to see what 2025 brings personally, professionally, and otherwise. Onward and upward, as they say!
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