☃️ 2025 Year End Reflection

Published on
• 6 min read
Authors
  • Name
    Kien

It is December, and I guess it is time to write about my current highlights, goals I have accomplished, and my wins. A little summary of what I have been up to this year. It has been an absolutely incredible year, both personally and professionally.

🏆 Highlights and Wins

  • 💍 Got married
  • 🚗 Bought a new car
  • 🏠 Bought a house
  • 👟 Walked 10k steps daily on average for the entirety of 2025
  • 📚 Read 28 books this year
  • 🇨🇦 Built CanadianRecalls.ca
  • 🎤 Did my first public speaking engagement about my projects
  • 🤖 Vibe coded apps with Claude Pro
  • ⚡ Improved productivity with AI tools, including WisprFlow
  • 🏥 Landed a part-time role at Collingwood General and Marine Hospital as a Data Solutions Principal

🪞 Reflection

It has been a very full year. My wife and I had been saving up for our big day for many years, and it has been an incredible journey to finally celebrate our relationship of 13+ years with our family and loved ones.

We had our wedding at Mildred’s Kitchen Temple, and the day turned out beautifully. Both the photographers and videographers captured so many meaningful moments, and every vendor my wife curated came together to bring her vision to life. Seeing everything crystallize after years of planning was surreal.

After the wedding, we made several major purchases that truly made it feel like we were building the life we want to live together.

Upgrading our car was something I had always wanted, while she was perfectly content with a Honda Civic. We mutually agreed that it was time for the ultimate Costco hauler. As millennials, there really is nothing more satisfying than a Costco run. And on top of that, we also bought a house 🥳

At the same time, I had my sights firmly set on career growth. This year forced me to think deeply about what I want from programming long term and how I can continue to level up and stay relevant.

I started experimenting with Claude Pro and was genuinely stunned by how much heavy lifting it could do with boilerplate, prototyping, and ideation. It did not make me fear replacement, but it did reshape how I think about leverage as a developer.

That experimentation directly led to me building CanadianRecalls.ca, a civic tech project born from a personal frustration with how recall data is surfaced to the public. That project unexpectedly opened the door to my first public speaking engagement at Civic Tech Toronto, where I was surprised and energized by how engaged people were with the problem space.

Through these side projects, I sharpened my platform engineering skills, from using GitHub cron jobs to automate backend workflows, to being intentional about infrastructure design so I would not accidentally run myself into Vercel overages. These constraints forced me to become more thoughtful in how I build.

That progression eventually led me to joining Collingwood General and Marine Hospital part-time. This has been one of the most meaningful learning experiences of my career, exposing me deeply to backend services, databases, PySpark, and large scale SQL systems.

For the first time, I feel like I am directly applying my technical skills to work that has real world impact in healthcare. It has also made me acutely aware of just how much opportunity there is to modernize frontend interfaces and internal applications in this space.

One thing about working multiple jobs is the importance of decompression. One of my favourite ways to unplug is getting lost in sci-fi and reading in general.

I blew past my original goal of 12 books this year and finished 28 in total, which I am genuinely proud of. As someone who is no stranger to burnout, especially throughout my journey of re-skilling into a developer years ago, I have established a routine of reflecting on my progress and reshaping how I view productivity. That shift in mindset has been crucial in managing my energy while taking on two roles at once.

At my full-time role, there is an ever looming sense of job security thinning after five total rounds of layoffs. I am certainly not happy about it, but I have done everything in my power to make sure I am well prepared for whatever comes next if that does happen.

I feel I am in a very good place, especially with a permanent part-time role as a backup, allowing me to buy time for a strategic shift in my career if needed.

Overall, both personally and professionally, I could not have asked for a better year. Everything seemed to come together in unexpected ways. For 2026, I want to treat it as a blank canvas to continue growing. One thing already on our list is to finally go back to Japan for our honeymoon 🇯🇵

I cannot wait to see what is in store for 2026.

🧠 Lessons Learned

  • In a rough economic climate, leaning into uncertainty, learning aggressively, and building in public has proven to be one of the best long term investments I can make.
  • Job security is an illusion, but skill security is real. The more I expand what I can do across frontend, backend, data, and platforms, the more control I reclaim over my future.
  • Side projects compound in quiet ways. What starts as curiosity can turn into speaking opportunities, career leverage, and real world impact.
  • Burnout is not a badge of honor. Sustainable pace, reflection, rest, and routines matter more now than ever.
  • Big life milestones do not slow ambition. If anything, they sharpen it.

🎯 2026 Goals

  • ✈️ Take our honeymoon through Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan
  • 🏠 Renovate and make meaningful improvements to our home
  • 🚘 Buy a weekend car, currently torn between a used Lexus GS350 or testing the BMW 3 Series
  • ⛳ Commit seriously to golf as a long term hobby
  • 🧭 Be intentional and selective with career moves, riding out rough patches while staying aligned with long term growth
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