2025 was a blast

Although it may not feel like it now, a few years from now, 2025 will likely appear as a pivotal moment in my life. I will remember this year with much fondness and an awareness that after this, things won't be back to where they were again.

10 years at Parcel Perform

I crossed this mark in October. 

Yep, I have been around for 10 years. A lot has changed in that timespan. I was 25 then, thinking that this would only be a short gig - startup projects come and go like spring flowers. The social cycles around me changed - I owe to my friends, old and new, the experience of an amazing burst of youth, excitement, and an unfounded sense of invincibility. I used to spend half of my week at the office, no, literally, I slept there. Since then, I have moved office a few times, and the latest edition, let's say, isn't exactly habitable. 

Throughout all of those, my employment at Parcel Perform remains constant. It isn't necessarily a good thing. At the end of last year, I genuinely thought my work at Parcel Perform was done. Like, we had a blueprint for the ever-growing traffic. Business had recovered its footing. And somehow, I felt like going on a loop.

Then AI came and flipped everything upside down. Software, as I know it, is changing. And with that, everything is new and existing again. I don't know how long this will last. I would give it a couple of years to see it through. To see if the system, people and machine that I have grown to know so well, would hold up and thrive in the market fundamental shift. Regardless of the result, I will come out with good stories. And that's what I have been after in my career.

Sabbatical leave

I was on the verge of boredom when I entered the sabbatical. The idea was to give myself as much time as possible to recover from what seemed like an over-lasting endurance race to keep things afloat since COVID. Well, "as much time as possible" came down to 5 months, after some negotiation. I should have gotten back in time to prepare for BFCM. Sounded good.

I had a few things I wanted to do during this break. I'm gonna read more. I'm gonna pick up my writing again. And I'm gonna teach myself some robotics. Generic new-year resolution bullshit, I know. I have only done this twice. The world found that unagreeable. In the first 2 weeks of my break, there were Google IO, Microsoft Build, LangChain Interrupt, and my personal fav, Code with Claude.

It was a bad time to lie low. So I didn't. I spent an awful amount of time on the internet soaking up all the news, tutorials, and whatnot that came my way. I was a Slack, a critical mistake of mine. I was never reall off work.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed learning and did all the above voluntarily. But it didn't feel like a break. More like a research semester at school. The mind was always working on the next puzzle, just that time flew differently. I wrote quite steadily during this time though. 

The pivot point for me came when I internalized that successful AI adoption was not simply a thing that I did once and was done. Good AI output relied on AI-friendly input. One couldn't spend their day translating input for AI, it was just counterproductive. The change had to come from upstream. And upstream's upstream. Before long, the end-to-end process needed to change. And my company at the time didn't have this level of thoroughness. 

I put on my writing hat, penned an Engineering AI Transformation doc, and planned my early comeback. I was only 2.5 months into my supposedly 5-month break. God damn it. Did I say I picked the worst possible time to be on break?

Dance in an AI whirlwind 

End-to-end realization and an AI transformation plan were just the beginning. Convincing 100+ people spanning 3 different continents wasn't a walk in the park, especially when I was equipped with no more than 3 months' worth of YouTube and hopeless optimism.

We started testing new hires for AI usage skills around the time my break began. By the time I was back, the test we spent weeks creating had become too easy for the latest models. Ouch. That pretty much summed up my experience in this race. Every step we gained was just temporary. Any trick I learned was either superstition or served me for weeks or months, eventually being standardized by a release from one of those frontier model labs - balancing the playing field.  I was only better than the next guy in those fleeting moments.

The amount of attention going to AI and the progress coming out of that is breathtaking. The world is still working on this fundamental transition.

• We need to learn how to incorporate and compensate people who move on from T-shaped to M-shaped model
• We can vibe code many things, should we? Build vs buy decisions can make or break a business. It all comes down to opportunity cost. How do you even measure opportunity though?
• Agile is dead, way before AI nailed its coffin. What's now, creative chaos (i.e. fancy name for a mess)?
• What can be done to ensure people going through this storm are energized, enthusiastic, and curious? Because it's not gonna be over soon.

I am getting married

By the time you read this blog, perhaps I will have done at least one of my three banquets. Yeah you read it right. Three. There is one on the bride's side. Another on the groom's side - which happens to be my side, in case you are uncertain. We call those our parents' wedding. Really, the wedding invite was written from the parents' POV, guests are basically invited to their son and daughter wedding ;)

Then there is a teeny tiny destination wedding. That is our wedding. The wedding. It has been the one constant item in my mind for a whole year. I am beyond thrilled to see it through. Vy has been telling everyone I am a guest at my wedding, because she had to do all the heavy lifting. She is absolutely right! I can offer little help because I think the first image of a wedding bouquet Pinterest shows me looks very nice, and I don't have the willpower to go through the very end of Pinterest's database to confirm that. 

Oddly enough though, I find all these traditions enjoyable. In a world spinning around AI 24/7, it is nice to see something never changes. Like love. Or family. I am a lucky guy.