It’s been quite a year. Here’s a grab bag of what stuck in my mind from 2025 and what’s coming next.

Personal Stuff

I started 2025 with a New Year’s resolution to deadlift 300lb. I hit 300 in the middle of the year, upped my resolution to 350lb, but only made it to 310lb. I’d like to hit 350 in 2026, but if I plateau and stay healthy I’m fine with that too.

My big resolution for the new year is to host a gathering at least once a month. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just an excuse to see people. My plan to make this happen: even if I’m busy, it’s easy to make a big batch of pasta and have guests bring side dishes and wine.

2025 was the first year I really noticed my dog getting old. He’s 11 and doing well for his age, but I’m more aware that I probably only have a few more years left with him. Retired racing greyhounds make great pets:

We spent a lot of time in late 2025 looking at real estate. After 7 years we’re a little bored of our current place and it’d be nice to have a bedroom for guests. It’s been an emotional roller-coaster; in November we had an offer accepted for a gorgeous condo downtown, only to back out after the inspection found some issues. But hey, it could be worse - when we bought our current place the market was so hot that people didn’t even get inspections done 😬.

Work Stuff

I got promoted to Staff Engineer in December. This required a ton of effort plus some luck, and I’m very proud of it; feels like I finally made it, y’know? The promotion felt especially good because during the tech job rout of late 2022 I accepted a Staff offer from another mid-sized tech company, and then after 3 weeks of delay they retracted it.

Overall it was a very good year for work. I shipped a product, worked on a high-profile keynote demo with OpenAI, and changed teams to launch a new product that’s attracting a lot of interest. I also flew down to SF twice to give talks for work; here’s one I’m particularly proud of.

Software

It is an incredibly crazy time to be working in software.

It feels like 2025 was the year where agents blew up. 1 year ago, I was occasionally using Aider to make commit-sized changes to software projects, and I felt like I was ahead of the curve. Today I tend to use Claude Code (sometimes Codex CLI) to make more ambitious changes, and they are far more capable of iterating on a change until they get it right.

My day to day now involves less “hands-on” coding and more high-level management of coding agents. It’s become incredibly cheap to try things out, and Opus 4.5 is remarkably capable.

I’m spending a lot of time with these new tools and I still feel quite a bit of FOMO. It helps to know that I’m not the only one.

So, big news: I’m off to a new job at Datadog, working on their CoScreen screen sharing tool 😎. I’m gonna be working remotely from Vancouver, which will be interesting because I’ll be dogfooding CoScreen as I work on it.

It’ll be good to work on native software again. It feels like the vast majority of jobs today operate at a level of abstraction where the OS doesn’t matter much; when you’re writing REST services it’s rare that you actually interact with the OS itself, right? CoScreen is very different in that it’s native software that needs to do lots of interaction with the OS to provide a great UX. Which is exciting and fun and cool, at least until I get bogged down in the details of GDI or whatever 😅.

I handed in my notice; my last day at work is next Wednesday. My employer for the last 2 years has been excellent to me, but I’ve been itching to try something new.

I don’t have a new job lined up yet; I’m planning to use this time partially as a sabbatical, and partially to see what’s out there on the job market. A “serendipity break” during which I will actively explore different possible paths.

One of my plans is to explore the intersection of native apps and web UI; I’ve done some promising experiments with that and it would be a good excuse to overhaul ReiTunes. I’d also like to build some new tools for working with the best database. Here we go!

I’m taking a self-funded sabbatical after 8 years of working full-time. It feels like the right thing to do at this stage of my career.

I’ve had an unusually stable career for a software developer. When I graduated from university in 2011 I interviewed at a few places, including a mid-sized investment firm. I didn’t know anything about finance and the… rustic state of their website was a little concerning, but the people seemed great. So I took the job, and told myself I’d stick around for 2 or 3 years.

8 years later I was still at the same company. Orbis offers a lot of different opportunities; I wrangled big financial data systems, ran a small team, got my hands dirty building a modern web stack, and worked in London and Cape Town. It was a blast, and I’d highly recommend Orbis as an employer.

Still, after 8 years, it’s time to try something new. I miss the open-ended learning that’s so common in school, and I want to explore my technical interests with no regard for immediate relevance to my day job. Gianfranco Chicco’s description of a “serendipity break” really resonated with me:

In the note I sent out to my friends and network I mentioned that I’d be undertaking a Serendipity Break, which wasn’t a nice way to say that I wasn’t going to work for a few months but that I wanted to actively explore different possible paths.

In the book The Craftsman, sociologist Richard Sennett describes how “skill builds by moving irregularly, and sometimes by taking detours”, which is akin to keeping the Serendipity Engine in perpetual motion to encourage the strengthening of current skills and allowing the development of new ones.

Leaving a great job at a great company was a little scary, but I think it’s necessary for my long-term growth. Reading about Joel Spolsky’s sabbaticals helped a lot; it’s reassuring to see successful developers following similar paths.

My last day at Orbis was July 27th, and since then I’ve been trying all kinds of things. I’ve been diving into database internals, rewriting this website, and even learning Lisp/Scheme. I’m not exactly sure where my interests will take me next, but I’m looking forward to finding out.