2025 Retrospective

あけましておめでとう！

My wish for 2025, made in 2024, was to no longer have to return to office work and still be able to support myself. I didn’t quite achieve that goal, but I would say 2025 was one of the years in which I grew the most.

Looking back at this report card, I failed. Because this year, I not only returned to a company, but also took on the role of VP of Engineering, living an insanely busy developer life.

This was the fastest-growing and broadest year of my career, and I want to talk about this surprising, twist-filled 2025 with you all.

When I left the workforce at the beginning of the year to start freelancing, I actually felt uneasy. The first half of the year was manageable, but I was always accompanied by worries about the future. It wasn’t until I posted on LinkedIn about wanting to try different work styles.

That post unexpectedly got a lot of attention, and by chance I ended up talking with and discussing collaborations with around a dozen companies. That made me unexpectedly realize that beyond the traditional path of finding a full-time job and collecting a salary, there might be even more interesting paths waiting for me.

I started two freelance projects:

1. Working as an assistant to a project manager, helping track development progress and also brainstorming new features. I also helped write some automation scripts. The project eventually ended, but it was a good experience for me.
2. Feature development for a manufacturing SaaS service: I learned about manufacturing know-how and pain points.

In July, I took on the role of VP of Engineering.

The title sounds impressive, but in reality the team had fewer than ten people. That meant I couldn’t just focus on management; I also had to spend a lot of time developing. This was one of the fastest-growing periods of my life in recent years. Team leadership, interviewing, project management—these skills were effectively maxed out within just a few months.

In September, in order to rush a new feature to launch, I entered the dark side of flow. It was a period with almost no life and no exercise; every day I opened my eyes, wrote code, and kept going until I got off work.

The experience of working here taught me a lot. Besides understanding the many nuances of manufacturing, it was also the first time I was deeply involved in things beyond development: helping customer support answer questions and solve problems, communicating with customers through my personal LINE account, meeting with customers, writing articles to increase exposure, and attending manufacturing-related exhibitions.

It was a completely different approach from my previous career. I’ll write another article to share this story with everyone later.

Also in September, I attended a ヨルシカ concert for the first time.

Getting tickets was insanely lucky! After the concert, I started reading n-buna’s Column in 後書き and listening to his podcast with suis. I really like n-buna’s writing and ideas, and I also love his lyrics and compositions.

At the end of October, I attended a friend’s wedding. It was my first wedding since entering the workforce. I had missed previous ones because of military service, and then COVID-19 happened after I moved to Japan, so I finally had a chance to attend this time. I really like this kind of atmosphere, I could attend one every day.

This friend was my mentor when I first entered the workforce, and later we even had a chance to become colleagues (though on different projects). Even though we didn’t interact all that often, they have always been someone I deeply admire as a role model.

I’m the type who absolutely does not want to have a wedding myself, unless one day I lose my mind.

In December, I developed a new habit: running.

To be honest, I hate running. I don’t like making myself exhausted, and I don’t feel the kind of joy in running that Haruki Murakami writes about.

So why run? Because the Apple Watch’s battery life was just too bad. Having to charge it after less than a day made me furious, so I angrily bought a Garmin Forerunner 265. That watch’s battery life is so good that it doesn’t need charging for two weeks.

Only after buying it did I realize that if I didn’t run, 90% of the watch’s functions would be wasted. To avoid wasting the money I spent on it, I started forcing myself to run. And to my surprise, although running is tiring, watching the numbers improve little by little is still very rewarding.

This gave me an interesting insight: sometimes we don’t need strong willpower to change a habit; we just need an environment where we “have to” do it (or a Garmin watch).

2025 wasn’t just about work and exercise; there were also many stories about “people.”

It was my first time traveling to a country other than Japan — Busan. What stood out most was that the coffee was pretty good, there were lots of coffee shops, and the food was delicious. As someone who believes quantity is everything, all-you-can-eat side dishes were truly amazing.

I really liked bossam (보쌈) and samgyetang, but I didn’t manage to find really good Korean fried chicken or tteokbokki in Korea. Compared with fancy ingredients, I prefer this kind of plain, unpretentious comfort food.

In October, I attended Colive Fukuoka 2025. It was a program that let you experience local life in Fukuoka, and most of the participants were digital nomads.

There, I had the privilege of meeting KK—the chair of the Taiwan Digital Nomad Association (TDNA)—and was amazed to discover just how vibrant the digital nomad community is. But I also seriously wondered whether these people were actually working, because most of the time it looked like they were just playing around 🤔.

Earlier this year, I signed up for electric guitar lessons on Amazing Talker, and was shocked to discover that the teacher was actually my middle school classmate, who later went to the U.S. to study music.

I also started recording a podcast with a friend and accumulated more than 20 episodes of material, but I was lazy and only edited a few. For me, the precious part isn’t “getting the show published,” but the one hour each week when we consistently exchange ideas and share what’s going on in our lives.

In an era flooded with AI content slop, these real conversations and reunions are the scarcest assets.

In the new year, my goal is no longer to “escape” anything, but to more deliberately move closer to certain things — closer to the essence of business, closer to real people, and closer to the pace of life I actually enjoy.

Notes on AI Development

I still remember that at the beginning of 2025, I bought a year of Cursor, and at the time I thought AI being able to “assist” with programming was already amazing. By mid-year, when I started using Claude Code, I began to feel that it was no longer just assistance: AI could write most of the code, and humans were left with review and planning.

With the successive releases of GPT-5.1, Gemini 3.0, and Sonnet 4.5, the tools we have in our hands have become terrifyingly powerful. Features that used to take weeks to develop can now, through Vibe Coding, be turned into a decent demo without worrying about syntax or understanding the underlying principles, as long as you can use “natural language.”

As CS230 —— Career Advice in AI says, in future software development, the bottleneck will no longer be engineers’ output, but PM decisions.

When the cost of producing code approaches zero, the real challenge becomes: “What problem are we actually trying to solve?” and “How do we write clear specifications?”—and those happen to be exactly the things I want to keep learning.

This powerful force also has side effects. Social media is now flooded with AI slop—those low-quality articles, images, and short videos that keep numbing our senses.

This made me realize that in a world full of AI slop, genuine human warmth will become the scarcest resource. As 好和弦 has kept mentioning, blogs are a good way to fight AI slop.

Wait, how is that related to a music channel? Actually, 好和弦 has always been writing a blog, and almost daily at that. There are many thoughts in it about blogging that are very worth reading.

So when facing 2026, I hope to focus on these directions:

1. Reduce deep dives into specific technologies: tools iterate too quickly, so chasing details is meaningless, but I will place more emphasis on foundational skills
2. Focus on product thinking and delivery: train myself to define problems and solve them
3. People: this was also the original intention behind starting the book club in 2024. Listen to more music, write more non-technical text, and share more real life

Questions

I found the year-end Q&A written by Yaxuan quite interesting, so I’m listing some of the questions and my answers here:

• How did you spend the holidays?
  • At the beginning of the year, I sometimes made bread and cooked
  • Recently, I’ve been writing code, reading, and going to the park to run in the afternoons
• Was there anyone you disliked this year who you didn’t dislike last year?
  • No one in particular
• What was your favorite program?
  • The most memorable one I watched this year was Devil’s Plan 2. I really like Yoon So-hee, though in the later episodes I really wished she wouldn’t be so love-brained. But I really like her intelligence and personality.
• What was the best book you read this year?
  • Die With Zero
• What was your favorite movie?
  • ひゃくえむ
  • Zootopia 2
• What was your favorite meal?
  • Zaru soba + katsudon near my home
• What do you want and got?
  • Right now I don’t particularly want anything; I just hope I can become healthier and healthier
• What do you want but did not get?
  • Learning in music, though it may also just be that my enthusiasm for it wasn’t strong enough
• What did you do on your birthday?
  • Worked. Had a small cake
• What is one thing that would have made your year more satisfying if it had happened?
  • Finding partners who share my values
• What kept you sane?
  • 💰
• Who do you miss the most?
  • This year I was so busy that I didn’t really miss anyone. If I had to name someone, it would be my aging parents
• Who was the best new friend you met this year?
  • I didn’t meet any new friends
• What was the most valuable life lesson you learned this year?
  • Trust is the key to whether collaboration goes smoothly. Once a trust relationship has a crack, it is hard to restore. And when only one side is trying to earn trust, the whole process becomes extremely painful
• What saying sums up your year?
  • Can’t think of one for now QQ