2025 was a huge year for me.

My photography hobby dominated most of the year and that wasn't something that was on my radar at all when I crafted my goals last year.

Growth at the Gym

I will say this is one of the areas of my life that I've stagnated in. I have a home gym setup, and I go into my normal gym every now and then, but this is a goal that I'm going to carry into 2026.

With Microsoft requiring employees to return to the office 3 days a week I will be getting a lot more structured in my week-to-week life. This has its ups and downs, but I think for me that means that I will try to be going in Tues-Thurs and needing to find the time to add in my workouts.

It's easiest for me when I have a paid/scheduled obligation with a trainer to go every week so that's something that I'm considering starting up again.

My specific goals were to record my workouts in an app, be more disciplined, and leverage more online knowledge. I will say that functionally I did a pretty good job at these but I definitely was not as consistent as I would like to be. I was recording most of my workouts and I leveraged a lot of YouTube and TikTok videos to improve my workouts.

Health and Lifestyle

Since starting to lose weight last September I'm about 90lbs down and this has been life changing. I find that I'm a lot more confident and have more energy everyday. I am going to continue with my GLP-1 goals. The last few months I've definitely felt some stagnation here and there but the most important thing to me is maintaining weight or losing slowly to keep it sustainable.

One of the things that comes with having a busier schedule (I have plans most weeks) is that I end up DoorDash-ing or eating out a lot more often than I'd like. It's hard to balance this because a lot of these meals are shared with friends and it's hard to want to cut any aspect of that out of my life. I think a simple aspect of this to fix is to be better about having my morning meals at home. Usually if I know I have to leave in the morning I'll just grab a sandwich and coffee at Starbucks before I hit the road.

My specific goals were to continue building good habits and stay on my GLP-1 medication as well as experimenting with new ways of cooking and new foods. I think these were easy wins for me.

Career Goals

This has been a challenging year for me. The constant fear of layoffs is emotionally taxing and dealing with the realities of work after losing teammates is incredibly difficult.

Over the past 2-3 years my team has inherited work from 3 full development teams in addition to everything we owned before. It's hard. Most of these teams did not know about layoffs in advance and so we had little-to-no time to do knowledge transfers and most projects came with no usable documentation.

I feel like the last few months of work have been more firefighting than being able to think deeply and methodically about the software I write or the services we own. It's been challenging.

My goals last year were to explore other roles or see what I can do to align with my future goals and I don't feel like that happened this year.