My 2025 Reflections
A year of visibility
My Highlights in 2025
2025 has been a long year full of whirlwinds, tough times, rewarding moments, and a new depth that has honestly blown me out of my old ways. I am still adjusting to this new reality where it feels like every day is happening very fast. For the first time in my life, I feel like my mind can no longer fully grasp the complexities and speed of it all.
However, this has been a great opportunity to form a new level of trust and connection with my heart. Whenever I have been in crisis mode and felt like the world was crashing down on me, I heard my heart whispering words of wisdom and calmness.
I have also learned to build deeper connections with friends and experience a new level of vulnerability with my partner. I now feel the courage to drop my deepest control mechanisms: attempts to control the world around me. It is now clearer than ever that the world cannot be controlled.
If I had to summarize my year in a single word, it would be: visibility.
Publishing Seeking Clarity
On September 1st, I published my third poetry collection: Seeking Clarity.
This collection has been in my drafts for years, so finally releasing it felt like a big relief. In this collection, I share myself in new depths and a new level of authenticity. It wasn’t easy to publish this book. I would say this is my “heaviest” book. It has an overall serious tone and covers bleak topics openly.
Why then Seeking Clarity? By confronting the bleak and the heavy, there’s something to learn about oneself and about the world. In this book, I am searching for clarity in an uncertain and confusing world, often finding new perspectives or hopeful outlooks.
Working on this manuscript helped me discover depths within myself that I had looked away from for a long time. Releasing this book set off a deep internal process that is still ongoing.
Hosting a public performance
I organized the Seeking Clarity release party in a theatre to celebrate the new book - the first public event I have organized to perform my art. I was very anxious for the entire month leading up to the performance.
I have held many events before, usually in the comfortable confines of my own home (where I somehow managed to host 25+ people), and I usually feel a pleasant nervousness before performing. But this time, I felt an anxiety that was entirely new to me.
However, I can honestly say that that night, I had my best Setar performance to date. I chose to play a 20min concert in the dastgāh of Segāh, which is known to be heart-opening and conducive for emotions and poetry. Then I performed about 15 poems.
The resonance I saw in the eyes of the audience, and the feedback I received afterwards, touched me deeply and is still vibrating within me.
I’m proud that I took this step. I now know that hosting comes with its organizational challenges, but it is nothing to be scared of. I am grateful for the opportunity to share my art with the world. Starting conversations and sparking internal processes through my art is a deeply rewarding and delicate experience.
A new scale of (non-)engineering challenges
At work, I have also gone through a stark transformation, and I’m happy to say that I have reached a much higher impact as an engineer.
Today, I added the finishing touches to a large-scale project, my largest to date. I have been heavily involved in this for over a year now, and I was surprised to see firsthand what dynamics the complexity of large projects can bring, and exactly what that means for the "speed" of progress.
Having years of experience in startup environments, it took me a while to adjust to this new reality. In previous jobs, as challenges arose, we discussed the situation in the group, came up with an action plan, and executed it. That rarely took longer than 3 months.
In the projects I am involved in now, the dynamic plays out very differently. The challenges are so big that they spread across a dozen or so different services and 5+ teams. This requires a consistent focus, re-evaluation of technical approaches, synchronizing learnings across teams, and constant negotiation. In fact, we are still working on tasks that we identified over a year ago.
I am convinced that coordination and building trust are exponentially more important in large scale projects than “hard” engineering skills. Engineering skills are a necessary condition, but if there’s no trust, no alignment, the project is set up for failure from the start.
Once again, I see the theme of visibility here. Being a key contributor to such a large and cross-functional project has given me the opportunity to connect with many other people, build a better understanding of the goals and inner workings of the company, and ultimately increase my impact and skills as an engineer.
This dynamic of large projects also comes with its own type of rewards. Successfully delivering a project of this scale brings a whole new level of satisfaction. I guess it is like they say: you grow with your challenges, and they grow with you.
Growing in Engineering and Leadership
[Workshop] Impact Accelerator Bootcamp on Maven. In this online workshop, I’ve learned to focus on impact. I can honestly say that putting the ideas from this workshop into practice has made me a significantly more impactful engineer, it’s like night and day. I can recommend this workshop to any engineer who wants to go for the next level of impact.
[Book] Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track by Will Larson. Inspired by the impact accelerator workshop and my experience this year as a key contributor in a large cross-functional project, I have also been more and more interested in looking at Software Engineering through the Staff Engineering lens. This book brings clarity to this role that is often associated with unclear expectations and mystery, and has given me a good direction for my own growth.
[Book] The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well by Michael Lopp (aka Rands). I know Rands from the Rands Leadership Slack, a community I have come to enjoy a lot. The community combines a couple of my favorite topics (Engineering, Leadership, Coaching). In his book, Rands shares timeless habits and practices that he has learned to value through his own leadership experience. The small chapters are written in a narrative style that’s entertaining to read, and they convey interesting and inspiring ideas. I haven’t read all chapters yet. I see this more as a book full of nuggets that can be integrated bit by bit into one’s own leadership practice.
[Tech] Tools for Scale. I had the chance to go deep into the complexity and mechanics of distributed systems. I have come to really enjoy working with Golang and Kafka. I learned to leverage Snowflake when tackling operational challenges and analyzing holistic data for flow performance at scale. Most importantly, I became deeply familiar with the topic of Observability. This is an area that excites me a lot, and I see huge potential in this field.
[Tech] Agentic coding. My current go-to tool is Amp and it’s genuinely mind-blowing. I am still adjusting to the new world of agentic coding, but no matter what else is changing, the way AI agents are making previously unfeasible things feasible is a total game changer. My favorite use case is writing ad-hoc scripts and prototyping for small, self-contained projects.
Developing new Coaching formats
In 2025, I developed a 12-week creativity workshop for artists, leaders, and everyone seeking to deepen their creative expression. Together, we explored deep topics such as purpose, forgiveness, creative practices, perception, spirituality, and authenticity. Supporting people in their transformational process and seeing them blossom is one of the biggest joys I know.
I also became a certified Constellation Facilitator and continued hosting sessions and various workshops on topics such as money, limiting core beliefs, and forgiveness. Additionally, I have again been involved in technical consulting roles, where I primarily support small startups.
What’s to come in 2026?
In 2026, I look forward to bringing my contributions and impact to a new level - whether in my artistic expressions, my impact as an engineer, or my services as a coach and consultant. I see a wealth of opportunities in front of me.
Some goals on my horizon:
[Music] Perform another concert in Segāh, targeting a duration of around 40 minutes.
[Poetry] Go on a reading tour for Seeking Clarity. Life has been busy since the release, and I haven’t done the book justice yet.
[Coaching] Host a new cohort for my creativity workshop, with a small and engaged group of creatives.
[Engineering] Gain more experience in both hard and soft skills, map out my path toward becoming a Staff Engineer, and continue contributing to company-priority projects.
[Consulting] Refine my technical consulting offering.
[Tech Topics] Dive deeper into Observability and Agentic coding.
I’m also working on a new website - I already bought the domain, so the job is already halfway done! (just kidding).
Stay tuned, and have a wonderful new year!