2025 in review.

career (42), blog (19), year-in-review (7)

Hi.

Previously: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017

Goals

TODO: these are just the 2024 goals copied over, need to update!

Evaluating my goals for this year and decade:

  • [Completed] Write at least four good blog posts each year.

    Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role, What is the competitive advantage of authors in the age of LLMs? , ?, ?

  • [Completed] Write three books about engineering or leadership in 2020s.

    This year I finished Crafting Engineering Strategy with O’Reilly. This is my third engineering book in the 2020s. More about this in the Writing section below.

  • [Completed] Do something substantial and new every year that provides new perspective or deeper practice.

    After almost a decade of not submitting a substantial pull request at work, I’ve been back in the mix since joining Imprint. I’ve submitted a solid handful of real pull requests that implement production features, and have used Claude Code widely in their creation. I’ve missed this a lot.

  • [In progress] 20+ folks who I’ve managed or meaningfully supported move into VPE or CTO roles at 50+ person or $100M+ valuation companies.

    This is a decade goal ending in 2029. I previously increased the goal in 2022 from 3-5 to 20. In 2024, the count was at 10. Things haven’t moved too much since then, but I’ll refresh next year. I still think that I’m on track.

  • ? should I add a goal around my new desire to be “in the details” / showcase my beliefs in company I work at? ?

For backstory on these goals: I originally set them in 2019, and then revised them in 2022. I’ve generally come to the point of view that I should be revising these every year, but also not sure it’s worth doing it. Maybe one day!

Writing

I finished my fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, and wrote some notes on writing it. I’m really excited for this book to be done, because I think it’s been a missing book in the industry, and I hope it will change how the industry thinks about “engineering strategy,” pull us away from the frequent gripe that “we have no engineering strategy!” You do have an engineering strategy, it’s just not written down yet.

As part of finishing this book, I’ve also recognized that if I write another book, it will be far into the future. After publishing four books in six years, I’m booked out, and I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped out my last decade’s path of writing books to advance the industry. I’ll definitely keep writing, but it’ll be posts focused on the stuff I’m concretely working on, without trying to map them into a larger book structure.

(Last year I mentioned adding The High-Context Triad to a second edition of Staff Engineer, which I still plan to do, but I’m not quite sure when. Probably in a few years.)

Work

I left Carta in May after two years there, and joined Imprint. Imprint has just been a lot of fun for me. I’ve written a small but real number of pull requests that implement read, production features. That’s something I haven’t done since working at Uber, and aligns with my desire to be working in the details again. There’s nothing more energizing to me than getting to solve real, concrete problems, and that’s exactly the sort of job Imprint has been for me.

TODO: write more

Family

It’s been a good year for the family. In particular, my son entered kindergarten this year, and I turned 40.

Speaking

…

Reading

In 2024, I read 27 profession-adjacent books. In 2023, I read 11. I’m not quite sure how many I read in 2022, because I put together a 2019-2022 professional reading recap, but it was about 50 over four years. This read I didn’t do much professional reading, mostly because I was too busy with the new job:

  1. AI Engineering by Chip Huyen
  2. Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka
  3. Facilitating Software Architecture by Andrew Harmel-Law
  4. Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins

It’s interesting to note the drop in volume, but I think I feel fine about it. I don’t read to hit a goal, I read to learn or understand a particular problem, and found myself mostly working on topics that didn’t align well with that approach this year.