2025 was a year of transition for me: out of university, starting work, and into a more intentional way of living. Although we’re already a month into January, I wanted to start this blog by reflecting on the past year and the shifts that shaped it.

Personal

Social: The theme of transition and new beginnings shows up most clearly here. During university, my social circle was incredibly close. We would make impromptu plans to study, grab dinner, work on projects, and play sports. I’m extremely lucky to have met such wonderful groups of people I wish to stay in contact with over the past 4 years. However, once I graduated and started to transition to a new season of my life, the spontaneity naturally faded. Simple catch ups with friends required weeks of notice to pencil in on my calendar. I’m still in the midst of this adjustment, but I am making it a priority to be available and spend time with those who are closest to me. I’m still happy that I got to travel with friends, coworkers and my parents this year. The closeness and spontaneity of University is one I will miss the most, but as I transition out of that chapter of my life, I’m still looking forward to new beginnings of what the next season will provide.

Physical: Apart from the intramural sports twice a week in university, I did not take my physical health very seriously. My stamina, strength, and energy levels did take a hit compared to my high school active self. My diet consisted of a daily Tim Horton’s run and a lot of fast food. While I did manage to get 6-8 hours of sleep, I often found it difficult to wake up in the morning and I had to doom scroll for a few hours before actually getting out of bed. Moving into a more structured, predictable routine with full‑time work has actually been a welcome change. I’ve become much more intentional about building sustainable habits. With movement, I’m subscribed to Apple Fitness+ and do a 4 day workout a week workout plan which involves 2x strength (with dumbbells) and 2x rowing exercises for 30 mins each time. I’m focusing on consistency and compounding rather than chasing immediate results. Alongside this, I regularly play soccer and recently started taking spin classes. With sleep, I’ve been working toward more consistent wind down and wake up times. Replacing late night doom scrolling with reading on my Kindle has been a small change with an outsized impact on my sleep quality. With nutrition, I’m getting into cooking my own meals and I’m focusing on eating a whole food, and high protein diet. I feel most energetic when I am intentional with what I eat in a day. This year, I’m looking forward to completing my first sprint distance triathlon and I think these habits will help me to accomplish this goal!

Mental: Leaving an academic environment gave me more freedom to explore topics that genuinely interest me and reignited my curiosity for continuous learning. One thing I didn’t enjoy in school was how heavily the environment incentivized test scores. A final grade isn’t always a reflection of true mastery. Even though I may have achieved a high grade in Computer Networks, I still struggle to explain the end to end process of what happens when when we navigate to a website like https://google.com. Another major shift for me has been learning to slow down and cut through the noise. With endlessly personalized algorithms, there’s an infinite amount of content to consume. Instead, I’ve been intentionally leaning into long‑form content and depth over breadth. I’m firmly in the quality > quantity camp.

Here are a list of topics I’m currently exploring:

• Habit building
• Philosophy
• Happiness
• Psychology
• Building mental models
• Finding a purpose
• Religion
• Cooking
• Coffee
• AI
• Tech

Throughout this new year, I’m aiming to blog weekly about an insight I took away from the week alongside links to podcasts/articles I consumed this week. This is inspired by the 5-15 updates framework.

Professional

University: I graduated from McMaster University with a degree in Software Engineering. Throughout this time, I have grown tremendously in terms of internships, friends, relationships, and community. I loved the balance of the school - making friends with people in studying different fields and seeing different approaches and perspectives rather than having a tech focused viewpoint on everything. This time really challenged me and I am very appreciative of the time I spent here and will always cherish those board games nights, hackathons, random dorm convos, and excursions that only university students get to experience.

RBC Borealis: In June 2025, I started my first full time job working as an ML Platform Engineering with RBC Borealis. So far, I’m enjoying navigating and gaining newer mental models on what it means to work within an enterprise environment. I work within our Lumina Platform org where my team is responsible for the public cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure). Being on an Infra team, I get a direct view into establishing patterns and creating tooling to make it easier to develop and deploy these applications. I’m very excited now that my projects have grown in scope which give me more of an intellectual challenge each day!

Financial: This is the first year where I’ve been mindful about spending and saving. During university, I optimized primarily for convenience, especially when it came to food. Now that I’m making my own money, I track my spending, maintain a budget, and prioritize investing and savings goals first. My investment strategy is very simple: dollar‑cost averaging into broad index funds. I’ve learned that timing the market is very difficult and is essentially gambling. Most professional hedge funds and investors struggle to outperform the S&P 500. For now, I’m happy letting time in the market and compound interest do the heavy lifting. Over the next few years, I’d love to deepen my understanding of value investing and selectively take more active bets. But until then, I’m sticking to the fundamentals.

Reflection & Ideas

This year was largely about navigating transitions and filtering through noise. Here are a few lessons that stood out:

Don’t Optimize, Just Start: I’ve always had a tendency to chase the “best” way of doing things: the perfect morning routine, workout plan, obsidian workflow, or productivity setup. What I’ve realized is that I often spent more time optimizing than actually starting. This is evident when it comes to habit building. I often dwelled on the optimizations but the best thing to do is to begin somewhere and iterate over time. Through experimentation, clarity naturally followed.

Be Curious, Not Judgemental: One of my favourite quotes from Ted Lasso is: “Be curious, not judgmental.” We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Actively listening and showing empathy is one area that I have overlooked throughout my life. I tended to say things without consideration of others. But as I began to foster closer relationships, I recognize that listening, and thinking helps us to understand where someone else is coming from. And that this is so important to always take into consideration situations, and context before we say things.

Helped, Heard, or Hugged: Being a supportive friend isn’t always just offering help. We need a more holistic model on support. I really loved excerpt this from The 5 Types of Wealth as it got me to reflect on how I interacted with others and to try to recognize someone’s true needs. Support is often nuanced and it’s important to recognize and ask for the needs of others before making assumptions or jumping to conclusions.

Patterns, Patterns, Patterns: Everything is a pattern or mental model. Whether it be designing a system architecture for a cloud service or analyzing the latest geopolitical event, things always relate. I’ve never agreed with the idea that learning something is “useless” just because it isn’t applied daily. Even if we don’t use math explicitly, there’s a meaningful difference between someone who understands it and someone who doesn’t, especially in how they reason about the world. I’m a very big advocate for learning the fundamentals and sticking with the universal principles and letting those compound.

If It’s Important, It’ll Resurface: This relates to my first point about not over optimizing. I used to be an avid user of Arc Browser, but lately I’ve gone back to a more native Chrome experience using Helium Browser (no spaces, no folders, no vertical tabs). Over time, I noticed that this complexity became overwhelming — I mostly lived in a single “main” space anyway. Now, the approach I take is to focus on one thing at a time and to be intentional with what I consume on the web. The importance of reminding myself that if things that are truly important, they will resurface and this has made my time online calmer and purposeful.

Next Year

If 2025 was about transition, I hope the next year I can continue to build slowly, intentionally, and with curiosity. Thanks for reading. If any of these reflections resonated with you, I’d love to chat about any of the ideas touched on here.