This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Compiling 2025.
My Roadmap for 2025
When I initially started writing this, everything was "business as usual." Coming off the heels of the holiday season, I was filled with optimism for 2025. However, as I started writing this roadmap, a terrible saga began to unfold. Multiple wildfires started up around me in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles. The devastation has extended to multiple communities and shaken the lives of millions of people.
While my challenges have been small in comparison, I was forced to confront a difficult question after receiving a false evacuation alert: what would I leave behind?
The wildfires around Los Angeles were a humbling experience, prompting deep reflection about what truly matters: loved ones, meaningful work, and health. With this renewed clarity, I’m approaching 2025 with a strategic focus on growth that aligns with my values and technical ambitions.
Personal Goals
First, I want to outline my personal goals. To me, these are important because without them I would allow myself to be consumed by my career or hobbies. Having things to look forward to outside of work gives me external motivation to complete things and do things well. Without external motivations, one can easily lose site of why they are working and run the risk of burnout.
As such, my personal goals for this year are:
- Make quality time for loved ones 🏠.
- Get plenty of sleep, exercise, and good nutrition 🥕.
- Take a much needed roadtrip vacation 🚗.
- Publish some music I have been working on since last year 🎶.
The roadtrip and music goals are the ones I am most looking forward too. The roadtrip is exciting because it can help achieve the first two goals. On the other hand, releasing my songs is exciting because it is a form of self-expression free from the constraints of engineering and career growth 😄. Exercising creative muscles is so important because without them life becomes dull and robotic.
Skills to Develop
Coming up with a list of skills is a little tricky since I already have developed quite a few useful ones in my career. Having moved to a more advanced role, I need to look for resources which help push me towards more high-value and difficult skill sets.
Having done some research, I want to focus on the following:
- Distributed system design.
- NoSQL and search databases.
- Event-driven architectures.
These skills—distributed system design, NoSQL and search databases, and event-driven architectures—align with the growing demands of scalable, real-time, AI-driven systems. These areas are not entirely new to me, so I will be deepening my knowledge of them rather than exploring them for the first time. My personal website will serve as a proving ground to apply and deepen these competencies. For example, I have been wanting to build a "related articles" component which would recommend new articles for readers based on embeddings of other posts.
By mastering distributed systems, I aim to increase my ability to deliver high-impact solutions that align with business goals. Through NoSQL and search databases, I hope to broaden my knowledge of solutions to big-picture problems.
Another way I would like to build these skills is through this Data Engineering specialization by DeepLearning.AI . The key parts of the specialization I am most interested in are courses 2 and 3, where the focus is on pipeline building and data storage. Having completed some courses and specializations from them in the past, I have found there content to be as informative as it is practical.
Side Projects to Pursue
There are multiple side projects I want to tackle this year:
- Build a SaaS idea I formulated at the end of last year.
- Complete the Hashnode Serial Blogger challenge.
- Continue to expand the reach of my personal website.
If I could complete any one of these I would be happy, but the top one on my last is the realization of a SaaS idea I came up with at the end of last year. Unfortunately, I can not share many details since the project is still in its early stages. However, I will say the next steps are:
- Finish doing market research on the idea.
- Create a simple prototype for testing.
The SaaS idea, like my website, provides an opportunity to develop the skills I listed in the previous section. For my project, I will have the opportunity to exercise system design, database development, and AI/ML skills. Additionally, I have the added bonus of being my own customer since the SaaS app is something I will be integrating with my website.
Lastly, expanding the reach of my website is something I want to keep working on. So far, I have been able to syndicate my blog posts across DEV, Hashnode, and BlueSky. I want to further expand this reach by cross-posting to Mastodon and maybe even LinkedIn. Another area I want move into is cross-posting images from my photo gallery over to BlueSky.
With these goals and projects, I’m excited to make 2025 a year of growth, creativity, and impact.