Happy New Year! 🎉
One of my favourite activities I do between Christmas and New Year's Eve is to slow down and reflect on the passing year, with a focus on the achievements and the important life events.
In our rush to do more and faster, and faster and more, we sometimes forget to step back and appreciate how far we have gotten.
Thus, let’s see how things have unfolded at in 2025.
365 Days in Numbers
In 2025, I published 48 issues. Out of which, 12 of them are part of the Open Goals section, and 5 are part of the Engineering Mastermind initiative.
My emails reached the inbox of 471 subscribers, with +166 more than last year. Although it might look like constant growth, there was a mix of unsubscriptions and new subscribers.
I guess the churn rate was higher because I changed the direction of my newsletter a couple of times in the first part of the year toward a more software engineering topics.
Most Popular Issues
👉 That’s How We’ve Always Done Things Around Here
Understand why software teams stick to old habits, and how to challenge them. I like to call these habits turkey tails because they are dragged around by the development team, although they forgot why they were necessary in the first place.
👉 Introduction to Software Architecture for Aspiring Software Engineers
Take a different approach to building a house metaphor when we talk about software architecture and design to our software engineering teams.
👉 When YAGNI Actually Makes Sense
Look at five scenarios when YAGNI (you ain’t gonna need it) might actually be YMANI (you might actually need it). These activities turn out to be low-cost, high-leverage work that pays off in the long-term, especially if tackled early.
Outside the Comfort Zone
Between other initiatives, I went outside my comfort zone and wrote two guest posts for the community.
In March, I wrote Five Reasons I Maintain an Open-Source Project for , written by , where I dive into why I encourage young software engineers to maintain or contribute to open-source projects.
Then, in April, I published The 3x productivity combo for software engineers for , written by , where I share my top 3 productivity tips and tricks to reach momentum.
The cherry on the top came later, in May, when , from , wrote 7 Golden Rules For a CV That Actually Gets Interviews as a guest post for , where he talks about how to write a CV that gets you noticed.
An Unplanned Break
In May, I published my last engineering issue, and after that, I took a 7-month unplanned break from writing (and frankly from Substack altogether).
However, I kept writing and publishing my Open Goals issues as a means to keep myself accountable with my goals.
Now that I’m recharged, I’m back, and I have a couple of new ideas I want to try out in the upcoming year.
So, stay tuned!
Monthly Challenges
Daily reading (5th try)
Exercise for 30 min (2nd try)
Although it might seem like I had a low completion rate for my daily reading challenge, only 37% since I managed to read 11 days out of a total of 30, it was actually a success.
Maybe I should have named the challenge “Wake up at 6:00 am”, as reading was the main goal for waking up early every day, and being an early bird had a success rate of 80% (24 days out of 30).
On some mornings, I would read; on others, I would organize this year’s city break to visit a Christmas market. Overall, I’m happy that I managed to be consistent with my waking-up schedule.
Regarding my second challenge, exercise for 30 minutes for 30 days, it had a 100% success rate.
I pushed myself every day to find a 30-minute window for anykind of exercise: there were running sessions, walking sessions, or, since it’s the time of the year, ice skating sessions.
Well-Being
Objective: Finish an indoor Super Sprint Triathlon.
❌ KR1: Swim 400m at an average pace of 2:30min/100m.
❌ KR2: Bike 10km at an average speed of 25km/h.
❌ KR3: Run 2.5km at an average pace of 5:00min/km.
❌ KR4: Finish the Super Sprint Triathlon in under 50 minutes.
Obviously, this quarter I failed to reach all my key results.
Although I still think I made good progress towards my goal of becoming an Ironman Finisher, I wasn’t fully aligned or committed to my approach.
I thought that I would run an indoor Super Sprint Triathlon as a first step. However, on the battlefield, I started training for a marathon that I’m planning to run in 2026, and I added energy gels in my runs.
I intended to get used to the other sports that I need to train for the Ironman, swimming and biking, but instead I focused on improving my running endurance.
Both approaches are needed in my training, and I failed to plan for them properly. For the next quarter, I have to be more mindful of what I will work on.
Productivity and Mastery
SMART Goal: Fill in the missing knowledge gaps to work effectively with AI by December 31st.
Milestones:
❌ M0: Earn the DeFi career certificate on Coursera
❌ M1: Complete the Generative AI for Everyone course
❌ M2: Apply what I learned in my daily activities
❌ M3: Teach what I learned in my community
My productivity and mastery goals suffered from the same root cause as above: I was not completely aligned with the objective, and as a consequence, I failed to reach any of my milestones.
Learning about DeFi was a must to enable me understand the domain of the project I was leading. And it turned out that the first two courses in the series were enough to help me meet the project requirements.
On the other hand, mastering the core concepts of generative AI was intended to help me cover the knowledge gap in this new domain that seems to get more and more complex with each passing day.
Although I failed with my initial plan, I did use AI more intentionally in my day-to-day activities as a techlead and software engineer.
This kinda opened Pandora’s Box, and one thing is clear: there will be more writing on this topic in the future.
A New Dawn
This marks the end of 2025.
For 2026, I’m planning a slight shift in the format of the newsletter to align it more with how I’m growing and evolving as a software engineer, while I keep a focus on the core principles of skill mastery, calm productivity, and sustainable wellbeing.
—Alex
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