A bit late, but I still want to write this down - partly for people who don’t know me yet, and partly just for myself.
2025 felt like the year things started to click. Less figuring out where to begin, more actually shipping and following through. Here’s a look back at what I worked on, what I learned, and what stuck with me.
Things I shipped and did
The highlight was winning the AWS + DIGITIMES Hackathon. Our team built a voice-driven AI chatbot for humanoid robots using AWS and LangChain - it was one of those projects where everything came together in a stressful, satisfying rush. We also reached the final round of the Taipei & New Taipei City Hackathon, which felt good as a sign that the ideas were landing.
On the side, I shipped a Badge Checker tool for the Google Cloud AI Study Jam. Small project, but it was used by real people - which still feels like the most honest measure of whether something mattered.
I also wrapped up a data internship at KDAN and wrote a reflection post about it. If you’re curious about what that experience was like, you can read it here.
Research-wise, I kept going on my CS + Bioinformatics work: single-cell Hi-C representation learning with Graph Neural Networks (GNN). It’s slow, dense, and genuinely interesting - and this year it got its first public outing: I presented a poster at the Multiomics and Precision Medicine Joint Conference (MOPM).
Toward the end of the year I sat the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam and passed.
There’s more I worked on this year - you can find the rest on my projects page.
Community and learning
I went to a lot of meetups this year - over 20 across GDG, AWS, MongoDB, and DevOps communities. I wasn’t always sure why I kept showing up, but I think it’s because the conversations you have in the margins of those events are hard to replicate anywhere else. You hear how people actually think about problems, not just the polished version.
Articles that stayed with me
I read a lot of blog posts this year (much more than books). Three pieces genuinely changed how I think about things:
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from - a grounding read about why software jobs pay what they do, and what that means for how you should think about your work.
You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites - I keep coming back to this one. Struggling with something hard usually isn’t a signal about your intelligence; it’s a signal about what you haven’t learned yet.
Searching for outliers - a quiet reminder that the things worth doing often look unremarkable from the outside until they’re not.
Onward to 2026.