Berryman Political Cartoon Collection, Public Domain

Now that 2024 is over I’ve been thinking about what kind of year I would like 2025 to be. The last few years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have been challenging in a lot of ways. I think that the pandemic affected me, and perhaps many other people, in ways that will take a while to unpack. Things have improved enough now that this year may be the year that I’ve felt most hopeful about the future.

Hope, though, requires action to come to fruition and I want to reflect on the last couple years and on some of the changes I hope to make this year. In a way the resolutions I’ve settled on are a “sign of the times”. Who hasn’t struggled with social media recently? Who isn’t tired of the 24 hour news cycle? Anyway, I’ll start by recapping the last few years.

2020-2024 Recap

Many folks have written full posts with retrospectives about 2024. I wrote a retrospective of sorts about my time at Google in my last post so I don’t think I’ll do that. I’ll just mention a few important milestones and my general feelings over the last few years.

For work, I mostly spent the pandemic working at home. I had been traveling for work and going to events pretty often so the pandemic was quite a shock. Being unable to travel and working at a remote office in another country is pretty tough. I didn’t see many of my teammates for several years.

I had been wanting to do more technical work so in 2022 I started to work with the Google Open Source Security Team on open-source tooling for the SLSA supply chain security framework. The slsa-github-generator and slsa-verifier projects were (and, to some extent, still are) the de-facto tools for generating SLSA provenance on GitHub. I was fortunate enough to be able to give a talk on SLSA at CloudNativeSecurityCon in Feb, 2023. GitHub eventually integrated SLSA provenance into npm and artifact attestations informed by our work. My work on SLSA contributed to the team receiving a Google Core Impact Award and Google Tech Impact Award in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Last year, I spoke at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas about Identity & Access Management, held a workshop series covering various AI and RAG applications, and developed internal DevRel tooling for workshops. In November, I left Google and have been spending the last few months on various open-source projects.

2025 Resolutions

2025 marks 5 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and 10 years since I started at Google. The pandemic really restricted the things I could do so the second half of my tenure at Google felt quite muted compared to the first half. This year I’ll be forging a new path and making up for time lost during the pandemic by prioritizing the things that are truly important and focusing less on things that I can’t control.

Less Social Media

It has become apparent to me that social media has not had an entirely good effect on me and my mental health. Like many others I made friends and found jobs via social media, but lately it has become filled with more negativity, bots, and misinformation. Politics has become ever-present and unavoidable. However, most people are simply posting, sharing links, and content farming rather than providing actionable information. I think the short tweet/Tictok/sound bite style of content overall lacks in quality. It works best as a way to share info or links to higher quality content rather than serve as the content itself.

With that in mind I want to be more mindful of how I use social media going forward. I stopped using Facebook in 2020 and maintain an account there mostly to communicate with family. I also stopped using Twitter in the last few months. I currently use Bluesky and Hachyderm for my social media accounts (please follow me there!) but I will be using them more casually than I have used social media in the past.

More Blog Posts

Instead of social media, I hope to create more long-form content. For now, I think this will mean writing more blog posts hosted on my domain. I want to write content that requires more thought and research than social media. My goal is to improve the quality of my output, and the quality of my thinking process.

In terms of frequency, I was inspired by Cassidy Williams writing a post every day for Blogvent 2024, and Simon Willison’s year log posting streak. While I don’t think I’ll post every day, I would like to set a goal of writing once a week. Some posts will be lighter than others but I hope that this is a more achievable goal.

Think Globally, Act Locally

Being someone that worked for a global IT company, I have had a very global, cosmopolitan mindset. I traveled all over the world. I thought about problems and solutions from a global standpoint. The folks I talked to and formed relationships with lived in different countries and we would meet at various conferences. While this helped me get a wider view of the world it came at the expense of my life here in Japan. I often felt like I was completely disconnected from my local community.

Starting this year I would like to do more locally in Japan. This will include focusing more on keeping up with my friends here, attending more local events, and participating more in my local community. To begin, I am starting to become informed more about what is going on in my local area and finding areas to participate. Justin Garrison had a great resolution to meet his neighbors that I’d like to emulate.

Also, please also reach out if you’re in Japan and you’d like to reconnect!

Building Sustainable Self-Confidence

The past few years have been challenging for various reasons. Things didn’t always turn out the way I wanted or expected them to. I’ve been led to compare myself to others and I tend to evaluate myself unfavorably (and perhaps unfairly). I let burn-out and other concerns go unaddressed for too long.

This year I plan to pay more attention to my needs and find sustainable ways to grow. I want 2025 to be a year where I can rebuild a sustainable self-confidence and find environments where I can thrive and my work is appreciated. I hope to do that by building high-quality software that is useful to people.

2024 is Dead, Long Live 2025

I feel some trepidation about the future but I hope that this is the year I can put the pandemic firmly in the past and move forward. The new year is a good time to reflect and reprioritize around the right goals so I’m excited to see what 2025 holds!