Year in Review — 2025

This was a quick year. Perhaps it’s an effect from aging time acceleration—when the subjective experience of the passage of time speeds up as I get older. Maybe it’s the result of throwing myself more into work for most of this past year, a montage of late-night meetings and Slack threads. Annual retrospectives like this one serve as a crux of meta-reflection while forcing time to drain marginally slower.

Hence, this is a summary of my 2025: writing, entertainment, shifting gears from my tech career, plus some thoughts on education and hobbies. My archives contain all my past Year in Reviews, while the collection of posts for the entirety of the year is available here.

Writing in 2025

In the past 3–4 years, I’ve settled on a standard routine for posting to allenc.com. It takes me about 2 hours to write 500–600 words1, and I post once a week on Monday mornings as the workweek gets underway. Skipping a few holidays, and this schedule comes out to 45–50 pieces of writing per year, with an aggregated word count of 22,500–30,000 words per year.

Lately, as I shift a bit in my career away from full-time tech leadership (more on this below), I’m dedicating more time to writing; the goal is now 1,000 words a day, at least 4× a week. I’m proud of building the habit for consistent blogging output and using the writing here to clarify my thoughts, but the flip side of routine is that it’s also easy to phone it in. Re-reading some of my posts this year—I haven’t had as much time or motivation before—I’m working to evolve my writing style. Taking the lessons from On Writing Well, I’m spending more effort to clearly and simply communicate my ideas.

Simplicity is hard. I enjoy clever turns of phrase, but they usually come at the expense of understanding the point. It’s overkill to ask friends to proofread everyday blog posts, but this is a task that ChatGPT excels in. To be clear, I’m not asking for AI to write for me; instead, I prompt it to critique my writing, checking for correct grammar and opining on subject flow2. This results in more editing, rewriting, and ruthless deletion of draft-quality material. Given how readers are now suspicious of all text with correct grammar and syntax, I’m hoping all this additional effort comes through as a distinct voice and tone.

Onto some of my favorite posts this year:

• Optimizing MacOS Screens. When people look over my shoulder at my computer screen, they often remark that my windows and text are tiny—because I drive my desktop size at native 4K/5K/6K resolution. This post goes into why.
• Review: Shift Happens. The amount of craft—writing, typesetting, photography, and layout—is exceptional for any book, let alone a three-volume, 1200-page heavyweight stack. This has become one of my favorite books.
• A Dent on the Floor. This came to me as I transfixed on the divot in my hallway that I walk by, every day.
• Strategic Leniency. I had started to experiment with ChatGPT with this post, looking for and incorporating feedback from the AI.
• Lucid Motors, the Tesla of a Decade Past. I’ve always been interested in the state of EVs and the progress of clean energy. This year, I traded my Tesla Model X for a Lucid Gravity, and the vehicle update prompted me to do my research on the current and future state of EV tech.
• Learn to be Bored. My kids hear me say this. All the time.
• Exclusively “A” Players. This post stuck in my drafts folder for over a year; I couldn’t find a good approach to the subject. My solution was to delete most of the post, rewrite it, deleting most of that rewrite, and re-rewrite it again.

Another Career Break

Last fall, I had intended to take an extended career break—a sabbatical—but a month in I joined a startup called UJET instead. The role presented familiar challenges around scaling a growth-stage company. My job was to stabilize the global engineering team, fill management and process gaps, and reorient the culture back to technical excellence and delivery. It wasn’t easy, but I’m happy to report that the team improved across all these dimensions, in less than a year’s time.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2025, and I find myself back in the same situation: shifting away from engineering management for a time, to pursue other hobbies and personal interests. As you can tell, writing will be a major focus. But I’ve also been picking up unfamiliar books from the library, queuing new podcast feeds and YouTube channels, doing soft research on areas outside of software engineering and management.

Admittedly, this is noncommittal. There’s a part of me that isn’t ready to permanently close the door on tech, not with the two decades that I have already spent building a career in Silicon Valley. I am two months into this break, which is long enough to disengage from the rhythms of my past work, but I remain closely connected with many former colleagues and friends. The possibilities around AI are so disruptive that I feel compelled to keep an eye out for opportunities, with one foot outside but the other firmly planted in the doorjamb, keeping it ajar.

There’s one more ulterior motive in taking this break—to get a sense of life after work and experience the oscillations of retirement. I found plenty of talking heads giving advice on life after work: healthcare, Social Security distribution strategies, estate planning, etc. But, most of this material is meant for people in their mid- to late-60s, those closer to the formal retirement age in the US; I’m not in the target demographic yet3. Instead of advice around personal finances, I’m looking at how successful retirees make the mental shift around lifestyle and identity.

So far, I’ve found the most useful non-money advice, beyond taking the time and space to decompress, is to find activities that fill the void left by the lack of a daily 9–5. It seems like most people who step away will hit items on their bucket lists—travel, mostly—for the first few years, but run out of steam as the novelty wears off. Hobbies fall into the same pattern. From testimonies of people who FIREd in the past few years, they seem to enjoy an initial flurry of busyness to make up for lost time, but their enthusiasm peters out as retirement life settles into the mundane.

But hey—if I’m still in this mode a year later, you’ll get to read about the experience.

Noteworthy Media

I consume lots of media—video games, movies, series, books—throughout the year, and write about them when I find something unique to highlight. Lots of other titles, though, are just excellent; I don’t have much to say other than to recommend folks check them out.

Games

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I played through E33 in the summer, but it’s so good that it deserves to be at the top of this list. It’s one of a handful of games I’ve replayed via New Game+, just to re-experience the story and the developers’ craft in shaping the narrative.
• Absolum. This game reminds me of Streets of Rage (old school) and Castle Crashers (more recent vintage). It takes 2D side-scrolling, imbues roguelike elements to boost replayability, and nails the presentation with beautiful hand-drawn graphics and animations.
• Powerwash Simulator 2. Virtual pressurized water blasting off virtual dirt should not be this entertaining. It manages to be equal parts fun, relaxing and satisfying, easy to load up for a few minutes at a time on a Steam Deck, particularly after a long day of work.
• FlipFlop Solitaire. It’s a variation on Klondike Solitaire4, designed for play on the phone. It hits all the mechanics for a great mobile game, and I’m working my way through its 40,000+ uniquely numbered puzzles.

Books

• On Writing Well. A cranky professor and lifelong writer authored a book about how to write nonfiction to his standards. Alas, in a world of AI-generated essays and short-attention spans, he waxed poetic about the power of newspapers and long-form magazine articles—an era before the prevalence of short-form content and ubiquitous video streams. That said, from this book I learned the difference between competent, yet mediocre prose5, from good and excellent writing.
• Abundance. This book launched a bunch of online discussion upon publication, for good reason—they present an exciting alternative to the ideologies of both major political parties in the US. Their agenda aligns well with the Silicon Valley ethos—rejecting zero-sum mentalities and a scarcity mindset, and looking to build our way out of current problems.
• The Art of Spending Money. Morgan Housel often has fun takes on personal finance, and his latest book avoids the oversaturated areas around investment advice to focus on the nuances of spending. Since social media skews to extremes of either thriftiness or ostentatiousness, I find his historical perspective refreshing.
• China in Ten Words. Published and translated in 2011, this book explores facets of contemporary China, framed around ten distinct words. The author pieces together intimate narratives to explain some of the complexity of modern China; the result is a raw exposé, spanning history, modern culture and economic principles.

Movies and Shows

• A Man on the Inside, Season 2. I’m glad to see that the show I enjoyed last year garnered enough views for Netflix to green light a second season. This time, instead of a nursing home, the central mystery takes place on a college campus and lampoons professors instead of old people—but retains the same charm and mix of comedy and drama.
• Hellsing: Ultimate. Hellsing is a Japanese manga, loosely based on Dracula and vampiric mythology, set in modern England. Back in college, I watched an early anime adaptation, but I found out about this updated version only this year. Hellsing: Ultimate is a much better anime, staying more faithful to its manga roots, and this effort took the studio 6 years (2006–2012) to finish.
• The Wild Robot. The best compliment I can give is that this movie reminds me of early Pixar, in a good way: a heart-tugging narrative, gorgeous animation, mixed with humor and philosophy, with something for both kids and adults.
• Ne Zha 2. Another family-friendly animated movie, Ne Zha 2 is based on Chinese mythology, and throughout the film the kids kept asking my wife to explain the fantastical background stories of its colorful characters. Even without the backstory, this film has a number of impressive set pieces and spectacular action sequences.
• KPop Demon Hunters. Okay, pretty much any parent with prepubescent kids will have watched this, multiple times, and also likely suffered through a summer of songs on repeat in the car. But, the movie is legitimately excellent, and it happened that we visited Seoul this summer and upon watching it, we recognized some of the famous locales featured in the film.

Education

When COVID lockdowns kept us home through the fall of 2020, I had pivoted my career to EdTech—to better understand and appreciate my children’s education system. At the time, my older one was in 2^nd grade, while my younger was still in preschool. In the remote learning chaos, the class curriculum—inasmuch as there was any formalized standard—aimed primarily to just keep the kids’ attention, hoping to minimize learning loss6. Well, and Zoom etiquette.

Fast forward a few years, and the kids have moved up to the grade levels where we, and most other parents, know just enough to be dangerous.

It’s math, at the grade school and middle school levels. But, the way they’re taught now is suspiciously different from how we learned it three decades ago, the long division somehow longer and pre-algebraic expressions featuring too few variables.

It’s English, but with modern slang and memes incorporated, blended into a so-casual-it’s-uncomfortable style of writing that infuriates the older generation. They haven’t even discovered AI-generated essays yet.

Hell, it’s Chinese school on the weekends, echoing the same schooling I attended as a 6^th grader, except that I didn’t get to use Google Translate to trivialize my weekly homework packets.

Amid these unfamiliar trappings of educational evolution, I find myself coming back to the question of what and how to teach our kids. Raw academics are still top of mind, but I’m realizing there’s so much to becoming young adults that is not taught in schools:

• Raising Readers in a Digital Age
• Learn to be Bored

Underneath it is my uncertainty, perhaps insecurity, about not only education but setting them up for lifelong success. A decade ago, I didn’t know what career advice I should have given my then 1-year-old son; I wasn’t convinced that following my footsteps into software engineering would be viable in 30 years’ time. Yet when I revisit this question only 11 years later, we already have real concerns about whether our industry can support the next generations of developers, when AI threatens to replace entry-level software engineers.

For now, this is birthday party and play date fodder for parents when we hang out as our kids socialize. I anticipate our urgency to ramp up, though, as the kids progress to high school. Instead of knowing just enough, we’ll be making barely-educated guesses on which areas of study will yield the best future opportunities.

Hobbies as Goals

I am broadly curious. When I was in school, I’d pick up books or take far-ranging classes—majoring through the College of Letters & Science provided a cornucopia of options—to learn about domains far afield from computers and algorithms. After I graduated, the internet further eased this process of discovery; learning something new takes only a few tutorials and YouTube videos. Beyond the vicissitudes of daily life, I write about some of these casual hobbies here: economics, keyboards, electric vehicles, photography, etc.

But I can’t help but look back at those academic disciplines that I never fully engaged with, and wonder what sort of profession would result instead. Astrophysics; Applied Mathematics; Business Administration; Architecture; Rhetoric7.

I still remember that when I filled my freshmen schedule with the additional classes, my guidance counselor advised me to drop these extraneous ones. It was the height of the dotcom bubble in 2000, and Computer Science was a deeply impacted major; the college only had room for ~200 students when 800+ students vied for admission every year. At Cal, the department set up 3 “weeder” classes to filter for applicants with high-enough GPAs to be admitted by their junior years. The counselor’s thinking—in retrospect, a generic response to all CS-hopefuls—was to focus on getting into Computer Science first, and fall back to these other majors if I couldn’t hack the curriculum.

Their counsel was logical, but I’ve regretted following it ever since. Even now, I feel like I was motivated enough to pursue a double major, or a minor, in something like physics or architecture and meld that into my career in tech.

All that said, I’m 20+ years out of school, and as a middle-aged dude I’m not looking to collect more academic credentials; I shudder at the idea of dealing with term papers and final exams. Rather, I view these domains as…more serious hobbies, bucket list items that I can work towards particularly now with more time and energy. Writing a book and/or short stories would satisfy my curiosity around literature. Building a house would force me to learn the basics of architecture and structural design. Admittedly, I haven’t figured out the right achievements to aim for to incorporate astrophysics and mathematics into everyday things.

If I do a good enough job, though, this becomes the answer to the posed question above. This is worthy of something to retire to.

On the Horizon — 2026

Last year, I put down a series of singular goals to start, stop, and continue. Taking survey of what I wanted to achieve this year, the scorecard:

• Start sleeping better. This one I failed completely, so much so that my Oura ring—with the app updates in the past year—blatantly reminds me of how much I did not accomplish this goal. This carries over to 2026 out of necessity.
• Stop trying to write a book. It turns out it’s pretty easy not to do something hard.
• Continue traveling. We visited Hawaii, New York, Korea and Taiwan in 2025, so we accomplished the goal of seeing more of the world and its wonders.

For 2026:

• Start sleeping better, and paying back the accumulated sleep debt accrued through the past 2–3 years.
• Stop dwelling on negative behaviors and interactions. Historically, I have struggled with letting a bad moment ruin my day; I can’t help but mull it over in my head, for much longer than I should. The goal is to be able to let things go, wholly and definitively.
• Continue working out and exercising, especially now that I’ve restarted them. I keep reading studies proving that muscle and endurance you develop in your 40s contribute to your quality of life in latter years. That’s strong motivation.

If I do this right, then I should come back next year and talk about how slow 2026 was—that it took forever to revise my writing, to learn new subjects, to grind through workout programs, and, to teach kids the tenets of life. It should be a fun year.