Happy new year and hello 2026! As the new year begins, I am taking some time to look back and reflect on 2025.

Highlights

My proud moments:

  • Contributed to an open source project. After a series of impactful contributions, I was formally recognized as a code owner for the Home Assistant Telegram bot integration . Moving from a user to contributor and finally to code owner has been an incredible journey for me. There’s no better feeling than seeing my work having an impact on the community!
  • Achieved Super Contributor in Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest was challenging for me as the event had a short time frame (within the month of October). However, I persevered and archived the Super Contributor status by consistently delivered quality Pull Requests (PRs) with features, code quality improvements, bug fixes, tests, and documentation.

Career Transition: From Dev to Ops

After building applications for more than 15 years, I decided to take on a new challenge. In June 2025, I had a career change from a software engineer to an operations engineer.

My focus has shifted from writing code (Build) to maintaining the availability of services (Run). As I transit into my new role, I hope to gain new perspectives and insights on the software development lifecycle. I’m excited to tackle the challenges of operations and support such as observability, resiliency and maintaining the health of systems.

Learning and Development

Every year, I dedicate a significant amount of time for skill development and 2025 is no different. For the past year, my focus is on Cloud infrastructure.

After a few years of hands-on experience developing scalable and secure cloud-native apps on AWS, I decided it was time for me to get certified.

More recently, I’ve also expanded my experience to include OCI through the course of my work. With strong foundational knowledge in AWS cloud, I was able to accelerate my learning of OCI technologies and achieved the certifications required for my role as an operations engineer.

Armed with this knowledge, I am confident that I will be able to develop and support complex systems in a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud environment.