2025 was a crazy year.
An addition to the family, new experiences, tech advances.
Parenting is hard. Hard is relative.
nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard….
There’s a ton to learn/relearn, you put your body through insane stress, get to experience a side of society you haven’t seen before, are witness to the inexplicable beauty of a potato turning into a tiny human, are glad you weren’t born a woman.
I learnt how resilient and adaptable the human body can be.
I have years of WFH with 0 physical activity/attention to health. When suddenly faced with sleepless high-exertion days, it’s like my body got a shot of adrenaline that never wore off. It worked on auto-pilot for months.
I had months of almost no sleep. No complaints, business as usual.
Then I had months of a few hours of sleep. But a day of no sleep would be extremely tiring.
Today I’ve had months of several hours of sleep. But a day of a few hours of sleep feels tiring.
Which brings me to: what is “normal” anyway?
Everything is relative to our own experiences.
There are new parents who objectively have more to do than I did, or less to do than I did.
But that doesn’t make one person’s life “less hard”. We all feel the same emotions and comparison is futile.
I feel like a lot of these experiences aren’t talked about enough, and people (like me) go in unprepared. Or maybe words have only so much meaning and you just need to get punched in the face.
I’m grateful to have a kick-ass wife to get through this! (or I wouldn’t have to go through this without her, so maybe an ass-kicking is in order?)
Every baby is different.
As a consequence, for exactly the same situation, your “correct” response may not be someone else’s “correct” response - but both of you are, in fact correct.
When he cries, I usually know if it’s because he’s gassy or because he’s sleepy.
Trial and error has taught me much.
There are other babies who cry primarily if they’re bored. Give them a new toy and they’re happy again!
It’s beautiful.
The problem arises when I know my little dude’s crying because he wants to sleep, but others, being helpful, are hell-bent on giving him a new toy - and disregard any of our lived experiences.
The worst (and most common) “solution” is “if the baby is crying, he must be hungry”.
Several times, we’ve had to feed him when he isn’t hungry just so they’d stop saying that. Replying with “nah that’s not it, we just fed him” to them just translates to “oh so the mother’s feed isn’t enough” and other awkward questions, because of course they happen to know with absolute certainty that the baby is hungry.
It’s a lose-lose situation.
After all the stress, uncertainty and exhaustion of parenthood we already are in: I do not want to hear from someone how the consistency of the mashed potatoes we’re feeding him is 2 microns too big.
My sister in Christ, you bought an apple, watched him roll across the floor twice and will leave in half an hour.
We literally watched him go from being a potato to eating a potato.
We are not the same.
Unfortunately, these people are omnipresent and at some point it feels like a reflection of society itself.
If you visit a baby: interact with the baby, focus on the nice things.
Anecdotally, most people who do this have either dealt with babies a decade+ back or are parent-adjacent (they watched other parents who have a baby) and not recent parents themselves.
I hope this isn’t me in a few years tho.
On the bright side, meeting people requires minimal effort - people gravitate towards the baby.
The baby brings joy to people around us, and people naturally seem to like interacting with him.
Which is really cool, and is a facet of society I hadn’t experienced yet - there have been instances where we went out to eat and others would play with him voluntarily, carrying him around, showing him everyday things - there’s a natural fascination baked into our brains.
The website gets a facelift (yep, this one)
I’ve had the older website around for ~5 years now, and decided to redo it to be more “mine”.
Most of this can be attributed to me having short periods of time where I couldn’t sleep either, with nothing to do (thanks to the baby).
Opinions are divided so far. I have to admit this wouldn’t fly for any user-facing product website.
But this is my corner of the internet and that’s that!
Writing: HN top story, Reddit top post + a bunch of subscribers!
One evening, my phone vibrates every few minutes with a “xyz subscribed to your blog”.
It turned out someone had submitted one of my blog posts to the HackerNews second chance pool - and it was the #1 post on the frontpage!
Which is insane, because getting on HN is a distant long-shot goal - something I didn’t expect would happen, not this early, and certainly not for that specific post.
Read: The kind of company I want to be a part of…
Another of my posts made it to the top of a subreddit in the same month: LLMs explained in a series called “Buzzwords for the Busy” - a series I started while at Zoho.
Read: Buzzwords for the Busy: ChatGPT (LLMs)
The timing was a bit unfortunate, since I later discovered a bug in my blog subscriber form and realized I’d lost several entries (thanks for nothing, Discord webhooks).
Because both posts did well during the same month, my free PostHog Analytics quota was quickly depleted and I wasn’t able to recover them.
But overall, this gave me the opportunity to interact with several interesting people (including the great folks at ValTown). Grateful!
Side projects
Dipped my toes into a bunch of shiny new tech. Availability of information is no longer the bottleneck - LLMs can serve anything to you on a silver platter, exactly the way you like it. Mental capacity (because you get that information instantly) and a spidey-sense for bullshit are.
As a result, it’s easier than ever to pick up and hit the ground running with any tech; but you need to prioritize.
Built a few Mac apps for myself, an agentic Whatsapp assistant, worked on a bit of face recognition (for a timelapse of my baby’s growth - they grow so fast!) and a Personal Relationship Management app (because my memory sucks).
Travel
Went to Mizoram start of the year. Great people, great place!
Claude code
Just sneaking into my 2025 is Claude Code - I first used it a month back in mid-November and…it’s crazy.
I vividly remember my first side project, which had a GitLab CI/CD pipeline to generate multi-platform artifacts.
I was on a view failure logs -> Google it -> change something -> run, wait for it to fail -> repeat loop for ~a week.
Last month, something similar in a tech I had 0 experience with took me less than an hour, and with MUCH less effort.
It can test and generate screenshots on the fly, do exploratory work autonomously, find bugs long before I push any code, plan all approaches with tradeoffs etc.
But it’s also easy to end up having run too far in the wrong direction.
Claude Code requires a lot of context and direction to work well. It relies on you for optimal decision making.
It can make incorrect implicit assumptions that you’re unaware of until too late.
It can mis-diagnose issues and say it with absolute certainty and valid code references.
It can give you suggestions that sound great, but are bonkers if you look at it from a degree of separation.
Most of this is easily rectified by asking it one right question.
The job is to know when to ask the question, what to ask it, and an intuition for if something really makes sense.
I’ve seen enough disastrous decisions it makes to not subscribe to “AI will 100% replace EVERYTHING”. At least not yet.
2026 goals
- Be present for family, while
- Building more stuff, while
- Talking to more people, while
- Writing more
(one can dream!)
