Review: 2025

Theme: “Refactor the pro­duc­tiv­ity”

Rethinking How I Work

2025 was a year of re­work­ing my pro­duc­tiv­ity habits. As agent tools grew more so­phis­ti­cated, I de­cided to refac­tor my work­flow from the ground up. I mi­grated all my notes and tasks to Logseq, bid­ding farewell to Obsidian and RemNote. I also stream­lined my Ticktick setup, trim­ming down lists and elim­i­nat­ing clut­ter. The re­sult: a leaner, more fo­cused sys­tem.

Upgrading My Tools

I made sev­eral changes to my daily tool­box as well. Double Commander re­placed the slug­gish File Explorer, and the speed dif­fer­ence is re­mark­able. For ter­mi­nal file man­age­ment, vifm be­came my tool of choice^[1]. These up­grades made my day-to-day work no­tice­ably smoother. Af­ter five years, I fi­nally up­graded my phone to the OnePlus 13. I still ap­pre­ci­ate the phone’s sim­plic­ity and the clean OS, free of un­nec­es­sary bloat­ware. This year, I also over­hauled my Neovim con­fig and in­te­grated an AI cod­ing as­sis­tant into my work­flow. Cod­ing now feels both more ef­fi­cient and more en­joy­able.

Learning and Building

On the aca­d­e­mic front, I com­pleted my mas­ter’s de­gree at NUS. It was a chal­leng­ing yet re­ward­ing jour­ney, brim­ming with new ex­pe­ri­ences and growth.

At work, I stepped into more soft­ware de­sign and ar­chi­tec­ture roles. I built a new prod­uct in­ges­tion pipeline from scratch, steer­ing every­thing from de­sign to de­ploy­ment. I also took courses in cloud com­put­ing (finally get­ting hands-on with AWS) and per­for­mance analy­sis, div­ing into low-level op­ti­miza­tion and queue­ing the­ory. I spent con­sid­er­able time with back­end tools such as MongoDB, etcd, and Redis.

I ex­panded my AI and ma­chine learn­ing knowl­edge with courses in text min­ing and graph ma­chine learn­ing. The Graph ML course with Prof Xavier was a high­light, and I’m proud of the A+ I earned.

Much of my work this year re­volved around large lan­guage mod­els. I in­te­grated LLMs into our prod­uct back­end and R&D pipeline, de­vel­oped and main­tained au­to­mated an­no­ta­tion agents, and kept the main R&D code­base run­ning smoothly.

Beyond Work

I made a gen­uine ef­fort to rest more, re­duce stress, and im­prove my sleep qual­ity. It re­mains a work in progress, but I can al­ready feel the ben­e­fits.

I also re­viewed sev­eral RecSys pa­pers this year. I de­lib­er­ately avoided us­ing AI tools for the ac­tual re­views (except for check­ing ty­pos and gram­mar), be­liev­ing that au­thors de­serve gen­uine, thought­ful feed­back.

Travel was an­other high­light of the year. I vis­ited Thailand twice and Malaysia once. Bangkok was vi­brant, with fan­tas­tic, fiery cui­sine. Phuket was stun­ning, with ex­cel­lent seafood. Kuala Lumpur did­n’t leave much of an im­pres­sion, but it was still a worth­while ex­pe­ri­ence.

Not every­thing went smoothly, of course. I weath­ered a few emo­tion­ally dif­fi­cult pe­ri­ods and con­tem­plated giv­ing up more than once, but man­aged to push through.

Still on My Mind

There are still things I did­n’t fin­ish. I wanted to start a TikTok or YouTube chan­nel to share my thoughts on books. I up­loaded two clips, but work and study took over. On the bright side, I helped my wife build her chan­nel and even ap­peared in some of her videos.

I also fell short of my weight loss goal. I was aim­ing for un­der 80kg by year’s end, but I’m still hov­er­ing at 81.5. Progress is progress, though.

Here’s to an­other year of learn­ing, grow­ing, and hope­fully dis­cov­er­ing a bit more bal­ance.