Review: 2025

Theme: “Refactor the pro­duc­tiv­ity”

Rethinking How I Work

2025 was a year of re­work­ing my pro­duc­tiv­ity habits. With agent tools get­ting more ad­vanced, I de­cided to refac­tor my work­flow from the ground up. I moved all my notes and tasks to Logseq, leav­ing be­hind Obsidian and RemNote. I also re­struc­tured my Ticktick setup, cut­ting down on lists and clut­ter. The re­sult: a much sim­pler and lighter sys­tem.

Upgrading My Tools

I made some changes to my daily apps as well. Double Commander re­placed the slug­gish File Explorer, and the speed dif­fer­ence is huge. For ter­mi­nal file man­age­ment, vifm be­came my tool of choice^[1]. These up­grades made my day-to-day work no­tice­ably smoother. Af­ter 5 years, I fi­nally up­graded my phone to the OnePlus 13. I still ap­pre­ci­ate the sim­plic­ity of the phone and the clean OS with­out un­nec­es­sary apps. This year, I also over­hauled my Neovim con­fig and in­te­grated an AI cod­ing as­sis­tant into my work­flow. Cod­ing feels more ef­fi­cient and en­joy­able now.

Learning and Building

On the aca­d­e­mic side, I com­pleted my mas­ter’s at NUS. It was a chal­leng­ing but re­ward­ing jour­ney, full of new ex­pe­ri­ences and growth.

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

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.

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

Beyond Work

I made a real ef­fort to rest more, re­duce stress, and im­prove my sleep qual­ity. It’s still a work in progress, but I can feel the ben­e­fits.

I also re­viewed sev­eral RecSys pa­pers this year. I avoided us­ing AI tools for the ac­tual re­view (except for check­ing ty­pos and gram­mar), as I be­lieve au­thors de­serve gen­uine feed­back.

Travel was an­other high­light. I vis­ited Thailand twice and Malaysia once. Bangkok was lively with fan­tas­tic, spicy food. Phuket was beau­ti­ful, with great seafood. Kuala Lumpur did­n’t leave much of an im­pres­sion, but it was still a good ex­pe­ri­ence.

Not every­thing went smoothly. I went through a few emo­tion­ally tough pe­ri­ods and thought about giv­ing up a cou­ple of times, but man­aged to get 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 did­n’t quite reach my weight loss goal. I was aim­ing for un­der 80kg by the end of the year, but I’m still at 81.5. Progress is progress.

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