2025: The Strangest Year

Everything is changing, everything has changed, everything will change

An Apology

If this is the only sentence you read: I apologize for broken promises, for not having been present, and for causing damage.

This is the first year in a long while onto which I don’t look back with a happy expression.

Transitions and change demand energy, and when all your energy is spent on that, the rest of your life starts to suffer.

After more or less having had settled in at Modash in January, February brought the revelation that if I want to stay relevant as a programmer, I need to adjust and properly engage with agentic coding tools.

Of course, often a job is just a job, but this was more profound: the thought of reskilling completely to make a fraction of the money in exchange for more work, and more demanding work at that, was daunting.

It was fear of becoming irrelevant that made not engage with Claude & Co in earnest, and thanks to Geoff, I managed to overcome that.

The result was leaving Modash, joining Amp and the most intense working period of my life: working with actual autonomy with highly-skilled people in a hot market was intoxicating and fueled professional growth. There are valuable experiences you can only get in certain environments.

What took me by surprise was the price.

Feeling that I need to prove myself a worthy member of the team made me push very hard, long, and often. Spending 12 hours at the office during summer was normal, and it was fun, and it was not going to be forever, but it sure does make other things suffer.

I barely made it to the gym, and…I’ve not been the best person to be around.

All kinds of relationships were neglected, and stretching myself so thin didn’t help with self-control, level-headedness, or general prudence.

Bills went unpaid, messages unanswered, people were hurt.

It took extremely immature behavior on my part in the latter part of the year, creating an explosion of sufficient size, to serve as a wake-up call.

All that is to say that if you have been on the receiving end of any of this: please accept my apology, I have learned from painful experience now.

On Building

For the price paid, I learned a lot more about building software, and built on system that has potential.

First and foremost, Decode Estonian now has a fledgling service it offers: a language tutor with memory, and access to news, accessible directly from Telegram. The basic idea is working, I have users, but the project needs more love and care.

Second: no matter what you’ll do, some people will always be unhappy. This hit me the hardest when building the permissions system into Amp and getting pinged five times a day for a week with people not liking the system for opposite reasons (“It asks too often!” and “It does not ask often enough!”) really tested my ability to function under stress.

Ultimately this pointed to a communication problem, and once we addressed it as such, the negative feedback disappeared. Not a lesson I’ll forget anytime soon.

For 2026

For the next year, I want to keep building, but at a more sustainable pace – of course there will be intense periods when nothing else really matters, but they need to be offset by rest.

Not only software, but also relationships – be a better friend, partner, colleague.