I debated skipping the whole process of doing a reflection on 2025. It was a chaotic year and in a lot of ways sitting down to reflect gives me angst because it feels like I'm taking away time from other things I should be working on. But that avoidance? That's the pattern I'm trying to break. So despite every instinct telling me to keep moving, here I am.

2025 was chaos: a cross-country move, closing a chapter I wasn't quite ready to close, and navigating turbulent times in tech as AI disrupts in ways we expected and ways we didn't.

📘 Closing the LA Chapter

A few years ago, I made the move across the country to live in LA, a place that has always been a bit of a second-home to me growing up. It was a welcome change of pace and perspective. Coming from a place where most people are hyper focused on their careers and in a more systematized lifestyle, it was eye-opening to be able to immerse myself in communities where people seemed far more concern with just living their life and having fun.

However, while I loved my time there, circumstances changed and I had to make the difficult decision to close the chapter on LA. And while this seems silly as I write this, moving cross-country was incredibly taxing on my time and attention. The amount of paperwork and administrative things I had to do was exhausting and on reflection I do think I minimized the work it would take to move.

But at the end of the day, I successfully moved back across the country and am now back in the DMV (DC Metro) area! And while there are things I'll always miss about SoCal, this isn't a sad ending because there are lots of things I love about being here as well. It's just a matter of finding ways to integrate things I loved about my LA life as best I can into my DMV life.

💻 Work

Angular

A huge part of my year last year was continuing my work with the Angular Team to create and improve their docs. It's been such an honor to work alongside a team which clearly cares deeply for its community and is relentless in trying to make the framework the best it can be.

One of the biggest accomplishments was helping to support the Angular Signals and Aria teams in the recent v21 release!

Vue

VueConf US in Tampa was one of those reminders of why I fell in love with this community in the first place. Getting to meet people who've been building with Vue for years and hearing their stories about what they're creating. It's easy to forget that impact when you're deep in the weeds of framework development.

2025 wasn't a year of major Vue releases, but sometimes stability is its own kind of progress. Watching the ecosystem mature and seeing what people build when they're not chasing the next breaking change? That's a kind of growth that I love to see!

AI

While I haven't posted much about this, like many others I've spent a lot more time with AI tools and trying to figure out how it fits into my workflow. Because at the end of the day, though it's a polarizing topic and has had a drastic impact on tech as a whole, ignoring AI felt like pretending the internet wasn't going to stick around in 1995.

Here's what I've learned: AI is incredible at getting you 70% of the way there and spectacularly bad at the remaining 30%. For example, from a documentation perspective, it can generate structure and boilerplate, but it can't understand why a particular explanation will confuse beginners or why one code pattern is better than another for teaching purposes.

Verdict: Claude Code became my go-to because it was the most consistent and reliable output of the ones I've tested.

🥒🏓 Pickleball

You might be wondering what this polarizing sport (which people seem to either completely hate on or love) is doing inside this blog post, but it wouldn't be a 2025 reflections post without acknowledging how much of an impact it's had on my life.

One of the things I've always been proud of was my success in taking the things I loved doing (such as coding, tech, teaching, user experience) and turn it into my professional career. And while that has been helpful in so many ways, it also meant that I was pretty stuck to my screens at all hours of the day.

Many years ago however, one of my old managers used to talk about how he loved having a hobby that would forcibly take him away from the digital screens and (to use the slang these days) "touch grass." It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but as the old saying goes, "Too much of anything isn't usually a good thing."

Fast forward a few years to when I was living in LA. My mom had been making numerous requests for me to come try to play pickleball with her. And while I was skeptical of it, in my experience, opportunities to share in a hobby that your parents love isn't one that comes about often, so I eventually agreed to do so.

While it started out as a way to spend quality time with my mom, before I knew it pickleball would become a pretty big part of my life. Even though it's not the most athletic of sports, one of the main reason I fell in love with the sport is because it reminded me of what Vue was to the frameworks community. It created a space that was accessible to people of varying abilities and encouraged social interactions all while keeping people physically active.

Like seriously, I don't think I've played a sport where laughter was such a big part of the experience (particularly in social / recreational play). Although it might seem like a simple game, the number of times people will whiff on a shot or make silly mistakes are too many to count and the great thing about it is that it creates these opportunities for shared laughter (rather than the usual shame or blame found in most sports).

Anyhow, this section was much longer than intended, but suffice to say that pickleball has become a big part of my life. If you want more pickleball content, feel free to check out my Instagram!

What's next?

I've learned that gigantic overtures don't work well for me, so I'm keeping 2026 simple: consistent progress in the things that matter, with actual space to appreciate what I'm building. 2025 was chaotic, but it was also full of the kind of quiet progress you only notice when you actually pause.

To my pillars of support and cheerleaders, know I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for you. Even though we don't get to talk or hangout as much as we'd probably like, every message, meme, and moments of connection is one that always brings joy to my day and reminds me I'm not alone in this.

It's been real, 2025. Here's to what comes next. 🍻