2025: Year in review

• My wife and I moved away from Asheville, NC to San Francisco, CA.

• As part of the move to the west coast, I left my job at Dendra after 5 years. It was bittersweet, but I am proud of what I accomplished during my time there.

• I started my new job at Anyscale in January.

• We heard horror stories of people moving into an apartment sight unseen and being miserable for their first year, so we spent 6 weeks living in Airbnbs in SF. Each week we sampled a new neighborhood. It was a great way to quickly learn about SF.

• Within a few weeks, we went under contract for a condo in the Mission District. It was cheap by SF standards: it was old, needed lots of updates, was on a loud street. But we would've been building equity and added value to the house as we remodeled. We ended up backing out of the deal when we found out that the foundation was the original brick foundation from the 1800s and that there were some parts of it that were collapsed.

• Found a second condo we were interested in. It was cheap and had a lot of problems, but it had potential to be remodeled little by little to add value. It was in the Liberty Hill historic district, which is one of our favorite parts of SF. The catch was that it was a probate sale and it already had an approved buyer. So we did our inspections and got ready for a bidding war at probate court. The other buyer had infinite money and ate us for breakfast.

• My little sister crushed her hand in a work accident. Since she was unable to work, I flew her out to SF for a few weeks — her first time on a plane, and her first time in the West. We didn't tell my family she was flying out, so we surprised everyone by staging a ridiculous photo shoot. I got to show her the Bay area: excursions to Point Reyes, elephant seals, a few spectacular hikes, and a fence that jumped 16 feet in the 1906 earthquake.

• Flew to FL to visit my Abuela in hospice. Flew back a month later for her funeral. I'm glad that I got to spend some time with her at the end. She unfortunately had dementia so she had limited moments of lucidity. Hung out with some estranged family members that I hadn't seen in over 10 years.

• Flew back to FL for Thanksgiving, two weddings, a SpaceX rocket launch, a Kennedy Space Center tour, and visiting friends and family in between.

• Went skiing for the first time in years, with coworkers I hadn't met in person before. It inspired us to buy snow gear and head out to Tahoe a few more times.

• We attended a "sound bath" concert at Grace Cathedral. It was an improv band playing a bunch of instruments: crystal bowls, didgeridoos, gongs, a harp, and some other weird ones. Everyone brought blankets to lay on the floor and look at the light show being broadcast on the cathedral's gothic ceiling.

• Gave a bunch of talks at Ray meetups on LLM stuff. MC'd at the Ray Summit 2025.

• Spent a month forcing myself to write 100% of my code with AI (mostly gpt-5.1-codex and Sonnet 4 in Cursor). A few tasks got nailed, but dumb mistakes ate the time savings. Tab mode worked better.

• Built my first desktop computer in years. I'm glad I did — by the end of the year, memory and hard drives skyrocketed in price due to the global shortage.

• Repurposed an old PC into a TrueNAS server.

• Bought an ebike and visited a bunch of the city.

• Went to the Folsom St Fair not knowing beforehand what the Folsom St Fair was; I saw things that I can't unsee.

• Lost my voice at karaoke in just a few songs. Whoops.

• Weekend trips: camping at Russian River, visiting Tahoe, a Sonoma wine tour, and Santa Cruz.

• Visited my friends in Columbus, Ohio and spent a really fun extended weekend with them.

• Attended weekly Spanish meetups.

• Social events: speed-friending nights, "skip the small talk" meetups, the Vibe Camp after-party.

• Collected succulents I found all around SF to bootstrap my new garden.

• Propagated a million plants and succulents.

• Took an Alaskan cruise along the inside passage and got to see Glacier Bay. I saw a lot of wildlife: orcas, humpbacks, bald eagles, sea otters, and a porcupine. Oh, and the cruise ship crashed into a mini iceberg, but the damage wasn't fatal.

• Joined a huge unsanctioned Halloween parade. It was so much fun and very chaotic. The self-driving cars were so confused.

All told, it was a year full of change!