🗓️ 2025 Recap
This winter was foundational. I traveled to Culebra with my boyfriend and began working as a software engineer at Rockefeller, where I shipped projects in anomaly detection and cash flow forecasting. Outside of work, I took singing and drumming classes and, for the first time, performed live with a band.
Spring was about staying with things. I started my E5 program, which is a scholarship from the University of Rochester to spend a year building a startup. I shipped two apps: one to onboard small businesses to AI, and another focused on health and fitness for premenopausal women. I ended up sunsetting the first project to focus on the second. I continued my work at Rockefeller while actively building my passion projects. I wanted to focus less on big pivots and more on showing up.
Summer slowed me down in the best way. I became an open source contributor for Scalar. I wrote every Sunday, revisited Arabic and French, and published more of my essays. Writing became less performative and more devotional. I also spent the season grinding LeetCode (less glamorous but it became its own kind of practice: showing up, doing the work, repeating). I wanted to train myself to spend a long time on things without necessarily seeing the reward right away.
Fall compressed everything. I interviewed across FAANG, hedge funds, and startups while deepening my music practice through theory and sound design. I transitioned into a Forward Deployed Engineer role at Default, moved to Brooklyn, and took on the role of Director of AI at Mycelia Foundation. I also began playing chess. This season felt less like becoming someone new and more like assembling parts of myself that had been waiting.
⭐ 2025 Learnings
It is not who you know. It is who knows you.
If you can’t sustain it, don’t live your life around it.
Fall in love with a problem more than the solution.
The one who sees action in inaction and inaction in action is truly liberated.
What you create is an honest reflection of who you are.
Write code that is easier to delete, not easier to extend.
You need to live life to be a good writer.
Don’t rent an audience. Own your distribution.
Like in scuba diving, plan your dive and dive your plan.
Whatever energy you save in avoidance, you will spend in regret.
People do not tell you who you are. You tell them.
A day without a walk is a mistake.
Self-sabotage is the unconscious rebelling against self-betrayal.
Many who have accomplished great things throughout history have been described as paradoxical.
