I know we’re halfway through 2026 at this point, but a lot happened for me in 2025. While I failed to accomplish half of the goals I set out for, I often feel it’s important to celebrate the wins when you find them.
On employment…
After the Orange TACO was elected in November of 2024, I shelved my search and rescue project and started looking for work as I needed to consider getting my family out of the state (at a minimum), and possibly the country. I spent the next 5 months searching for work.
Eventually, I found a job through my late friend’s brother doing platform engineering for a generalist AI solution. I’m not going to lie, the problems with the organization were pretty apparent throughout the interview process. During the final round of conversations with the C-level, I was told my role was to explicitly focus on front-end work. (Little did I know this would come around and bite me because my manager expected me to work across the full stack and not just on the front-end.) So despite seeing the dysfunction on full display, I needed a job and it paid well, so I took it. 5 months later, the company laid off the majority of its staff including myself. Despite the dysfunction, I enjoyed everyone I had the opportunity to work with. Suffice it to say, I was not looking forward to being back on the employment market already.
Fortunately, my time being unemployed again was short. One day, I was scrolling through LinkedIn and saw that someone I worked closely with at Indeed had recently joined a start up as a CTO. They were looking for some engineers to join and help get the product started, so I decided to pass along my resumé. Within a few weeks, I was employed again.
Being the first engineer hired onto a product poses a different set of challenges than when you’re joining an established product 6 months or even a year in. Companies in the earlier stages of development are often focused on delivering features and functionality in order to unlock further rounds of funding. As a result, developer experience and security concerns are often treated as an afterthought. This role not only gave me the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an early stage startup, but it also afforded me the opportunity to bake the developer experience and security concerns in from the ground up. In a meeting earlier this year, the CISO organization we consult with complimented us for how serious we’ve taken security into account as few often do.
Since starting this new role, my spark for software development has been rekindled.
On public appearances…
In 2025, I had two goals around public appearances.
My first goal was to speak at 2 conferences and attend a number of meetups. The first conference I spoke at in 2025 was OpenSource Summit North America. I previously spoke at OpenSource Summit in 2019 so I was pretty familiar with what the event was like. While in Denver, I had the opportunity to catch up with a number of friends that I hadn’t seen since my time working on gRPC. The second conference I spoke at was OSACON, an online open-source analytics conference. In that conference, I discussed strategies for iterating on and improving SQL queries using the mcp-toolbox from Google. While I didn’t attend as many meetups as I intended, I did dip my toes back into the conference circuit after 5 years away.
My second goal was to perform in a piano recital, which I accomplished in December. It had been over 20 years since I last performed anything in front of an audience and my nerves were on fire. Put me in a team setting or group and I’ll mask fine, but to stand and perform alone triggered my anxiety in unexpected ways. After struggling through my piece and pushing through the tremors, I spoke with my therapist, my boyfriend, and my ex-wife who all recommended talking to my psychiatrist about a beta blocker.
What’s on deck for 2026?
2026 has been off to an interesting start for me. We finalized our release process earlier this year and our development teams have been off and running on their own. While many others at the company have been working on user-facing features, I’ve been working increasingly more on the backend, designing data intensive pipelines for meter data information at utility companies, connecting legacy data warehouses to our new solution, and so much more. Life at a start up is always a challenge, but each varies in their own way as leadership is seldom the same. Some struggle with direction, some with money, and some with delivery. Even when all the stars align, it’s still possible for things to fall through. That said, I’ve really been enjoying my current job and don’t see that changing any time soon.
Writing has always been a therapeutic practice for me and it’s something I’ve received numerous compliments on throughout my career. I’ve long missed sharing my experience with others, although not in the quippy format of something like a micro-blogging platform. Working at start ups often means foregoing my ability to write technically as start ups seldom present the size and scaling challenges that attract the attention of mediums and aggregators. In lieu of having an engineering blog for Gigawatt (at least not yet), I’ve been given clearance to write technical articles pertaining to work on my own personal blog (within reason of course). In addition to continuing my technical writing, I also plan on doing a few more presentations this year around the Austin area as we’re still in the process of moving.
Finally, I’m really looking forward to my piano performances this year. After fighting through the anxiety for so long, I finally spoke with my psychologist about a beta-blocker and decided to give one a try. My first recital for the year is later this month, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this improves my life.
So… I hope you decide to stay tuned for some more algorithms and arpeggios! ~ Ciao!