It was a year of two halves.

On the evening of the last day of May, during what was an unusually warm week for late spring in Northern California, I sat in a frigid ICU on the first floor of our local hospital, holding my wife’s hand, watching her chest rise and fall as the ventilator puffed and huffed its perfect machine rhythm. Open heart surgery was on nobody’s bingo card this year. But there I was. And there she was. Alive thankfully, but with many painful weeks of recovery ahead.

If you were to ask me about the events and themes of my year prior to that last day in May, I could only paint the most impressionistic picture for you. School day routines, moving forward on various work projects, a visit to Carmel and Monterey, a camping trip, the daily feelings of fury and dismay whenever checking the national news. By contrast, the days and months that followed feel vivid and clear, brought into focus by stress—lots and lots of it—but also by gratitude and that heightened attunement to what matters that only the vicissitudes of life can bring. Life has since returned to “normal,” and my wife has fully recovered, but the new normal feels different. More real, more immediate.

Reflecting on my year and writing about it, as has now become a year-end ritual, I’m reminded how much a single traumatic event can cleave time into before and after.

Professional growth

Unsurprisingly, the theme of the year for me in my professional life was AI. At work, much of my focus this year was spent helping separate AI hype from reality, working with the teams I manage to identify tools and use cases with real, productive value, and then scaling those up within our design engineering organization. One of the most impactful initiatives has focused on helping designers build things with code. This year, we saw both designers (and product managers) embrace “vibe coding” as a means of rapid prototyping, conjuring up new experiments, working directly in the medium of code.

Vibe coding is uniquely well-suited to prototyping. Prototypes are bricolage, after all, often cobbled together by any means necessary, and tend to be throwaway after they’ve served their purpose, so the pesky issues that engineers have to deal with—like maintainability, legibility and code quality—are mostly irrelevant. What matters in prototyping is the idea, the communication of intent. And a working prototype conveys so much more intent than a drawing of the same software in Figma ever could. So, at Adobe, we ran with this, empowering non-engineers to build and iterate with AI tools, which by the end of 2025 resulted in something of a Cambrian explosion of internally-deployed prototypes.

This year I also started working with a career coach for the first time. Honestly, I wish I had done this years ago. Weekly coaching has proven invaluable in so many ways, both for my professional development as a leader, as well as for my personal development in my “extracurricular pursuits” (more on this below). As wonderful as it is to talk through challenges with my peers at work, sometimes you really do need someone with an outside perspective. My coach both advised and helped me think through some very challenging situations this year.

Family

Our immediate family grew this year by exactly one non-human. In late summer we adopted a puppy from the local Humane Society. He’s quickly become a source of delight in our house during an uncommonly stressful year. And somehow—even though I was the most resistant to add an animal to our pre-existing menagerie—the dog seems to have really taken a liking to me. My wife likes to joke that he’s “my” dog now which, to be fair, is mostly true. (He’s curled up next to me on the sofa as I type these very words.)

Other than this, our kids are thriving. My son performed the lion dance in the San Francisco Lunar New Year parade, and my wife and I spent many weekends shuttling between swim lessons, kung fu, baseball, art classes, and numerous play dates.

Health and wellness

I really don’t have much to report in the category of health and wellness. Nothing terrible (for me personally), and nothing extraordinary either. I started off the year strong with a regular running routine. And meditation proved absolutely essential for my own well-being and stress management during and in the weeks following my wife’s stay in the hospital. But, the acquisition of the dog later in the year completely interrupted all of my routines, and I haven’t quite figured out how to get back to my regular fitness practices in a consistent way. Still, I make it out daily for a long walk or short hike on the trails behind our home.

Studies in philosophy

As my wife was recovering from surgery, I spent many waking hours reflecting on the fragility and brevity of life. And I realized, during those reflections, that I missed—or perhaps longed for—a more contemplative life. I realized that I wanted to live a richer “life of the mind”—to both read more, and write more—and I didn’t want to wait for retirement to make that part of my daily reality.

So, I decided to do something about it. Towards the end of August I began, in earnest, to take seriously the idea of reading and writing about philosophy as it relates to design and technology practices. This practice started with Life habit experiment №2, which I called an experiment in self-directed study. As part of that experiment, I created a reading list for myself focused specifically on a branch of philosophy called phenomenology, and then methodically made my way through it over the remaining months of 2025. I read Husserl. I read Heidegger. I read Merleau-Ponty. And I explored the writing of more contemporary philosophers like Don Ihde and Byung-Chul Han. I also wrote several essays, and a long reflection on the entire experiment.

These autodidactic adventures in philosophy were by far the most transformative and rewarding part of my year. I read more, wrote more, and learned more than I ever have since graduate school, and I cannot imagine not continuing this indefinitely. As I wrote in my reflections on life habit experiment №2, this kind of self-directed research is not just a new hobby—it is my primary leisure activity, and I’m very excited to continue working on it next year. I fully anticipate more writing and blogging in 2026.

Reading

Because I dedicated the bulk of my spare time to reading philosophy, I read more books this year than in any year since I started keeping track. Even so, reading philosophy is often slow and methodical. It takes time to actually absorb it, reflect on it, and ensure you really understand it. So, even though I read more than usual, the number of books read still feels low given how much time I spent reading and studying. That said, especially when it comes to reading to learn, quality is far more important than quantity.

Here’s the full list of everything I read in 2025 (28 books in total, not including several academic papers):

Trajectories for 2026

As I wrote last year, I call these “trajectories” because they indicate direction without committing to specific goals. My trajectories for the coming year do not really differ much from those I set for myself last year. I’m happy with the general direction I’ve set for myself, and if anything I want more focus. I guess this means saying no to new ambitions, not accumulating more of them.

  • Read and write even more about ideas at the intersection of design, technology and philosophy. This will remain my primary intellectual and leisure time pursuit. Next year, I want to deepen my engagement with philosophy, and continue publishing essays that explore how the ideas I encounter can inform design and technology practices.

  • Read more fiction. Philosophy dominated my reading this year, which was necessary and rewarding, but my coach suggested I read more fiction too. She was right to do so. I found myself longing for more balance in my reading, and more exposure to beautiful, less academic writing.

  • Experiment with more “home cooked” software. I’m really drawn to the idea of building small, personal tools—software made for an audience of one or few. AI makes this easier than ever, and I have a few ideas in mind that I’d like to explore which align nicely with my autodidactic pursuits.

  • Continue to develop as a leader in design engineering. This is less a new ambition than an ongoing responsibility. As AI reshapes how software gets made, the ability to bridge design and engineering becomes ever more valuable. There’s plenty I want to do to keep growing in my role, particularly in how I help support and develop the people on my teams.