Annual Review 2025
- Annual Review
2025 Annual Review
TLDR
- Our family grew by 1
- Changed career and today marks one year as a Software Engineer
- Did 183 training sessions. 2 half marathons.
- Won Ireland's National AI Hackathon with a few engineers from work.
This is my fourth annual review. This is the second one I am publishing on my own website. I don’t know how long I will continue to do these for. I think it is a helpful exercise even to read over the previous years one and see how goals and priorities for me change over time. In one way, these are my own personal measuring approach. In another selfish way, I think they are an interesting timeframe snapshot. As my kids get older, they might find this interesting to read in the future.
Anyways, I have done the same format for the past couple of years. Pretty simple. What went well. What didn't go well. What needs to change.
If you want to follow this approach go for it. Or don’t!
Let’s start with the hardest question to begin with.
Am I living the sort of life that I want? Compared to last year’s review, am I closer or further from the kind of life I want in a lot of the areas that are important.
Writing this, another question that I find helpful to answer is this. If 80-year-old me reads this, what would he think? Would he think that I was focusing on the right areas? Would he suggest that I wasn't even asking the right questions?
Generally I break this down into a couple of big buckets.
Health
Family
Relationships
Work & Career
Wealth
Fun / Creativity / Hobbies
What went well
Family
Our son turned three this year and he has developed such a brilliant personality. Most of all he is kind. Our daughter was born at the beginning of November. She is two months old. She is great and is a really settled baby most of the time. I think Amy has been brilliant as a mom. She is doing a lot better than me. I knew that being a parent for a second time would be busier but I didn’t realise how much busier to be honest. It’s really hard when you are in it but this is something that will get better over time. An average day for us right now means that our oldest is awake from 5.30am and our newborn is awake until 10pm. Throw in a couple hours of witching time at the end of the day and it It feels like there is just not time to focus on anything else right now. I don’t think that Amy and I have spent enough time together and that is something I want to work on next year. I had wrote down to aim for a date night a month and that has fell off a cliff. I think aiming to have even a weekly ritual and a date night would be a brilliant step in the right direction. What we are going through is pretty normal though and being a dad is the best thing I will ever do.
Work and Career
I have just completed a year working as a software engineer with a great company, Liberty IT. Honestly it has been brilliant and I have really enjoyed my day job. I am fortunate that I found a company that were willing to take a chance on me and gave so may opportunities over the year. I like the work, I am learning a lot and feel like a value add. If it all ended tomorrow, i wouldn’t have any regrets.
I actually think I have built a lot of valuable skills. Working on enterprise software is probably different than I expected. One of the most interesting things I was surprised about is how important soft skills are in this industry although writing that now, it seems like I should have realised it. These are skills that I am pretty strong on from my previous work as a physio and they have been important in hitting the ground running. Luckily it has all worked out and I have gained a lot of experience about the tech industry in general. No one knows where the rollercoaster of AI is going to take the industry but it's an exciting time.
I am really looking forward to work over the next year.
Study
I actually started another post grad course this year. Amy is a saint for putting up with me. I am doing a post-grad diploma called Practical AI for Software Engineers through University of Galway. I hadn’t planned to actually take another formal course on but the syllabus around AI looked interesting and the progress with AI and LLMs this year means that it would be silly not to develop my own skillset in this area as fast as possible. While the course is good, there is probably a little too much focus on theory and not enough on building imo. It’s been enjoyable but it’s taking up any free time I have left. I'm hoping that this course will turn into a positive return next year.
What didn't go well
Health & Fitness
I think fitness wise, I actually did ok this year. Not terrible. I trained in the gym pretty consistently and I ran two half marathons. Now that I am working as a software engineer, I spend a lot of time at a computer. As a result, exercise has become more of a non-negotiable to be honest. Getting short workouts done at lunch time has probably kept me ticking over fitness-wise. My diet has been crap the last two months, more so having sugar snacks when I am tired. It’s an easy enough correction. Wrapping up the year, I decided to take a look at some numbers.
Current weight = 80 kg. Probably 2 or 3 kilos more than I need to be.
Gym Current lifts
Backsquat 110kg for 3
Bench Press 100kg x 2
Row 85 kg for 1
Should press 25kg db x 8 x 1
Pull ups 15
Half Marathons Dingle Ballina
Most of the time, when I was running, I wore a fitness tracker. Total runs 72 Total running time was 50 hours. Total mileage was 493km.
I cycled to work this year and tracked it a good bit. Total mileage 1843 km. Total times 47. Total hours 30hours.
Gym workouts 111. These were probably 30 minutes on average.
Right now, the biggest thing that exercising does for me is that it helps to keep me in a decent mental headspace. It feels like a reset whenever I do it. I am not really tracking numbers right now. I think this is a season where I am just aiming for consistency right now and I think I am doing ok.
I think I was lucky enough that I didn’t really have any injuries this year and was pretty consistent over the year.
Alcohol
I drank more than I was planning to this year. I don’t drink at home ever to be honest. I think having a hangover with small kids is just a terrible idea. I don’t think that I need to give up alcohol completely but I can definitely get better at drinking less. I find that having 3 or 4 drinks when I am out is probably the optimal amount, there is literally no upside to any more than that. I probably need to think about longer about managing this in the future. Right now, it's impossibe to justify the cost of a hangover as a dad of 2 small kids.
Evening Routine
I still have a habit of doom scrolling at night time. Part of this is that it is probably habitual. I read books on my phone for a while and that is just an awful idea. I guess I am nearly using this as a way to decompress. There is definitely a receny bias here as I was a lot better earlier in the year. I actually bought a phone time box that is brilliant and I use for work. I think that i am just going to start setting a cut off time. It will help in a lot of ways. It will help me to read more books, to consume less social media and to get more sleep hopefully. The easy fix here is just paper books and phone free time.
Friends
When I stopped playing football, I didn’t really think about the knock-on effect of not being involved in a team sport. Playing golf has actually been a good alternative. It’s a good chance to just chat and get outdoors for a few hours. I am a pretty crap player but I enjoy it a lot. The only downside is how long the game takes to play. I have done better this year than last year trying to keep in touch with people. I know with a second kid now that will be harder again but it’s something I plan to work on. Can do better.
Projects
I think the most interesting project I worked on this year was a tool that gives personal energy recommendations called LibertyLumen. A few engineers from work competed in Ireland’s second National AI competition and placed as one of 3 overall winners! The tool is a calculator that lets you add in your home energy usage data and then helps you analyse your usage, compare plans and look at your energy usage using machine learning and AI. I think we can probably improve the repo and turn this into an open source idea next year.
I didn't ship any other products. Sure i have some projects in my github repo but overall I didnt do as many as I would have aimed for. I will do better on this next year.
Finances
Pretty crap. Overall, not a great year. To move into tech, I took an internship for 8 months and Amy was job sharing most of the year. It was a pretty lean year for us. Savings wise, we didn't manage to grow our net worth much. Our house appreciated by around 10 percent this year which would have added around 50k to our positive equity in it. This doesn't matter though because we dont have plans to move soon. Our net worth outside of our home is about 100k but almost all this is related to an investment property. For me, the financial focus will be on increasing earnings.
Travel
Didn't happen. We had a weeks holiday in Kerry as a staycation. Didn't go abroad apart from that. As the kids get older a priority will be to have family experiences and trips that the kids will remember.
Overall, between investing a ton of time into moving career and upskilling and parenting, that was most of my time. It was a year of consuming. 2026 will move towards producing. That's a wrap on this year. Will set targets in a few weeks.