This year was a roller coaster; a year of uncertainty. Professionally the biggest change was Walmart's divestment of their robotics division to symbotic. Fortunately I was not caught up in the layoffs; something I attribute to sheer luck. It's strange to be only one of two people left from a 15 person team you were close with. Fortunately most of the fellow sre's found gainful employment; something very much not the common story.
I got moved from sre infrastructure to cloud infrastructure and now baremetal k8's. I got to work on some interesting projects throughout this year ranging from finops initiatives, migrating a saas solution to a self hosted solution in the cloud, to automating ceph cluster resiliency testing. There was definitely a bit of whiplash but all in all it was good for me. I do enjoy working on different problems even if at times it feels like you have to be learning at a breakneck speed to keep pace with specialists.
All that being said; what did I write down and what did I do?
This is what I set for myself in 2025
Azure cert path
Admin and maybe arch
cks
Take performance seriously
Be able to read assembly and reason about it
Better knowledge
General programming
Complete blog roadmap and blog it
Code crafter projects
Maybe something unique that builds off one and blog about it
I should be really comfortable writing golang
Rewrite blog in rust and profile do I actually learn rust this year?
I should preface that I don't really believe that certs mean very much. However I did list them as things as I should do and I do have an active cka and have had aws certs.
Azure cert path - after a few years in azure work pivoted to gcp and I did not pursue azure certs. Thats a fail CKS - I did not take the cks. Fail
I did make much better progress on my goal of taking performance a lot more seriously. At some point in this process; I have realized that some of my fundamentals from school where actually pretty fuzzy and not very useful or accurate. I had to go back to fundamentals a bit. I reread operating systems in 3 easy pieces, did the code exercises and I also paid for a course on performant programming which I am about halfway through. A lot of the information wasn't new but it also wasn't clear. I did make a half baked arm64 tui stepper which did help.
I believe I am much stronger in reasoning about performance. Nothing earth shattering happened but I am much more comfortable making guesses and being able to squeeze better perf out of. I am still not very comfortable with a lot of algos. But I can look them up most of the time and the type of code I write at work is more o(1) so a lot of gains I see are from mechanical waste. I've strengthened my programming fundamentals to complement my infrastructure work and I am enjoying the process of being able to program with a higher degree of proficiency. I can see a point where there will be few infra people in the future without these kind of skills ready to go. Its simply too useful a skill to ignore or pretend admins have any kind of future outside the most stagnant of enterprises.
Something throughout this process I became paranoid about was using an llm too heavily; however I have developed some guidelines that I think negate my concerns.
I did actually keep blogging through the entire year. Which was a win.
I did become much more comfortable writing go but I did not bother with rust this year and Im less sure that I will pursue it in the immediate future.
I attribute some of the deviation from a changing work environment. I did become much stronger in k8's at a lower level than I was expecting and I did learn a fair amount of gcp.
I'm not dissatisfied with what I accomplished this year. I become a much stronger technologist through roundabout ways and kept learning things which were useful for work. However it is funny to look back and realize I thought I would have all this time to grind azure. Honestly what happened was likely better.
It's time to look forward for what I want to accomplish in 2026. However I want to attach some caveats to these goals.
without further adieu