#annual-review — Public Fediverse posts

Adamsdesk Review of The Year 2025

Join me in a review of reflecting upon achievements with statistics, what can be improved moving forward, and mental health for the year of 2025.

https://www.adamsdesk.com/posts/adamsdesk-review-2025/

#blog #adamsdesk #AnnualReview

Annual Review – 2025

2025 is a year of “Let it go”. I became slow, scattered. But made sure some important things are done. Compared to previous years, 2025 is “less done year”. But it’s ok. Life has to move on, with learnings from the past.

Here is a review of my 2025.

Failures first

• Started No sugar life. Downgraded to less sugar in 4 days. Then dropped to regular sugar in 7 days.
• No proper exercise
• Bad sleep cycles
• No regular reading
• Spent too much time on social media, doom scrolling, short form videos
• Very less contributions to Kaniyam.com and FreeTamilEbooks.com
• Not giving enough time to learn french and car driving
• Missing to be in regular touch with friends, family and relatives.
• Missed journaling many days
• Missed many blog posts and weekly notes
• Missed to complete the Python book in Tamil
• Missed to write about kubernetes in Tamil
• Very less contributions to Wikipedia and openstreetmaps

Many small wins

Cooking

Self-hosting

• iyal.kaniyam.ca – A Tamil Spellchecker ( in development )
• blogs.kaniyam.ca – A blog aggregator to read the writings and git activities of my OpenSource Friends
• catalog.kaniyam.ca – A Portal for all the tamil books catalog
• crm.kaniyam.ca – VTigerCRM
• grafana.kaniyam.ca – Dashboard for Domain Name Expiry monitoring
• photos.kaniyam.ca – Few of my photos shared here
• social.kaniyam.ca – my homegrown social network with gotosocial
• french.kaniyam.ca – A static website with my french learning notes
• files.kaniyam.ca – To share files with others
• tamilpulavar.kaniyam.ca – A tamil dictionary website developed by Ramasamy Duraipandi
• tamilcorpus.kaniyam.ca – A tamil Corpus search website developed by Abirami

KanchiLUG friend Hariharan is working on revamping a website for ezhil programming language. Will host it soon.

Will host a few more websites and applications this year.

Happy to see all these websites are running from a 15 years old desktop, at my home, under my working table.

Photography && Videography

I use DarkTable for bulk editing Photos and Kdenlive for editing videos. Both are Free/Open Source Software. They can create all the magics like any other paid software.

Python class for kids and adults

Had many weekly technical discussions with friends around. Have to resume them in 2026 too.

Online meetings

• Tolkappiyam Python Meet on Saturdays
• KanchiLUG meet on Sundays
• Few Islandora meets
• Few Kubernetes meets
• Few emacs meets
• TossConf planning meets
• Tamil Software Freedom Day meets

Physical meetings

• Mississauga Comic Con
• Weekly Chess Hours for kids
• ThiruKural conf – https://photos.app.goo.gl/3xFfkX253GU2ATzH7
• Tolkapiyam celebration event – https://photos.app.goo.gl/QSj66DbV28PcmR9S7
• Toronto Tamil Book fair – https://photos.app.goo.gl/QPHDeBNFZEbqipEt9
• Run for Periyar – https://photos.app.goo.gl/pzRCqmLNHV3JYqqv7
• Bike Day 2025 – https://photos.app.goo.gl/iZ8Z1vjhZ9FMifaP9
• Magical Holiday Seasons Celebrations 2025 – https://photos.app.goo.gl/dPWgw7byQVH7VKC26

French class

Living with Emacs Editor

Things purchased

• Lost Google Pixel 9 phone. Then, bought Samsung s23 phone.
• Eufy X10 Pro Omni robot . This is the best purchase for the home. It does cleaning, mopping daily, automatically
• Kobo reader. This is 10 inch eink screen ebook reader. Reading the PDF and epub files are easy with this.
• Hyundai Tucson Preferred Car. Nithya gifted this car for our marriage day. She got G driving license here. She is driving and taking us to many places. I will learn car driving in 2026.

A short video of the moments of getting car is here – https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dHAngrvygPw

Places visited

• wet n wild
• lion safari
• Toronto reference library and few more libraries
• Niagara
• High Falls
• Wasaga Beach
• BlueMountains

Winter break was so fun with a trip to Montreal City. Visited few churches and Museums there. The 600 KM long winter drive was full of adventure.

Recording home accounts with KMyMoney

Books and Movies

Office Works

New projects

• Islandora for Digital Collections.
• Tamil books Catalogs
• Python articles series in tamil
• Iyal spellchecker
• Opds catalog for FreeTamilEbooks.com
• A Prometheus/Grafana based monitoring system to show the expiry date of many website domain names.
• French notes as static website with text to audio
• Personal RSS aggregator to read content from many websites

2026 Goals

• Exercise regularly
• Complete Iyal spellchecker
• Complete the tamil books catalog
• Complete Python book in Tamil
• Complete the book on Life Hacks in Canada
• Learn French
• Contribute to TolkaPy Project
• Less Social media and videos
• Read and Publish more books

Hope your 2025 was good. write about in your blog and share here.

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#2025 #annualReview

Morning all!

I just published my November newsletter "Is it now already?"

👉🏻 https://www.worklifepsych.news/is-it-now-already/

#reflection #AnnualReview #ArrivalFallacy #Planning

It's #AnnualReview time at work. And because I've bounced around a few teams over the last 12 months, I've got a bunch of colleague feedback forms to do.

And guess what - every single one of them is getting a *glowing* review and a mark of "Exceeds expectations" for everything.

Because I'm not a fucking #Snitch

If you guys only knew how much of a faker I am on nearly every topic, but especially my career. How did I get here? idk honestly. But I LOVE pulling the wool over my peers' eyes all year then reaping the monetary rewards come annual review time.

I'd like to thank my negligent hiring manager and low-performing teammates for making all this fakery easy and so, so successful.

#impostorsyndrome #success #thankyou #career #fakeit #ruse #corporate #annualreview

It's annual review time.

How many of you have a practice you like to follow? Mine shifts from year to year depending on what I need & energy level.

For this year, I think my review is going to be more focused on what I learned and what I want to hang onto/let go of, than spelling out a bunch of goals for '24. I need a year where I'm not chasing a bunch of goals. I need more space this year. That's my goal.

Here is a post on #annualreview resources I put together: https://www.gatheringinlight.com/2019/12/30/are-you-ready-to-do-your-annual-review-heres-some-tips-and-resources/

It’s that time of year where people reflect on how their year went. I’d say this year has been a really mixed bag as my life has changed and transformed post-PhD study and my job has transformed significantly post funding at work. There were lots of exciting achievements and events but a little stagnation on some fronts. I hope that next year I can focus a little more on some of those areas.

Becoming a Doctor…

I’d say my biggest achievement this year was finally completing my PhD after 7 years of part time study after having my thesis corrections accepted in February. I began my PhD in Natural Language Processing with the University of Warwick in 2015 while I was still at IBM. During that time a lot has changed, both for me personally and in technology and machine learning. The last few years have been a huge challenge but I’m really happy that they’ve paid off.

Unfortunately I was sick during my graduation ceremony but I graduated in absentia and received my doctoral certificate in the mail. I had a lot of fun updating my title to Dr from Mr on as many official documents as I can and repeatedly making the joke about “is there a doctor in the house? Yes but I can’t help with your medical emergency.”

I am excited to continue working on my academic projects as a sideline and will be staying in touch with my supervisors at the University of Warwick, Aberystwyth University and the Alan Turing Institute.

Public Appearances & Talks

I’ve done reasonably well for public speaking gigs this year. In April I was invited to give a talk about applied AI at Rare Earth Digital’s Debrief event in Nantwich, Cheshire. This gave me an opportunity to put together a slide deck that incorporated my experience of building machine learning and AI solutions over the last decade and some some cautionary tales about LLMs that I picked up from folks like Simon WIllison.

I then did something of a “tour”, presenting similar material at a local Science Cafe, an event for KTP associates at the University of Essex and privately for my wife’s team at her workplace.

Earlier in December I was invited by a member of my PhD cohort to join a panel discussion about AI in industry. The audience were made up of heavy hitters from a diverse set of companies and industries. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of discourse and the healthy cynicism that the audience had about the blind application of GPT and LLMs.

In October, I also attended an awards ceremony, accepting the trophy for best emerging tech firm on behalf of my company.

Work Achievements

This year my company went from being pretty much fully bootstrapped to taking on some investment money. This was a new experience for pretty much all of the senior leadership and the experience has been very exciting and enlightening and at times quite uncomfortable. It was great as it meant that we could move offices, give out pay rises and recruit but It’s also been a big change of pace and focus for me with the engineering team almost doubling in size. In late September we had a leadership team retreat and we’ve been working on ways to improve the way that our product team work together to make things super sleak.

I’ve found that the hype around generative AI hasn’t impacted what we do as much as you might expect. As I wrote earlier in the year, NLP is about a lot more than just LLMs and we need to provide reliable systems that don’t hallucinate about stuff. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems in this space and much more efficient ways to solve them than throwing GPT-4 at it.

Projects and Open Source Contributions

By far the biggest success I had this year was Turbopilot which was hugely successful when I first launched it in April thanks to a tweet by Clem Delangue. It was really interesting to play with llama.cpp and learn about quantizing models, not just because of all the LLM stuff but because this technique can be applied to other types of models to make them smaller and more efficient too. I stopped developing Turbopilot in september when it was clear that other, better-staffed projects were doing a better job. I wrote about it at the time. Turbopilot was then featured in a keynote at Intel’s 2023 Innovate conference after I spent a little time coordinating with a couple of their engineers in order to help get it running smoothly on intel CPUs.

I’ve also made a couple of smaller contributions this year:

• I built an extension for FreshRSS which allows it to solve Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA-style challenges in order to retrieve RSS feeds that are inexplicably behind bot detection systems (RSS is supposed to be automated so I’m not quite sure why you’d do this but meh.
• I went through a phase of using Dendron to manage my notes before that project went into dormancy and I switched back to Logseq. I built a plugin that syncs your public hypothesis annotations with your local filesystem from inside VSCode. It works with Foam too.

Misc Personal Stats

According to my bookwyrm stats, this year I read 11, nearly 12, books. That is a disappointingly low number for me. Last year I managed nearly double that. My favourite books this year have been the Dredd: The Early Years (non-affiliate link) series which are properly pulpy/cheesy sci-fi and William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (non-affiliate link) definitely a bit of a Cyberpunk theme going on. My favourite non-fic book was Sprawl Trilogy (I spent a bit of time test driving their AI DJ earlier in the year and that led me to discover some amazing new bands. Of particular note, The Last Dinner Party who I can’t stop telling people about. I tried out Jungle’s new album, it’s not my favourite but there are some catchy tracks on there. I recently updated my music recommendations page over on my digital garden with some recommendations.

Mrs R and I have retained our Cineworld memberships and been to see a few films this year. That said I still haven’t gotten around to the Barbenheimer experience that was all the rage earlier in the year. I recently saw Wonka which I actually enjoyed quite a lot. It had a lot of actors from British sitcoms like Peep Show and Ghosts.

Habits and Fitness

I’ve been a fair bit better at journaling and meditating this year but I’ve definitely gained some weight this year which is unfortunate. I was probably at peak fitness towards the beginning of 2021 having spent most of lockdown eating healthily and regularly going for walks. This year we’ve been eating less well and doing less exercise and I’ve got the “dad bod” to prove it. I’ve had a few conversations with other people about getting back on the fitness train next year including some colleagues at work and Kev Quirk who is trying to avoid being a fat boy at 40. I’m a few years away from 40 but I am going to try and do a similar “fat boy at 35” challenge.

I have made a few weeknotes this year but felt a little self-conscious about publishing something every week, particularly during weeks where it’s felt like not much has happened. I might re-jig the format next year and switch to private weekly reviews and monthly blog reviews more like Jan-Lukas.

Both Mrs R and I have found the pace of this year pretty challenging and it’s had a knock on effect on our personal projects around the house and our general health and fitness. Hopefully next year these are some areas that we can work on together.

Travel and Family

I’ve managed to do a fair bit of travelling around this year and seen a lot more of my family than since pre-covid. In May we took a week-long trip up to the Lake District around the time of my birthday. At the same time, we popped in to visit my parents in the midlands and my dad, who has been taking flying lessons, took us up in a small aircraft which was really exciting.

While we were up in the Lake district we got to visit Kendal Museum where my late grandfather was the custodian in the 1990s. It was great to be back there as I have many treasured memories of Kendal and the surrounding lakes. We couldn’t pass up an opportunity to recreate an old photo.

In June we went on a cruise around the Mediterranean with my dad and his wife to celebrate his 60th birthday. We stopped off at Pisa, Corsica, Marseilles, Palamos and a few others. We briefly visited St Tropez and I was a bit taken aback by the ostentatious and inauthentic display of wealth in the town.

Then, in September, we also did a beach and chill holiday in Cyprus where we spent a lot of time reading, swimming and drinking cocktails. We spent a lot of time making friends with the local stray cats of Cyprus who we wanted to smuggle home with us.

I have found that I’ve been ill quite a lot this year. From about mid-February until the end of April I had coughs, colds and COVID almost every other week. This has prevented us from visiting family and friends quite as often as I’d have liked this year. In particular, I would have liked to have visited some of my old school friends, one of whom is expecting their first child early in the year. We also had to cancel some concerts and shows due to illness and dangerous weather. Although it’s not necessarily my fault that I got ill or that there was a raging storm, next year I hope to rectify this where possible by visiting as many of my friends as possible. I’m hoping that our fitness goals will also help with the whole “being sick” thing.

Next Year

Rather than making a separate new year post, let me make some predictions and set some goals here.

I’d summarise by saying that getting fitter and looking myself a little bit more are the main things that I’m aiming for in 2024.

I’m also keen to improve on my existing journaling and planning habits. I recently joined the Ness Labs community and I’m keen to try and take part in some of the workshops and meetups around these topics.

I’ve enjoyed all of my public appearances and speaking in 2023 and I hope to continue with these sorts of activities next year. I’d like to get more engaged with the BCS (of which I am a member but have yet to go to any events) and join more meetups and events locally.

I think it’d be nice to make more progress on jobs around the house next year too, we’ve slacked off somewhat in 2023 and we have a few maintenance and decorating type jobs that we need to tick off the list.

I’ve published a fair few posts and articles on this site in 2023. I’d like to keep this up in the new year, possibly changing from weekly to monthly reviews as mentioned above and also writing more about stuff I’m working on.

Happy end of the year everyone, hope to speak to you all in 2024!

https://brainsteam.co.uk/2023/12/22/annual-review-2023/

#annualReview

"Yeah, I know lots of companies do it, but the fact that lots of companies do it does not make it a good idea."

https://estherderby.com/an-alternative-to-the-annual-review-originally-published-in-2004/ #management #annualreview

"Basically, avoid canceling meetings in an effort to show how important you are in another sphere and then the employee evaluation process starts to make a lot more sense."

https://tedbauer.medium.com/companies-now-remove-the-employee-performance-review-and-replace-it-with-nothing-lol-e78f467d18b7 #management #annualreview #employeeevaluation

In my latest blog post I use Derrida to think about annual reviews and other rituals.

>> Dangerous texts: Vajrayana practice texts, technical manuals, and your annual review <<

Derrida’s concepts of logocentrism and text as the dangerous supplement offer a way to understand the strange ways some texts are held back until you’ve heard them out loud

https://rinsemiddlebliss.com/posts/2023-03-24-vajrayana-practice-technical-manuals-annual-review/

#blog #blogging #Derrida #logocentrism #Vajrayana #TechWriting #AnnualReview #tantra

Is it ok to stop and restart?

I enjoyed recording interviews, editing, and polishing Gravitas WINS Radio. But last year, I took a pause.

Today I released an episode after a long time. It is about conducting personal annual review. Hope it is useful to you.

open.spotify.com/episode/6SqI5Qazp7KGlIbua2xwOV

#podcasting #podcast #annualreview

I just included my #fediverse activity on my professional development list of activities for 2022. I have gathered more ideas and techniques from here than from many other events considered professional development. Can we normalize this? #academicchatter @linguistics #ProfessionalDevelopment #AnnualReview

While I don't look forward to filling out my #annualreview file every December, there are two things I appreciate about it:

1) It forces me to catalog and reflect on just how much work I completed over the course of the year and what I accomplished.

2) Reading my supervisor's review of my work is encouraging, and reminds me that I actually do good work and don't just think I do.

@academicchatter @academicsunite

can #chatgpt just write my #annualReview for me? have we figured that out yet?

A huge task achieved

Completed my Annual Review & Planning 2022-23

Tools used: Notebook (duh!), Digitized on Powerpoint (ta-daa!)

Method used: W.I.N.S Framework by @jjude

#annualreview #yearplanning

#ChristmasEve has arrived. As everything is #slowingdown, it might be a good time to #reflect the year. If you’re interested in how mine was, here is my #blog post on that topic.

https://msicc.net/my-annual-review-2022-editorial/

#yearinreview #annualreview

Our latest newsletter is out.

It's a short one, with our review of 2022, and an appeal to help us shape our 2023 activities.

https://mailchi.mp/8f2dbb14d315/help-shape-2023?e=5b8ae3d9b2

#newsletter #AnnualReview #opendata #DataScience #Python #ReaderSurvey