2025 Year's End

Year-in-review essays permit a certain amount of navel-gazing, but 2025 resists the usual warm retrospection. I started the year at my grandmother’s funeral and ended it with a dislocated shoulder on the ski slopes of Chongli, China.

Travels

I spent close to 50 days on the road this year.

I learnt to snowboard in Val Thorens in April. The spring slopes were icy and unforgiving, which made falling down repeatedly a miserable experience for my arse. It clicked on the final day, when we started racing each other and I stopped overthinking every turn. By the end, I was finishing blues and greens without trouble. One of my roommates fractured his arm that same afternoon. At least that’ll never happen to me, I thought.

Eight months later, I dislocated my shoulder in Chongli, one run after finishing my first black, on a baby slope. The resort was genuinely excellent, better than the European ones I’ve been to, which made spending the rest of the trip in a sling all the more annoying.

China surprised me. Western media had primed me for some kind of panopticon, but I found something more mundane. Shanghai was lovely and the food a pleasant surprise. Turns out I prefer northern Chinese cuisine¹ to southern: it’s more lamb-heavy, unpretentious. Beijing was too cold, too grey, and had too little going on outside the tourist sites. Reminded me of Moscow.

The standout was San Sebastián. I went solo and discovered the particular pleasure of wandering between pintxo bars with no plan. I loved the food², the views, and the people. Bilbao was forgettable. The Guggenheim in particular was a letdown as I’ve never enjoyed art that exists primarily to be explained.

From Spain I flew to the UK to see Anna, who’d left in September to do her master’s at King’s. We did London, Bristol and Bath. London has always felt like a second home. Londoners are inexplicably kind to me.

I started carrying a Fujifilm X100V on the Europe trip. I used to dismiss photography as a distraction from experience, but I was wrong. It forces you to actually look at the details you’d otherwise walk past. It’s also nice to have something to show people afterwards.

Honourable mentions:

• Kuala Lumpur: The hojicha cheesecake from OGA Tea & Dining.
• Malacca: Jonker street cafes and Atlantic Nonya HQ were good.
• Faro: Only got three hours of my time, but the pierogis from My’oMeu were excellent.
• Lisbon: Pastéis de Belém, of course.
• Bristol: Nadu reminded me how good thosai can be. The ambience in the Cosy Club was goated.
• Bath: The Scallop Shell had the best fish and chips Anna and I have ever had.

Health

Not in the best shape of my life, but certainly fitter³ than I was in 2024. I ran the 2XU half marathon and SC 10km, both with better times than the previous year. I still don’t enjoy running, if I’m honest. Halfway through each race I find myself thinking: “why the fuck am I doing this?” And yet, I’ll probably sign up for a few more runs in 2026. There’s something to doing hard things you don’t enjoy, though I’m not sure what exactly.

I didn’t climb a mountain this year, breaking a streak I’d kept since 2023. Had my eye on Mount Kinabalu (4,095m) but never made it happen. The shoulder willing, I’ll be back on the slopes by March, and I’m eyeing a marathon or Ironman 70.3 for later in the year.

Work & School

I graduated with a master’s in maths from NUS in July. A good GPA felt like a minor victory given my undergrad was in engineering. The ceremony itself didn’t move me much. The real winners were my parents, who missed my undergrad graduation to COVID and weren’t about to miss this one.

I interned as a quant at a bank for the first half of the year. My manager pushed hard for me to sign a full-time offer but I turned it down. Quant work is siloed in a way that doesn’t suit me: just coding and maths, minimal interaction with people, and everything you build is abstract. I couldn’t show anyone what I was working on. Interest rate models aren’t exactly tangible.

Meanwhile, applications elsewhere were rough. I had the lowest interview-to-application ratio I’ve had since undergrad. Twice I made it to final rounds at hedge funds⁴ and got nowhere. In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t work out. There’s this Thiel line about his time at a law firm: from the outside, everybody wanted to get in; from the inside, everybody wanted to get out. Finance is the same. So much of your identity gets wrapped up in winning the competition to get there that it’s hard to ask whether you actually want to be there.

So what the fuck do I want? I want to build things I’m proud of and ship them to people who actually use them. Something I can point at and say: I made that. Work that’s messy and high-context and illegible to HR departments.

Side Projects

I rebuilt this website this year and I’m pretty proud of how it has turned out. Everyone should have one of these, if only to have a corner of the internet that’s actually yours. I’ve gotten some lovely comments from strangers since launching it, proof that putting things out there works, even when it feels self indulgent.

I moved from a shared rental in Tanjong Rhu to a two-bedroom unit in Punggol Coast, just me. It was a fresh apartment, so I had to handle the plumbing, drilling, retrofitting, etc. The place is incredible. I look out over the sea from my desk and it’s quiet for Singapore, except for the F-15s that serve as my morning alarm.

On the reading front, only two books! This has been my worst year since I started tracking on Goodreads in 2017. Sometime around 2024, reading started to feel like work—writing marginalia, forcing myself to review post-completion, etc. Maybe the fix here is to just read casually again, without trying to remember everything.

Other stuff:

• Built KeepIt, an Apple Vision Pro goalkeeping game.
• Got my drone pilot licence from CAAS.
• Shipped Teletable to feature-complete.
• Picked up functional programming and Haskell.
• Got much better at Python (LeetCode monkey) and the command line.

Coda

I’m excited for 2026. I feel in my bones there’s good stuff ahead. No blackpilling, no dooming. We’re all gonna make it.

Thank you to my parents, who spoil me. To Anna, for sticking with me. To the people from Twitter who have been supportive despite never meeting me. To the folks at my workplace who taught me the ropes when I was lost. To new friends made on trips this year, and old ones who reconnected. And to you, for reading all this far.

Have a wonderful 2026 and see you on the other side.