2025 In Reviewv1.11.0
The year of Sabbatical. Reflecting on the things that I did during this year, the overarching theme was doing all the things that I had always wished I could do if I had the time. Not having to worry about money nor external commitments forced me to self motivate in ways that I had never done before. “No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it, without physical, economic or social penalty.”1 This meant that I was constantly questioning what is important and who is important in my life. I discovered that what is important is what I decide is important. This sounds easier than it is but I had to figure out a way to escape my sphere of influence that instilled certain ideas in me (very hard) and learn how to keep myself motivated (very very hard). Being surrounded by the right people helped me a lot in both and had the effect of creating some very fulfilling moments. So for 2026 I will get better at deciding what is important, how to stay motivated and surround myself with the right people.
Sabbatical
I had been planning to take a sabbatical for several years. My idea was that as soon as my investment income exceeded my expenses with some wiggle room for emergencies and unforeseen events, I would hand in my resignation. I reached that milestone in 2023, but it took me almost all of 2024 to work up the courage to quit. I recalculated my expenses and income more than twenty times during that year. I imagined every possible emergency including the need for a sudden epidectomy, improbable lawsuits, and global market collapse. I contemplated starting a fund for said emergencies, which would have forced me to stay working for a few more years. After discussing my hesitation with a few friends, I came to the realization that I was dealing with loss aversion. I wanted to let go of a fat paycheck in a terrible tech market and for what? Are the eight hours that I would gain more valuable to me than what I was charging for them? Can I do better with my time than my employer could do with it? Will I look back in regret a year from now?
As a last attempt to test the strength of my desire2 I sought novelty, so I switched teams at work. By the end of that week my desire won so I put in my resignation and with that came the final test. The director of engineering in my new department offered me a substantial bonus if I were to stay and complete the project at hand. That made me pause and think for about three seconds, but I just could not see myself delaying things anymore. I recalculated my expenses and passive income for the twenty first time and declined his offer. I honored my contractual obligation of staying for a couple of months to delegate my responsibilities to a few team members and started my sabbatical on Dec 21st 2024.
The beginning of the sabbatical was highjacked with a couple of heavy feelings: The first was that I was being left behind by my friends who were still making tons of money and moving forward in their careers. The second was this sense of lack of structure and having no deadlines to meet. I poured over my journal to address the first and put things into perspective. The escape velocity from the gravity money is immense, but once I was out, it felt like escaping from a make believe world that I had been living in my whole life. A whole section of my brain was freed up. How will I use it? This is something that I will think about more as the months pass by, but I think I’ll just keep doing what I have always done, but with a source of motivation that is not financially driven. For the second, I had to build my own structure, something that I had done before when I built my first company. It had been a while since I switched from being an entrepreneur to working in the corporate world, but it was easy respawn the old structure and self motivate.
What’s next?
I’m not calling this a sabbatical anymore. A mini retirement is more apt because I’m not sure when I’ll come out of it and in what capacity. Will I go back to the corporate world or build another company?
Books
I spent the first few months of my sabbatical on books. I always dreamed of having all the time in the world to read books and learn from them, so I started with that. My primary list of books was very meta so it made sense to front load it. What that experience showed me was that I’m able to take on any project and hyper focus on it until I completed it. Even at the expense of my mental health. With reading, I was focusing on one subject for several weeks, then publishing my notes on it, and then picking up the next subject and repeating the process. By the end of a couple of months, I didn’t want to read anything anymore. It seemed like the creative part of my mind and the learning part get tired separately. I can learn for a few hours and produce for a few hours fine, but cannot do either for more than that. For me to be the most energized, I have to have a mix of learning and producing during the day. With my craft, hyper focus is bearable because there are usually multiple context switches throughout the day between learning and producing so I rarely felt any burnout.
Thinking about the day to day effects of reading those books more than eight months ago I can say that it was a productive activity. I read differently than I used to. I’m more critical of my writing and cognizant of the importance of brevity. And I can remember certain category of things much better than before (people names and numbers). I also took detailed notes that I can refer to in order to refresh my memory.
In the future, I would interlace reading non-fiction with a related activity that I’m involved in so theory and practice go hand in hand. E.G. I would read On Writing Well as I was writing my book, not as a prerequisite to writing my book. Get messy quick and organize later.
What I’ve been enjoying lately is listening to non-fiction and history books as audiobooks and slow-reading non-fiction books. If I find a non-fiction book interesting enough, I’ll publish its notes here.
Tango
When I finished reading my list of books around April, I switched gears to submerging myself in the world of tango. I wanted to frequent milongas all night and not worry about waking up late. Something I had always craved while working. I knew that I was going to face many challenges in tango so I started writing a book with the idea that it would keep me on track and help generate insights as I grew in the dance. It would also serve as a memoir that I could revisit in my older years. I thought I could finish it before the end of the year, but that was an arbitrary deadline not grounded in what it takes to learn tango. The chapters on musicality and technique will require a lot more work and time before I can have anything substantial to write about them.
I started going to my favorite milongas every week for a full year without the pressure of having to leave early. It got to a point where some nights I was literally surrounded with friends and couldn’t keep up with dance requests. As fun as this was, the next day I was barely functional, operating with low energy and a bad mood. I couldn’t get myself to write nor practice until the following day. I was reminded of a forgotten fact about myself that I’m highly social, but have low tolerance for stimulation especially at night. I had always been that way, but forgot about it because my lifestyle had naturally adapted to my body. But with my sabbatical, I was putting myself in new environments and situations that I hadn’t in many years. I’m not comfortable exchanging a few hours of fun with 24 hours of discomfort even though I got used to it. This limited my dancing to daytime milongas and with friends outside of socials. This is a good reminder for me to always test my cravings and desires before committing to them.
I went through multiple teachers this year trying to find one that I felt I could trust to make me a better dancer and whose teaching style fit my learning style. My method was to take ten classes with each teacher to get a deep feel for how they taught. After the tenth class, I had to make the hard decision to move on if neither of these conditions were met. It was hard moving on from these relationships because even though many didn’t fit my criteria, they were wonderful people with whom I felt like we had developed the beginnings of a friendship. Luckily, in October I accidentally stumbled on a teacher that exceeded my expectations and I have a feeling that I’ll be under his mentorship for a long while.
I spent a lot of time on exploring musicality. I took a musicality course that broke down musical elements in tango music. Followed by a musical plays course that layered steps on top of the musical patterns. Both were useful in showing what’s possible, but I realized that I didn’t have the technique to express them. I spent a lot of time working with teachers that couldn’t tell me nor show me what was missing for me to reach that level of expressiveness. Once I learned, with the help of my mentor, that I had to rewire my body to be able to reach those levels, my focus was redirected to technique. I landed on a book called The Tango Manual that helped me organize my body and how it related to technique in categories which could be worked on directly.
Whenever I felt like I had enough material to complete a chapter in my memoir, I stopped all learning and poured into writing. At first I thought that the earlier chapters would be the hardest because they dealt with psychological hangups and with exploring my weaknesses and natural disposition. I felt vulnerable writing them. I imagined the later chapters that deal with the dance itself would be easier and more tutorial-like. I was wrong because developing the technique required to dance well takes a lot of time and practice. I could not write about a subject that I cannot show at least some level of considerable ability in it.
The year was mostly an exploratory year in which I finally started to understand the structure of tango, how to find a good teacher and how much more work I had to do in order to enjoy myself more in the dance.
So what’s next for tango?
- I’m switching gears to mostly hands on and less theoretical work. This will be in the form of practice with professionals a few times a week combined with private lessons with my mentor.
- Codify all the acquired knowledge of this year into a manageable system to integrate into my education. They’re currently in the form of handwritten notes.
- Finish the memoir in 2026
Ditching Qwerty
My third attempt to ditch Qwerty stuck this time. What kept making me go back to Qwerty was how much work was involved in switching layouts. I have so much muscle memory around Vim and Keyboard Maestro shortcuts that the initial slowdown of a switch would have degraded my work performance. This time, I didn’t have any external obligations that I had to abide by so I kept at it since September putting in at least 30 minutes a day on keybr.com and on Monkeytype. As of December, I’m starting to get 40wpm at 98% accuracy on the graphite layout.
What’s next?
On Jan 1st 2026, I’m going graphite cold turkey on my main computer and once I can code on that, will switch other computers to it. Fun!
Switching to Neovim
I switched from vim (after 20 years) to Zed then [back] to neovim. I ditched my .vimrc and started from scratch with a lua config based on kickstart.
What’s next?
My plan for the beginning of 2026 is to complete my terminal plugin as a way to break in the graphite layout (in extreme anger). I never stopped coding during my sabbatical. I always found excuses to build something. I’ve come to accept that building with software above all else is the thing that excites me the most. That’s going to take the bulk of 2026 with other projects taking second place.
Music
My 2025 Playlist. My favorite 2025 song is Clay Pigeons.
Social Media & Addictions
One of this year’s experiments was not to post anything on social media. I then extended that to cancelling The Criterion Channel, my favorite streaming service, and I disabled history and muted everyone that I follow on all platforms. This change alone has freed me to learn a new keyboard layout and code in my free time. I had no idea how dangerous and insidious these things are. One could lose their whole life plugged into the virtual world. I will extend this into 2026, but will post once a year to update my friends that don’t read my /now page.
Buenos Aires After Two Years
I love it so much that I’m working on getting my residency (more exciting news about this in 2026). I walk and bike everywhere and rarely use cars. The people are loving and warm. The ice cream, pizza, pasta, and steaks are amazing. I’m excited to plant roots here.