My 2025 in Review
Personal Projects, Travel and of course work results in 2025.
It becomes a good tradition to conclude the year results. It provides an overview on everything done during the year, grants the feeling of accomplishment and inspires for the future achievements. I encourage you to write one as well!
This review focuses on work aspects of my life, but touches upon personal topics too. The post is structured from the least impactful to the most impactful stuff.
Personal Projects
YouTube Channel
Yes, I have one! Find the Architecture Weekly Channel here. This year I don’t see much progress unfortunately despite releasing some bangers. For example, I managed to talk to Neal Ford himself, record a video of How AI unlocks the super-power of lightning fast delivery with Misha Druzhinin, discuss the Role of Decision Making in Software Architecture with Andrew Harmel Law. The view count stays flat as well as subscribers number:
The problem with the channel is the lack of time: I have at least 3 good ideas for the videos and I even have the content - but never have energy and time to put those videos into the recording. I even stopped paying for Descript because I don’t have a chance to work on videos anymore. I hope I will get the capacity back in 2026, but we’ll see.
System Design & Management 101 Course
This year I ran 4 cohorts of Business Oriented System Design Course. In Summer I had the biggest cohort ever: 30 people! That was awesome experience, and I am happy being helpful to people: the feedback was great!
Unfortunately, the cohort #7 only included 7 students. I am not sure what is the exact reason: may be I run out of people interested in the course in my reach, maybe I didn’t put enough effort into marketing into, maybe something else.
Any way, as well as with the video production, I can not spend time doing marketing now. However, if you’re still interested, sign up for it: if we can get 15 students, I will launch another cohort in February.
We also developed a course on the Foundations of Engineering management, but this course is for companies only. If you’re in L&D and interested - let me know!
Regarding the courses: the students expect to have a recognition for completing the course. I used to use Credly in hopes it helps to promote the course, but it had literally 0 ROI. I decided to stop using it and will use another(free) service.
Architecture Weekly Newsletter
This year I decided to give a try to Substack as an alternative platform for the newsletter. At first it took 3 month to gather 100 subscribers and another 6 months to reach 1000. However, after that the Substack subscribers exploded:
It grows almost vertical now. The actual vertical line you see on the graph is a result of moving subscribers from my personal website - as the growth there stalled for years. Now the newsletter sits at 4,851 people and growing everyday. I even got 5 paid supporters which feels amazing!
I bet the reason for such growth is the sharing feature of the platform and it’s recommendation capability. I will definitely continue doing the newsletters adding the specials every couple of weeks. Recently I published How AI helped to transform infrastructure at Supplied AI; half a year ago I posted My first 30 days as a startup CTO. Looks like it’s time for a “My first half a year as a startup CTO” :)
TL;DR: newsletter is doing fine - I wish I could spend more time on it, but I will elaborate on the issue further.
Travel
There is a proven scientific phenomena that with age the perceived pace of time increases: the older you are, the more things become routine, and routine means time flies fast. The way how to fight it? More new stuff! And travel indeed a way to do that.
Typically I would go to couple of short vacations a year and probably one local go at a weekend. This year was different hitting 7 different travel locations!
The first trip was in February flying to Tenerife. We go there for a second time already and it’s well deserved: mild climate, relatively low prices and stunning locations like Loro Parc, Jungle Park and of course the largest european sun observatory due to 350 sunny days annually with the best air quality. Besides the Teide volcano, this is the top place to visit!
Second vacation was to Turkey which was realatively boring. What was not boring though at all - all the other my trips!
Switzerland
In March Johann and I went to the Start summit. This is the conference for startups mostly: startups, investors, and infrastructure companies gather together to share the ideas, find partners and indeed raise money. Our goal was to pitch our Supplied AI startup to raise the round.
The conference happens in Saint-Gallen, Switzerland, an hour trip from Zürich. I’ve been to Switzerland before - to Geneve and CERN in particular - but never to this part of the country. The biggest impression you get there: it’s safe, it’s beautiful and super-expensive. Our week-long vacation in Turkey cost me the same as the trip to Zürich for 3 days!
But the trip was successful: after talking to 50+ investors we managed to secure a pre-seed 1.6M round with 3 european funds. But more on it later :)
Helsinki
There was a trip to Riga in September, but it was not memorable; however in November I paid a visit to Slush conference which is another huge startup event. 13,000 people, hundreds of companies, stellar speakers(Marcus Villig - CEO of Bolt - included) and unbelievable atmosphere of entrepreneurship definitely worth attending. The goal of the trip was to find partners, potential investors and of course - clients. I spent several days preparing for the conferences looking for the relevant contacts and then both days talking to all sorts of people: energy marketplaces, waste management companies, peer-to-peer lending platforms, investment funds and so on!
The highlight of the trip was indeed meeting the investors in person. Yeah, you read this right, we secured the fund totally remote and only meet the investors in person much later!
So Helsinki trip was a blast indeed!
Stokholm
The last trip of the year was a flight to Stockholm. A beautiful old city, modern districts, a Christmas fairy and amazing museums - a worthy place to visit. One of the biggest highlights is indeed the Vasa Museum where you can witness a 17th century ship which has drown minutes after setting sail due to insufficient design effort and lack of experience of building massive ships. The ship rose from the sea bed half a century ago and now anyone can take a look at it and study it’s history.
Work
This is a biggest year in my work life ever. I spent near 18 years working as a typical employee: in the early years I would right scripts and eventually production code; later I designed software products and managed entire engineering departments. But the last 5 years felt awkward. You know, when everything seems fine but you still lack something invisible which unsettles you?
Well, I finally figured out the trouble: I needed to stop being an employee and become a founder. Although Supplied began in 2024, I transitioned to the full time in the early 2025 and now lead the technical aspect of our startup. The transition came to several important mind shifts.
Not my job? Not anymore!
In a corporate environment you have a pretty defined function: as an engineer you develop features and fix bugs; as a manager you handle teams; as a software architect you design systems.
In a startup it’s so different as day and night. As a co-founder you handle hiring and paper-work, software architecture and tiny bug fixes, selling the product and handling vendors, researching the market and adopting new tools.
One of the biggest challenge is the right allocation of my time, and I am yet to say I mastered it. My colleagues tell me there is frequently a lack of my time invested in certain topics and I definitely agree - a point to improve next year.
The workload is so intense I lack the time for other activities. As I already mentioned I barely upload any videos to the YouTube channel; I don’t actively start the new courses cohorts and definitely I don’t market them. But people still apply, so may be you want to apply too :)
The only thing that saves my sanity is indeed the AI leverage which deserves it’s own chapter.
AI in Work Life
As I mentioned many times in various articles in talks, we do leverage AI in almost every aspect of what we do. We use summarisation in HubSpot, we create Proof of Concepts using AI, we leverage meeting assistants and indeed AI helps us building features with the velocity never seen before. Some of the examples:
AI helped to generate a big part of our migration to Infrastructure-as-Code
We created several proof-of-concepts for the new features of our solution like Data Orchestration
We wrote the boilerplate for significant features like Fivetran integration, New Report generation and many others
We fixed countless tiny problems just by tagging Cursor in Linear issues.
To throw in some statistics:
I made a conclusion we’re not only AI-first company, we actually won’t be able to make the revenue we do several years ago. Raiding the wave!
While developing huge functionality, we began to land bigger clients with wider geography. We landed the clients from Ireland, the US, the UK and other locations. Looking forward to the year!
Summary( or TL;DR)
I became an official CTO & Co-Founder at Supplied AI
We raised a 1.6 million euro pre-seed round
I traveled like never before
We built more than I built in any other year in my career
The newsletter reached all-time-high.
Sounds like a solid year, how was yours?
Very inspiring and motivating people to do something new rather than corporate jobs.