2025 Retrospective: AI, Teams, Travel, and New Challenges

The year, of course, flew by very quickly.

Looking retrospectively at any date of the past year, I think that there simply was not a single calm day. Every month was filled with something completely different. Either we are trying to understand how long programmers will be needed in their classic form, or we are swearing at cloud providers because of reduced limits and the inability to complete a task quickly. Here I am standing near Hogwarts at Universal Studios Japan, and here I am telling schoolchildren about my path to IT.

Vibe coding is your friend

When I gave a talk about AI at BeeTech last year, my main thought was that the chat interface itself with access to LLM is a game-changer, but what really brought back the passion for programming and creating something with my own hands to me and hundreds of other people was agent programming.

When I moved into management, I thought that I would have enough time to write code outside of working hours, but the specifics of the work and the increasing workload of my calendar put an end to the constant development of anything.

Agent programming (and in some places vibe coding) solved the time problem for me and, especially, the white sheet problem. Still, as a manager, I can more effectively manage a pack of middle-level specialists in my terminal 😁

And I really like that I can pick up some old developments, ideas, breathe life into them, quickly test hypotheses or do something useful for work.

Yes, this is a new skill and quite a serious paradigm shift in the development itself. But if we stop learning, we stop growing.

People, people, people

The second year of work at Bereke Bank has passed.

Taking into account the versatility of my current position (where I am simultaneously Head, PM, IC and much more), there is an understanding that without strong leaders in my direction it is simply impossible.

This year my team at the Bank has undergone minor changes. On the one hand, some of my excellent guys were transferred to different companies, on the other hand, you and I previously discussed that everyone leaves sooner or later, and our task is to adapt to this, find new opportunities and people. We adapt, change and move on.

Special thanks to the guys, thanks to whom we heard about the Bank at almost every meetup and conference this year. Next year we will try to capture even more :)

Work-life integration

It is often difficult for me to tell which of what I do is work and which is simple life. This year I integrated work into my life even more, rather than maintaining a work-life balance. It is important for me that the teams and I myself can work asynchronously, minimally blocking each other, but respecting my colleagues, I still schedule messages with ideas and thoughts for the next day, rather than writing to them at 9 pm :)

Still, to become a market differentiator, it is not enough to just work, you need to achieve the best, be autonomous and challenge yourself.

Sometimes I wonder whether I have time to live in general and what is considered a full life, but after self-reflection I come to the conclusion that my life is what I have come to over all these years and it is worth admitting that every year it only gets better.

I think that next year will be even more eventful, the goals and strategy for the year have been set, and we will implement them.

Happy New Year, friends.