2025: Year in Review

2025 was a year of expansion — geographically, professionally, and personally. I traveled more than ever before, worked on some of the hardest problems I've solved so far, and spent more time with my loved ones than I ever had a chance to.

It wasn't perfect in many ways, but it was so much better than what I had imagined at the start of the year. Here's what made this year meaningful:

Career: Building Taste and Hard Things

The biggest shift this year was starting to build from scratch. I launched smoldb, a database project that's teaching me more about early design decisions than any code review ever could. Having full freedom to express my ideas is rapidly improving my programming taste.

At Qdrant, I worked on some of our most important features for our 2025 roadmap:

Read-write segregation: the foundational infrastructure powering two powerful features:
1. Multi-zone/region deployments: Seamless data replication across the globe, enabling low-latency access for users worldwide with eventual consistency and the ability to increase read replicas for higher throughput.
2. Specialized clusters: Write clusters leverage high-compute (even GPU) machines for intensive indexing, while read clusters leverage IO-optimized machines for blazing-fast search.
Tiered multi-tenancy: Allows you to isolate and independently scale your biggest customers (tenants) via dedicated shards — One of our biggest milestones this year. Watch my talk here
Major improvements to our distributed systems and storage layer in Qdrant core (consensus, shards, replication), our chaos testing infra, and the cluster manager service that I built.

I also did some AI consulting gigs where I provided strategic guidance to startups. Beyond distributed systems, I dove deep into ML (thanks Karpathy Sensei) and reinforcement learning. The best outcomes aren't visible yet, but the foundation has been laid.

The most unexpected career moments came when I received 2 inbound offers from USA companies with O1 (Extraordinary talent) visa sponsorship. While I didn't pursue them due to personal beliefs and priorities, it was a huge confidence boost — a signal that I have the option to move to the USA if I ever wanted to. 🚀

I gave talks at several places this year, including Microsoft Bangalore, PlatformCon (Virtual), PES University, and IIT Bhilai (my alma mater), covering internals of search, distributed systems and databases. Each of these opportunities were meaningful and rewarding in their own way.

Delivering my first international conference talk at DjangoConUS in Chicago was a truly unforgettable experience — the opportunity to engage with a global audience was intimidating, but it went smoother than I anticipated.

I also organized the first-ever IIT Bhilai alumni chapter meetups in Bangalore and Delhi and attended conferences like Fifth Elephant and Rust, Systems, Python meetups, where I made some acquaintances/friends.

I also wrote a deeply technical blog on reverse engineering Exa.AI architecture and infra cost with napkin math that received some positive feedback from the search community — it was encouraging to hear that people found it useful.

Travel: Overwhelming But Valuable

This was a year of frequent travel—overwhelming at times, but I don't regret any of it. I'm grateful for the privilege of visiting multiple cities and countries:

United States: Flew to Chicago for speaking at DjangoCon, followed by outings and a road trip with college friends in the US. Then I flew to San Francisco (dream come true!), where I attended lots of tech meetups, met some of my mentors, founders and VCs that I admire, and visited Stanford to catch up with a junior and a good college friend.
Europe: Qdrant offsite in Mallorca Island, Spain, followed by solo trip to Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome). Italy is now my favorite country in Europe — amazing food and culture.
India: Multiple trips across the country — family trips to North India (hometown and Delhi) and South India (Mysore, Ooty, Rameshwaram), ending the year with a beautiful Kerala trip (Kochi, Allepey, Trivandrum, Varkala).

The travel was intense and sometimes exhausting, but each trip brought something valuable: reconnecting with family, meeting mentors/friends, experiencing new cultures, and building new relationships.

Learning and Growth 💡

Beyond technical skills, this year brought several important realizations:

The joy of mastery: Building smoldb in public hasn't yielded external gains yet, but that's not why I'm doing it. I'm intrinsically motivated by the excitement of understanding all this complexity. Building from scratch forces you to make foundational decisions that expose gaps in your understanding—you can't hide behind existing abstractions. The pursuit of mastery itself is the reward, and it's accelerating my growth in ways that reading code or working within established systems never could.
Norms vs. personal beliefs: Receiving O1 visa offers was deeply validating and I'm grateful for those opportunities. The bigger lesson, though, was questioning the conventional wisdom that you need to be in SF to succeed. While location advantage is real, I realized it's not always worth the trade-offs — at least not for me, at this stage. The work I'm passionate about, the relationships I'm building, and the life I want to lead matter just as much as career optimization. Different paths work for different people, and I'm learning to trust my own rather than following what's considered the "obvious" choice.
Writing accelerates learning: Giving talks and writing publicly forced me to articulate ideas clearly, revealing what I actually understood versus what I only thought I understood. This year, I also understood the value of writing for reflection — maintaining weekly logs of what I did gave me more clarity on past and future, helping me think and plan better.
Relationships that shape us: This year's travel, meetups, and time with family and friends reminded me that relationships are investments that compound over time. The mentors who guided me, the friends I reconnected with, and the family moments I prioritized — these connections have shaped where I am today, and I want to give back to them.

What I'd Do Differently

Looking back, I wish I had:

Started building from scratch earlier — projects like smoldb are improving my programming taste faster than anything else, and I should have begun this journey sooner
Prioritized health and sleep from day one — treating these as non-negotiables rather than "work in progress" would have improved my entire year, especially during the intense travel periods
Spent more time on non-technical hobbies — I have interests outside of programming but I spent very little time on them this year. It would have provided better balance and perspective in life, and likely made me more creative in my technical work

What's Next ⭐

2026 feels like it will be a year of transitions. I'll be turning 25, which feels like a big mental milestone — a shift from early twenties to mid-twenties that brings different perspectives and priorities. I'm focusing on:

Maintaining balance: I want to spend more time on health and hobbies — not just because it's healthy, but because these experiences make the work itself more meaningful.
Continued purusit of mastery: Continue building smoldb and other projects to dive deeper into the complexity of search, db, and distributed sytems — not for external validation, but for the intrinsic satisfaction of understanding computers, intelligence, and the universe
Cooler projects in ML: I want to be more hands-on with machine learning in 2026. The foundation I laid this year with ML and reinforcement learning should show more visible outcomes!

Gratitude 🙏

I'm grateful for my team at Qdrant, the mentors who have guided me, friends who have supported me, and family who have always been there. I deeply appreciate the privilege to work on hard problems, travel to new places, and keep learning every day.

Here's to 2026 — may it be a year of health, mastery, and stronger relationships 🥂