So , How was 2025 ? In really really short words, busy and fulfilling.

When you look back , you always like to see the shiny stuff . The things that worked and where you did well. But it is criminally understated how many failures or rejections underpin some of those things what worked well. You get to that process of getting to do things well by learning from your failures. As much as I would like to say I had a perfect year, it was a mix of everything. But it would be a miss to say I didn’t have support personally and professionally to do what I could do.

Imposter syndrome is a thing and I have to remind myself that I don’t need to be doing the exact same things as others. I can be doing things I love in my own ways.

Goals

I set a loafty goal at the start of 2025 to see where I land at the end of this year.

  • I am going to work on a blog a week. ( Phew …)
  • I am going to submit to speak at every conference near me or I can relate to.
  • I will get healthier.
  • I will get myself in the habit of losing the fear of meeting new people.
  • I will continue contributing to what I was doing : Terraform providers, some modules and so on.

Numbers

I did leave out certifications or any successful attempts there; but it was good to keep up with some of the certifications. I did get some opportunities to sit in an Alpha exam for TF pro for Azure though my experience is predominantly in AWS. Thankful to the certification team who decided to see what an AWS guy had to say about the exam structure, ease and so on.

  • 27 posts for 2025 in this site. I did have a lot moe drafts if I showed you the actual intentions. Some I felt were left not published as there were better blogs or articles around a theme or feature or use case. I knew it was loafty when I set it and it is OK :)
    • Cross posted them at medium and dev.to. All I now need is a cross posting workflow which deploys to all after commiting each of these posts so that I don’t have to mess around with how medium wants it. May be a 2026 side project :)
  • 10+ speaking events. I intentionally submitted in every Hashi event ( HashiTalks 2025, HashiTalks: Securely Building, HashiConf) and would have submitted one for HashiTalks: India if I had the time around it.
    • I had the opportunity to lead some immersion days with HashiCorp and AWS consultants around DevOps and security. I did branch out and did a Vault webinar with a HashiCorp PM which was initially unnerving as I don’t think of myself as someone who would be as comfortable in Vault as in Terraform.
  • Personal goal of being healthy took a hit, badly. I did keep up my soccer when I could and got into some finals of tournaments. But the overall health is still not where I would want to be. Something to carry on to 2026.
  • One thing I am proud of is being intentional about interacting with folks not in my immediate circle. Even this was my own made up sense of Oh I have heard them so many times on this podcast which doesn’t really mean the same :) But I understood humans are most often kind and want to help and would like to be listened to.
  • Contributions weren’t that bad. I did have a fair few in the AWSCC provider, checkov and some modules I keep an eye out for. I have a few utilities or tools which I have been using this year and would love to contribute back in 2026.

Things I didn’t plan for

2025 seemed like you couldn’t step into a conversation, conference or general public meeting without talking about Generative AI. I am guilty for a fair share of it too. But I did try to bring up things which have worked for me and not really something which I wish it could. I did see Amazon Q CLI ( not kiro cli) being a silent partner in most of my endeavours even landing me a spot on the HashiConf stage with a HashiCorp Sr Engineer on creating Terraform actions and general Terraform workflows with Q. It was fun, scary. But will I do it again if I had the chance ? ABSOLUTELY !!

  • A few pet projects of my own:

    • Terratags. What started off as a conversation with a friend ended up as this tag validation tool written in Go. I did start off with Amazon Q ( now kiro) to help me out with the structure of these and create the parsers for each cloud provider it supports. Started off with something I was aware of : AWS ofcourse. Working with AWSCC closely gave me an idea of what to exclude and what to expect from such a tool. I soon feel out of my depth there with Go in many places and I just relied on kiro to help me along. It has been genuindely rewarding to see random emails or even issues opened by people who gave it a try. Currently it supports AWS, AWSCC, Azure, and GCP. The tagging policies from AWS with reInvent might take soem foot traffic away. But that is the intention at the end of the day with these projects. The more the CSPs find a need to have some of these natively supported in ways is best for every customer.
    • Extract actions/list resources : The intention was to showcase what the provider schema json was capable while solving the discoverability issue that exists with the Terraform action and list resources which are somehow merged in with the provider documentation for most providers.
    • Empherality Checkov custom checks: Based on Drew Mullen’s Sentinel policy library for empherality, this repository contains custom Checkov policies designed to enforce best practices around ephemeral resources and write-only attributes in Terraform configurations. These checks help identify opportunities to improve security and reduce state management complexity by preferring ephemeral data sources and write-only attributes where appropriate.

  • First reInvent : I have always been on the other side of supporting re:events ( Invent, Inforce) and so on. I jumped on the option to run the builders’ sessions ( 2 infact) on the reInvent and in fact anything that came my way. My knees weren’t used to 20K+ walks I had to , almost every day. But the opportunity was amazing and met so many folks I have had talked once over a call or a GitHUb issue :D

  • Revamped this site from the original hugo theme cactus if I remember right. I am still figuring it out and it was an October Friday night decision to change how it looked. I did break a few things in the process, but overall happy with where it is now.

The best swag !!

I usually don’t care about the swags I get from any of these conferences. But three of them stood out and had to add it here. Much of it has to do with the thought behind it and the usability.

  • HashiCorp Ambassador Sony headphones : These headsets were a fun addition to what I already owned and have become my daily driver of sorts.
  • RedHat USB knickknack : I didn’t really know what to call it. Some kind gentleman from RedHat handed one to me at HashiConf and it had somethings ranging from sim card remover to every possible USB , HDMI converters in a matchbox sized package. Saved the day a few times when I forgot changing the SIM on my trips.
  • Humidifier from the HashiCorp Community team : People weren’t kidding when they said Vegas gives you a bloody nose. The humidifier the HashiCorp community gave was probably one of the most thoughtful swags or gifts I have had in a professional setting.

Podcasts

I wasn’t always into podcasts as lending my earholes to people talking for 40+ mins on an episode about some random technology didn’t always sit well with me. But that changed this year when I decided to give it a try when I was walking. And I absolutely recommend all of the below if you need a good technology podcast to start.

  • Day 2 DevOps and their monthly Youtube/Linkedin video calls. If you use Terraform Ned’s is a name you would absolutely know. Kyler and Ned have my vote for my favorite podcast for year. They come across as kind generous folks who love to share and are not worried coming across as unfamiliar of a topic which is a really vulnerable thing to do.

  • Smashing Security : One podcast I have listened to every episode of. Graham and Carole ( though she left mid year to do her own things) are absolute blast and the humor in these are what we miss in general security conversations. In my opinion they make security conversations accessible in some ways. I did catch other podcasts from their episodes which I listen sometimes. I do miss the banter with Carole though.

  • Cloud Security podcast : Came across this in an episode from Day 2 DevOps. Security podcast again. No, I don’t do security consulting in my day to day life. But I do like to listen to what folks in the security space consider an absolute necessity as you come across these questions which you can’t shy away from. I did get to meet Ashish and Shilpi twice this year but both in a rush. Its a shame I didn’t even realize Ashish is a fellow Malayali.

  • AI Fix : Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley bring back the humor into AI converdations among all the doom and gloom we hear outside.

Not as planned or hoped

I usually plan to take some certifications around HashiConf or if they are expiring to keep up with the changes in the ecosystem. I tried to take my Consul Associate 003 certification twice and failed. Considering my exposure to consul was limited and networking being my weak spot, I expected it to be tough. But the Fail message on the screen after finishing the cert was a little disheartening. I might play around with it a little bit further this year to see if I see if I can crack that.

Along with some talks which got accepted, there were a few which never made it. Do they make you feel bad ? Absolutely. For a day or so. Then you know the reasons and rationalize based on what else made the cut. You learn and move on :)

  • CodeSmash 2026 : I think I genuinely missed the mark on the session on this and though I didn’t receive any feedback; I understood that from the quality of the speaking lineups they had.
  • AI Rising 2025 : Same thought as the first one. I sometimes have the habit of ignoring the business need behind a technology and that is something I need to learn to craft a better narrative about.
  • AWS Community Day Midwest : This one was more of a congested timeline and I would have absolutely loved to contribute in some way. I had to withdraw from it with the promise I would submit in 2026.
  • A few other internal ones :)

Things I am thankful for

  • The family who let me do what I wanted
  • Folks whom I call friends ( from work or met by chance due to love for a certain thing) - AJ/François/Gautam/Mark/Mattias/Michael/Sourav/Welly . They have pushed me to do better in their own ways.
  • The opportunities I did get from across the partners I work with and humility they showed with every nagging feedback I had for a certain product or feature.