2025 Year in Review

From Internship to Professional Life#

When I graduated in July 2024, I was like most people leaving school: carrying a little idealism and a lot of enthusiasm.

Perhaps because job prospects in my field were relatively good, I found an internship before graduating and smoothly entered a role that interested me. My leaders trusted me and offered more opportunities, so I naturally took on many tasks beyond my formal responsibilities.

At the time, I seemed to enjoy feeling needed.

I still remember taking part in a network upgrade during my internship. For a whole week, we started at 6 p.m. after work and continued until 10 p.m. We replaced every switch in a five-story office building; the removed Cisco switches piled up almost as high as I was.

Was it tiring?

Not really, because it was a field I loved. Passion can offset exhaustion.

From Networking to Security#

After joining full-time, I moved from the networking work I had encountered during my internship into security engineering.

From the second half of 2024 through the first half of 2025, I participated in many security-service projects, including penetration testing, code auditing, risk assessment, security support during critical periods, adversary exercises, incident response, and phishing simulations.

I progressed from relying on ready-made tools to writing functional modules, building phishing systems, and organizing information-gathering workflows myself.

My technical skills grew, but more importantly, I learned to communicate with different kinds of people. Some client engineers were highly capable and efficient; others needed patient explanations.

I began to understand that technical ability matters, but communication is equally essential for an engineer. Even now, I still have plenty of room to improve.

My First Large Private Cloud#

In the middle and latter part of 2025, I began working on security and operations for a large private cloud.

I learned private-cloud operations and processes from scratch, and later took responsibility for projects such as data overwriting. I encountered technologies from many fields and grew quickly.

Yet that year was also the one that left me feeling the least motivated.

Promises were repeatedly broken while the workload continued to grow. Someone will always say, “If you won’t do it, someone else will.” Perhaps there is some truth in that. But when effort goes unrecognized for a long time, you begin to wonder: what is the meaning of persistence?

Eventually, I understood one thing:

It is not about giving up, but about investing more effort in directions that truly belong to me.

Do your job well, while also looking for a sky that suits you better.

Reexamining Myself#

I remember a former leader telling me during my internship that they hoped I could write a two-page résumé of project experience by graduation.

But by graduation, my résumé was still remarkably sparse.

I do not list things I barely understand, nor do I exaggerate my abilities. Perhaps this is an engineer’s most basic principle: be factual.

Later, I scoffed at résumés that turned superficial knowledge into grand achievements.

In the second half of 2025, I reorganized my experience and included projects I had genuinely participated in, owned, and understood. Today, I can finally present a résumé that meets my former leader’s expectations, without embellishment.

Around the same time, I began maintaining my own website and public account. If more people can eventually see the knowledge and experience I share and find it useful, then all of this will be worthwhile.

In this era of rapidly evolving AI, human learning seems unable to keep pace with the evolution of models.

But remember: everything AI learns ultimately comes from the real experience, sincere sharing, and continuous creation humans leave on the Internet.

So keep writing. Even if it is slow, authenticity makes it valuable.

A Few Days in Melbourne#

At the end of 2025, an elder in my family became ill. Traditionally, it would not have been the right time to travel far, but with my work about to change and no guarantee of another opportunity, I booked the flight anyway. On the evening of the third day after the surgery, I flew to Melbourne.

I stayed there for six days, which may have been the happiest part of my 2025.

I visited the University of Melbourne and took a photo in front of the Old Engineering Building.

During those days, I kept thinking that engineers should use technology to create value rather than get lost in repetitive labor. Instead of constantly reacting to problems, we should proactively create tools.

Those mornings and evenings in Melbourne strengthened my resolve to improve the existing inspection system and build more practical tools and platforms.

In the past, these projects may have had a high barrier to entry. Today, tools such as Codex and Claude, AI coding assistants, automation frameworks, and an increasingly mature technology ecosystem make them far more accessible.

The world is developing much faster than we imagine.

The Boundaries of Work#

The most important thing I learned in 2025 was not a particular technology, but this:

Face your shortcomings, acknowledge your limitations, and grow within your boundaries.

People should not take on work without limits; they also need personal space.

Technology is a profession, but it should not be the whole of life.

Before the Year of the Horse#

2025 brought growth, anxiety, exhaustion, and distant horizons.

If I had to sum up the year in one sentence, it would be this:

After everything I experienced, I still love being an engineer, but I need to learn to grow for myself.

I wish everyone a happy Year of the Horse in 2026, with family happiness, peace, and smooth days ahead.