It’s that time of the year again. I love this annual tradition of writing my year-in-review post primarily for taking a closer retrospective look at how things went and establishing themes I’ll return to as guideposts for the year ahead.

2025 is a special year because it’s the year I became a mom. :sparkles: The experience has been nothing short of transformative, rewarding, grounding, and deeply joyful. At the same time, it has reshaped how I relate to time, energy, and ambition in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. Becoming a parent changed me most in ways in which I approach each day with deep presence, patience and self-trust. What surprised me most was discovering that every new situation somehow resolves itself if I stay calm and trust my instinct. This year wasn’t just about doing new things, it was about becoming someone new in quieter, more durable ways.

If I had to summarize my 2025, it would be- Transformation through presence.

2025 Focus Area Recap

Do a few things better

The first half of the year was defined by anticipation and preparation to welcome my baby. Health (physical, emotional, and mental) was the clear #1 priority. The second half of the year marked the beginning of learning how to be a parent. Very much in “learning and testing in production” mode. Parenting became an exercise in chaos testing, systems thinking, adaptability, etc.
Professionally, this year involved a deliberate narrowing of focus. This meant less operational load and stayed anchored to a small number of high-impact priorities. With Datadog expanding into AI, there were plenty of learnings on the emerging field of LLMs and AI.

Learn and Teach

This year, I made two teaching and writing contributions that felt especially meaningful given my capacity and season of life.

The first was a guest lecture at San Jose State University, a full-circle moment that spanned nearly a decade. From taking Professor Rakesh Ranjan’s Enterprise Software Platforms course as a graduate student to returning as a guest lecturer for that same course, delivering a session on the state of observability and security in cloud-native software. Teaching always pushes me to articulate complex concepts in simpler terms, and what stayed with me most was how well received my lecture was, how I got every student in the class to actively participate and how engaged the students were. It reminded me why I value teaching because it blends clarity with curiosity for me.

The second contribution was a guest post for Venture in Security titled AppSec/ProdSec’s Reality Gap: Why Theory Doesn’t Match Practice. Writing this piece helped me put language to something I’ve experienced for years: that the gap between theory and practice in application security isn’t an inconvenient reality, it’s the defining challenge of the field. In the spirit of “less is more,” these contributions felt adequate and aligned with my capacity in 2025. More importantly, they felt intentional rather than obligatory.

Deep focus and a better reading routine

Deep focus looked different this year. Parenting demands constant mode-switching and there are no clean boundaries when a baby needs you. For me, this fragmentation was a reality of learning an entirely new system while keeping others running. Most of my reading gravitated toward pregnancy, childbirth and parenting related books, and the idea that stayed with me most was there isn’t a one size fits all approach to it, you do what feels right for you.

2026 Focus Areas

Flagship Intellectual Contribution

In 2026, I want to amplify my voice and expertise by committing to one flagship body of work. What I’m really after is exploring an idea that sits at the intersection of what the industry needs and what only a practitioner’s lens can reveal. Something underexplored, wide-ranging, and worth sustained attention. There’s a couple of problem spaces I keep returning to and 2026 feels like the right container to sit with it deeply. With modern AI tools, the gruntwork of tackling large, complex problem spaces has lowered, making it more feasible to sustain long-form, high-quality exploration without burning out. I have a few ideas I’m considering, and my intention is to choose one and stay with it for the entire year.

Energy-Aligned Work Design

For many years, I optimized heavily around time (calendars, efficiency, and throughput). That approach served me well until it started to become crystal clear that many times my best work came not because I spend a ton of time on it, it came because my energy was right to tackle it. In 2026, energy, not time will be the primary design constraint. This means designing weeks around cognitive and emotional energy, with clear differentiation between creation, execution, and recovery phases. This applies not just to professional work, but to personal projects and life rhythms as well.

Relational Infrastructure (Trusted Circle)

In 2026, I want to be far more intentional about my relational infrastructure specifically, my trusted circle. I believe deeply in the value of mentors, peers, and collaborators who think long-term and operate with alignment and integrity. In short, depth over reach will be the guiding principle here.

Sustainable Consistency

As much as pace matters, sustainable consistency is what everything ultimately comes down to. I’d rather make steady, repeatable progress than sprint toward something I can’t realistically maintain once life inevitably gets full. Ultimately, prioritizing health and wellness in all of life’s seasons sustainably can make a world of difference going through it and coming out of it. Only a few things in life can operate as sprints. Most meaningful pursuits are marathons.

Looking ahead

2025 was a year of becoming, not just doing. I learned new skills, became a different person( more patient, more present, more willing to let things unfold rather than force them into being). 2026 will be about building something sustainable from that foundation.

There’s this unsettling feeling as my fingers type the keyboard knowing this is the only post I have for the year 2024 on my personal blog. However, it is that time of the year again to do the annual tradition of writing a year-in-review. It’s serves as an anchor of reflection for the closing year and something that I know I will use as a reference point in the next one (I know because it has done exactly that in the past two years). :boom:

2024 Focus Area Recap

Do a few things better

I wanted to refine my expertise and experiences in a few areas of life (primarily the craft of writing) and career (deepening my security knowledge as a security engineer) in 2024. It feels satisfying knowing I did well on that front by pursuing writing in publications like The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter doing a 2 part series on the topic ‘What is Security Engineering’- Part1 and Part2. Also, a few other interesting ones include authoring two chapters in the O’Reilly Media book 97 Things Every Application Security Professional Should Know and the Dark Reading article The Imperative for Robust Security Design in the Health Industry. All these gave me the experience of refining my writing, learning a bit more about writing for a broader audience and the art of editing.

Learn and Teach

The highlight on this front for me was to be invited to give a guest lecture at the Sonoma State University’s Computer Science department on the topic of ‘State of Cloud Security’. Teaching has been a passion of mine and getting the opportunity to do so at an academic level was quite fulfilling.

I got to deliver a talk to a small group of smart woman in cybersecurity practitioners at the Day of Shecurity conference sometime earlier this year.

I did a fun brown bag session at Datadog during the learning week on the topic of ‘Job Crafting’.

I also served as the Co-chair for the Call for Proposals team at The Diana Initiative conference and got to learn the skill of how conference proposals process work all the way to putting together a well balanced schedule for it.

Adjacently, I collabed with Swathi Joshi to publish a template for Security Design Reviews.

On the learning front, I embedded with the Cloud security team at Datadog for one entire quarter and towards the end, also successfully did the AWS Certified Security – Specialty cert.

Balanced Work-Life Integration

This one I would say I did fairly well however, there’s a long way for me to go on it. I had some peaks and valleys in the pursuit of this particular goal and knowing that it is something one needs to do for a lifetime (of their career), I’ll be ok exercising patience to get it right (mostly). I now know what works for me and what does not and the real skill would be to harness my understanding of it on a regular such that it will show up in maintaining the quality of my life in terms of wellness, satisfaction, meaningful relationships and happiness. I spent real quality outdoor time this year and focused my travels on personal front instead of more professional ones.

2025 Focus Areas

Do a few things better

In the spirit of keeping the same high level goal, I’d like to set my eyes upon optimizing for depth and maintaining consistency in what I choose to pursue. This would mean looking for opportunities that will let me take my skills from what I have done in 2024 one step further, one level deeper.

Learn and Teach

My commitment to learning and teaching persists and now I know I got the chops to do that too. So, I’d be looking to explore creating a structured format to teach.

Deep focus and a better reading routine

I want to carve out focused time to engage in creative activities that demand deep work. Also, I’d look to re-establish and re-cultivate my reading habit and behaviors to read at longer stretches of time.

:heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark:

It is that time of the year again. I love this annual tradition of writing a year-in-review post primarily for two reasons:

• Taking a closer retrospective look at how things went over the year
• Establishing/ Re-establishing themes and focus areas for the coming year that I know I will find myself referring to often as a guide post.

If I had to sum up my 2023 in a few words, it is this- Big energy and Intense execution. :boom:

2023 Focus Area Recap

Put health and wellness first

I’ve come to hard realize that this focus area is a life-long one. In fact, this is the centerpiece or the main pillar of everything.

That being said, all the big energy and intense execution comes at a cost. The cost of trying to figure out how to balance everything in life, how to be more proactive than reactive when it comes to handling stressors, and how to optimally take care of your fundamental health items (sleep, nutrition and movement).

Throughout the year, I stayed fairly active. I’ve relied on a tracking board to jot down the smallest inch of deposits I make to my wellness and health. The cumulative zoomed out monthly view has helped me not freak out on the days when I feel I am not doing enough or when I feel I am over-doing something.

Improve my communication skills- writing, speaking, listening, and reading

Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to explore more public speaking at conferences and write more for publications. My exploration led me to understanding how to write a good CFP to a conference, seek feedback/ inputs from mentors on the idea for the CFP, etc. I spoke at these conferences in 2023-

• Open Security Summit: A solo virtual presentation
• Datadog DASH: A panel session
• DEFCON 31 AppSec Village: A co-speaking experience with an industry peer, a smart product security engineer- Larkins
• OWASP Appsec Global USA: A solo in-person talk

As for writing, I did write a lot. From writing a good submittable CFP, writing weekly snippets at work communicating what I worked on the week, working on some upcoming writing project ideas, etc. I’d say writing was the mainstay activity I practiced all year long.

I focused on improving my listening skills in an attempt to be a good speaker too and learn to understand what someone has to say at a deeper level (interpreting the spoken words, the intended message, the conveyed body language, etc.)

A large part of our thinking is influenced by what we read. A lot of reading this year was geared on improving on my thinking patterns and getting good at the thinking types.

A career highlight for me was getting to review the Software Engineer’s Guidebook and having the Tech Tribe of Mentors article featured in it.

Alongside that, I grew a lot in my security knowledge at work. I thoroughly enjoyed working at Datadog the entire year on Software/Application Security with a focus on Security Design Reviews. It helped me learn and develop my system design skills as well. I took the lead in scaling our Security Champions program too. The work got me promoted another level at the start of the year. It took a huge deal of communication skills as an engineer to convey the impact as well as channel the educational aspect of working on Software/Application Security.

Networking

The year also fostered extensive organic networking, predominantly at conferences, and deliberate one-on-one connections to learn from industry peers and leaders. Emphasizing quality over quantity in networking experiences was a pivotal lesson.

Celebrate every win, no matter how small

Celebrating victories, regardless of their size, emerged as a reframed perspective, understanding that every dedicated effort counts as a win, reinforcing the belief that one’s best effort at any given time is invaluable.

Learn and Teach

A large part of the teaching came from speaking at conferences. The goal of exploring the idea of formally teaching, maybe in a self-serve manner, did not make much progress. It is going to be a carry over for the coming year.

2024 Focus Areas

Do a few things better

I’d like to refine expertise and experience in a few areas of life (primarily the craft of writing) and career (deepening my security knowledge as a security engineer) in 2024. This would mean spending more dedicated time for learning and practicing in those areas instead of diluting efforts on multiple things.

Learn and Teach

My commitment to learning and teaching persists, with plans to explore different teaching modalities. This has been toggling back and forth in my mind so I am inclined on trying some options on this front.

Balanced Work-Life Integration

It would be good to explore on achieving a harmonious balance between personal and professional life, ensuring adequate time for relaxation, hobbies, family, and social activities while pursuing career aspirations.

:heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark:

2023 was one that I lived with the mantra of ‘- ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ :star2: :star2:

In summary and channeling Snoop Dogg’s words- I want to thank me, for all the hard work I did this year.

Over the last year, I’ve had a few conversations with friends and colleagues in the industry with one overarching common theme- finding joy at work/ enjoying the work you do/ not interested enough in the work currently in, etc..

Sometimes, we find ourselves in a job role that comes with a host of responsibilities some of which aren’t so enjoyable. I’ve meandered that lane too.

This one particular concept that has been most impactful for me has been ‘job crafting’- redesigning your job in ways that improve your engagement at work, job satisfaction, resilience, and helps you thrive.

It’s an interesting and generic concept by Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski and her team that applies to any job and got me thinking about how it can be used in the tech industry, particularly as an individual contributor (IC) in the software engineering industry.

I also came across this piece of research Dr. Angela Duckworth quoted in her book ‘Grit’ that lays out three concepts:

• Job

• Career

• Calling

Job crafting can help us shift our perspective from job to career to calling.

There are three aspects of crafting:

1. Task crafting- altering the type, scope, sequence, and the number of tasks that make up your job.

2. Relational crafting- altering whom you interact with within your work.

3. Cognitive crafting- modify the way you interpret the tasks and/or work you’re doing.

I’d say software engineering yields itself better to this idea of job crafting given its dynamic nature, multitude of opportunities present and also the broader scope of work we do.

How does one do it? For starters, these are the steps:

1. writing down what you work on (the tasks), who you work with (relations) and how your work feels to you (perception).

2. note down what you would like to change about each of it.

3. the steps for that change

To be effective at job crafting, I feel one needs to be open about it and build trust with their manager and peers while also creating value for the organization. The ease of doing this depends on the size of the team and/or the company. By intentionally crafting our jobs, we can find a sense of identity and purpose to turn a seemingly dead-end job into a launchpad.

A good formula to focus on:

Effective job crafting = Create value for others + Build trust + Support network + Be Open about the process

The Limits of Job Crafting

Not everything is straightforward though and not every theory translates as practically.

Job crafting isn’t a silver bullet because sometimes, you risk taking on too much or altering tasks without understanding your team’s or organization’s goals.

Being candidly open about this process with your manager can open up the possibilities of them helping you identify ways to redistribute tasks in complementary ways. Afterall, one person’s dreaded assignment may be another’s favorite.

I’ll point to a few articles/ snippets below to illustrate my point:

An interesting one that kind of stirred the pot here was Charity Majors ‘Do your one job’ where she notes:

When you are meeting expectations for your One Job — and you don’t necessarily have to be dazzling, just competent and predictable — then picking up other work is a sign of initiative and investment. But when you aren’t, you get no credit.

When thinking about job crafting, it’s common to meander in the career and get caught up in snacking, preening, or chasing ghosts as Will Larson notes in one of my favorite articles ‘Working on what matters’:

If you spend your career snacking, preening, or chasing ghosts, it’s possible but relatively unlikely that what you’ve done before will be valued at companies you interview with. Instead, the only viable long-term bet on your career is to do work that matters, work that develops you, and steer towards companies that value genuine expertise.

Know the priorities

Siddartha Sarda has simplified it a bit further in the article: ‘Something important for someone important’ where an interesting approach is aligning on:

1. One set of objectives that are important to the organization 2. Another set of objectives that are important to your manager 3. The final set of objectives that are important to you

Glue Work

Sometimes, tasks that feel very vital and meaningful to you might be perceived as Glue work in your organization. Tanya Reilly offers solid advice here:

Even for people who are getting recognized for glue work and who want to keep doing it, I really recommend you keep increasing your other skills.

If you only do glue, you will only get better at glue.

Final thoughts

This is a dynamic and ever evolving process. So I like to frequently ask myself (usually during my weekly review sessions)- Are you shaping your job or letting the job shape you?

However, it is also important to acknowledge the limitations and considerations of this concept to best utilize it.

I hope you find this useful as I have. Cheers!

I appreciate and love the annual tradition of writing a year-in-review post primarily for two reasons-

• Taking an inventory of how things went over the year
• It serves as a handy guide throughout the coming year to anchor the decision-making and stay aligned on the areas of focus

If I had to sum up my 2022 in a few words, it is this- A hazy upward spiral of growth. :loop:

Key highlights from the year

• Career Moves: I closed out a chapter at Intel and started a new role as a Security Engineer at Datadog. This opportunity has been one that presents an environment and culture of growth, support, and learning.

• Time with family and friends: Throughout this year, I spent quality and quantity time with my family, my pupper and close friends. The warmth and love of these moments have boosted my well-being significantly.

• Creative projects: I had several creative projects this year. I created three episodes on JAM.ai that covered ideas from the book Algorithms to Live By: ‘Learning from algorithms and distributed systems’, ‘Scheduling Algorithms’, ‘Let it Slide’. I started The Weekly Sync newsletter on substack. Working on this idea has been pure joy - from brainstorming the idea/concept, designing a logo, writing outlines, shipping the work, getting feedback from readers, maintaining a backlog of topics, and everything in between. :sparkles:

I’m happy with the outputs from the efforts so far and gaining more understanding of my behavior patterns towards creativity.

2022 Focus Area Recap

Health and wellness

This year my understanding of health and wellness evolved. A lot of action on this front initaties from a ‘because I do x I can’ mindset instead of a ‘if I don’t do x then’ one. My methods of gauging progress realistically and practically have improved. For example: Is a brisk walk, a flight of stairs, or an uphill climb leaving me out of breath?

Another realization has been that consistency is a primo factor and bouncing back matters because the longer you stay off the track, the harder it gets to restart. Also, the importance of rest, relaxation, and recovery for overall health and well-being is more evident.

Improve my communication skills- writing, speaking, listening, and reading

The overarching area of focus in this bucket was the art and craft of writing. I wrote 12 articles this year (4 on my blog and 8 on weekly sync) As for speaking, at work, I had fun opportunities to speak on:

• Role of communication in Engineering culture (A presentation)
• Security Design Reviews (Training Workshop)

I read a good amount this year. I reviewed ~ 75 articles for the LeadDev publication for ~ 6 months. My intention was to provide feedback as an individual contributor perspective to the outlines and ideas. I’m happy to help advance the industry along topical themes of the team, tech, process, and career.

Networking

My bi-weekly tech learning circle has been such a rewarding experience. There were some great times of excellent conversations with peers from the industry that I met via LinkedIn, Twitter or in-person during a conference.

I attended the LeadDev SF and the OWASP AppSec Global USA Conferences in person and wrote about this experience in my newsletter edition titled ‘Sharing growth stories’

Learn and Teach

It is my third year as a mentor to undergrad/ grad students at my alma mater San Jose State (2 mentees each season). I learn a lot from my mentees and gain a renewed perspective towards my past experiences of navigating similar situations and challenges. I’ll write more about this soon.

2023 Focus Areas

All of the focus areas I set for 2022 seem like the ones that are more multi-year apt. For 2023, I will keep these as the same objectives and define what key results would look like.

Put health and wellness first

Consistently stick to the realistic and efficient framework/ methods that work for me.

Measure progress regularly using the right indicators- mood, focus, energy levels, etc.

Improve my communication skills- writing, speaking, listening, and reading

I am absolutely in love with the security engineering domain and its challenges. In 2023, my focus is on Security Design expertise, writing deep-dive articles on topics, and looking for potential industry-level contributions. For the weekly sync, I want to continue writing about meta topics that interest me.

The most important one is sticking to a system of working on creative side projects with a well-defined definition of done to avoid my classic analysis paralysis status.

Networking

At some point during the year, I am thinking of an attempt to form learning circles and creating a self-serve toolkit around this concept for others to use.

Celebrate every win, no matter how small

Not just to celebrate my wins but to get better at celebrating the wins of others around me.

Learn and Teach

I will be sharing my learnings broadly and frequently.

Explore the idea to formally teach, maybe in a self-serve manner.

:heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark: :heavy_check_mark:

2022 was one that I lived with the mantra of ‘We are the mapmakers and the travelers’. :sparkles:

I am confident entering 2023 with the quote by Lao Tzu as my mantra- ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ :star2: :star2:

I am so excited to introduce my weekly newsletter on Substack- The Weekly Sync.

The primary purpose of this is to practice consistency with writing, experiementing with varied topics that are best suited for short form content with a potential of becoming blog posts here and leveraging the powerful features of a platform like Substack.

A list of publications so far:

1. Introducing ‘The Weekly Sync’
2. The things we have control over
3. Deciphering the details
4. Unpacking communication and creativity
5. Sharing growth stories

Follow along and subscribe. I always appreciate the support.

“I am so glad to not have to be staring at a computer all day…” 

That’s one of the sentiments from my remote team’s first onsite this month.

You see, on-site which brings the team in-person, and in-office face-to-face (f2f) are fairly common and highly valuable for remote teams. These are typically 3 days to a week-long aimed at bringing the team together to build meaningful connections, getting to know each other more, conduct deep dives, brainstorming and whiteboarding activities, retrospectives, discussing KPIs and OKRs, meeting with leadership, meet and greet with cross-functional teams, lunches, dinners, team-building activities, etc. So, in short, there’s a lot to be done when you get the team altogether. 💥

As an individual contributor, I think there are several reasons to have an onsite when your team is remote and distributed:

• interpreting your teammates’ facial expressions (and use of emojis/ punctuation!) over chat and video conference all day long can be too much sometimes.
• meeting team members for the first time, to put a face to the zoom.
• work can lean a lot more towards a transactional-focused vs a balanced relationship-focused dynamic. Say you have to interrupt someone to make an ask, so you may as well only ask for things rather than casual chatting.
• loneliness can also be attributed to the lack of connection with your team or the mission of your company. A lot of learning how people work only happens in person because just zoom meetings feel transactional.
• build team synergy.

Recently when my remote team met for our first onsite, I liked how well it was planned as well as executed with a good balance in mind. So I thought I should log my experience here on what worked well for us.

Logistics, Agenda, and Schedule

My manager and team lead collaborated to draft a document that captured the logistics, agenda, and schedule for the entire week. This allowed our team to provide inputs and chime in on ideas we each had for what we wanted to get out of the onsite. How do these three things differ? Well…

• The logistics are useful to highlight the overall details of any event. They also help with seamless execution.
• An agenda is a desired list of items such as team sessions, team building activities, lunch and dinner ideas, etc. to be completed during the onsite
• A schedule is a plan for carrying out the agenda. Not everything on the schedule may get done as is or ad hoc things will come up. Isn’t that the thing with a schedule though?

Having these three things written out helped us be prepared in advance, make necessary arrangements to be available as well as get a lot of things done while accounting for many fun, team-building activities.

Mindfulness

You may ask, what does mindfulness have to do with an onsite? The story here is that my manager is also a certified mindfulness instructor. So we started the onsite team activities with a short session of intention setting and energizing breathwork session (note: this session was already planned in the schedule ahead of time). The mindfulness activity as a team helped ground the room with calm, clarity, and presence.

Power of Play

We scheduled a few sessions geared toward play, allowing us to know each other a little more, exercise our creative chops, have a hearty laugh, and overall ‘just have fun’. We tried these activities:

Indoor Icebreakers

Icebreakers are great warmups for the team. We tried these two icebreakers that I enjoyed because they were engaging and helped us know each other a bit more.

• Superpower discovery

Here’s how it goes-

Round 1: Each team member gets 30 seconds to describe their superpower to the team.

Round 2: The team collectively, one by one describes what they think is the team member’s superpower (30 seconds for each team member). All in all, this activity took us under 15 minutes and what made this an excellent icebreaker was the sense of authenticity and playfulness each of us brought to the game.

• Two Truths, One Lie

Here’s how it goes-

Each team member states two truths and one lie about themselves. The group has to guess which statements are true and which statement is a lie. We did one round of this and it was a very creative exercise.

Outdoor Team event

• Escape room

An escape room is a great team-building activity as it allows each member to use their unique strengths, test the team’s communication under pressure and get to know each other better. We did ‘The Heist’ escape room. Working as a team on a 60-minute adventure to uncover clues, solve puzzles and complete the mission on a deadline was not only thrilling but also an excellent way to uncover how we all could bring our unique strengths to complete the mission. Pure fun! ✨

• Dining and outdoor activities

I’d like to briefly mention dining and outdoor activities like sightseeing by sharing our observations around this- It is 100% necessary to take dietary restrictions into account and then make reservations in advance for every single meal when possible. If you plan on getting the meals delivered when possible get team orders in ahead of time. All this coordinated time and place is required given how tight the schedule can be. For planning these, our experience is that having the local team members provide input is great.

Closing thoughts

On sites bring remote and distributed teams together, help set the team dynamics, and develops a sense of one team, one mission, and collaboration towards the roadmap. The effects can be seen afterward with improved morale, improved collaborations, and deeper connections within the team.

Related recommended read

• Planning a remote offiste

$ pwd
/Datadog/SecurityEngineering

I am a month into my new role at Datadog as a Security Engineer. Now is a good time for me to write this post so I could finally tell folks where I am, my onboarding and contributions experience so far, and also keep it real about the ‘n’ things that happen when you change your job. Deciding to make this career move wasn’t easy. It required quite a bit of reflection and preparation. I particularly recommend this approach for anyone looking to figure out their own.

There are a few reasons that led me to Datadog-

1. I’ve firsthand seen how complex data-intensive and/or cloud-native distributed systems have gotten. Making sense of how things work in the grand scheme of things needs better observability. I’ve been fascinated by the security and privacy aspects in particular. It’s something I deeply care about as a user of technology. Hence, the combination of observability and security appealed to me.
2. Hypergrowth. Learnings, Learnings, Tons of Learnings.
3. Culture. By now I acknowledge that this is prime for growth.

With Datadog, I particularly liked how the company cared about my interview experience, provided support throughout the process, and most importantly the involvement of my manager throughout.

In my first week, I attended a week-long onboarding in the NYC office, experienced the awesome office dynamics, and met with different folks from the sales, engineering, and security organizations. Week 2 was co-incidentally the company-wide learning week with over 40 unique sessions. I am impressed by the sense of community and learning culture at the company.

As for my new role, I’ll be focusing on software security, primarily engineering the tooling and processes to scale security design and guidance. It’s something I am deeply interested in as technology and software engineering continues to evolve. These are the things I’ll be prioritizing- doing more, different, interesting, and difficult things while pacing myself. All while building a network of peers.

There’s certainly a huge amount of rapid learning and I look forward to writing more to share my knowledge, learnings, and thoughts.

Today is my last day at Intel. I began my chapter 1 as an intern in 2015, chapter 2 in 2019 after a year and half working at McAfee. It’s been a quite a ride with lots of learning and challenges too. Here, I have grown immensely both professionally and personally.

As I reflect on my overall experience, I thought I’d share my learnings here briefly:

1. Career is a marathon and your best career happens at the intersection of your passions, values and strength.

2. The relationships you build, the people you work with matter . Kindness and empathy goes a long way.

3. Change is inevitable, Growth is optional.

4. Know when to persist and when to quit.

5. Build a network. Who you know and who knows you factors in many ways.

6. Having strong business acumen and understanding the strategy is important to working on what matters. It is valuable when contributions add value to the business.

7. Benefits matter to life and career growth.

Until chapter 3..

Almost a wrap to 2021 and this is my second ‘Year in Review’ post since starting my blog last year! To me, this year has been another year of many “firsts”.

In reflection, here are some key highlights-

Became a pawrent to my adorable Golden Retriever puppy

The highlight of my year- from endless love and joy I experience every day to the fun training sessions to the rain or shine walks, not a piece of cake.

Experimented with audio content with JAM (@jam.ai)

This was a great experiment for me to try out audio content creation and I loved it. I am exploring the idea of a podcast after this initial burst of confidence. Check out the platform and my content titled (‘Software Engineer Reverse Engineering Life’)[https://www.jam.ai/jam/software-engineer-reverse-engineering-life]

Wrote an article for an external publisher (@LeadDev)

Start of the year, I wrote an article for LeadDev and it was nice to work with professional editors and get feedback on my writing.

Dealt with anxiety, stress, overwhelm and found ways that work for me to manage it

This has been a year I experienced emotions of a magnitude that felt crushing simply because of the number of things on my plate. I’d say we are lucky today that we have access to information and resources that help us deal with it. For me, mindfulness and exercising work magic and it’s a practice for life.

Mentored a diverse set of graduate students

This year SJSU matched me with a diverse set of graduate mentees and I had the opportunity to exchange thoughts and ideas on career growth, networking, communication, prioritization, etc.

My goals for 2022 are:

Put health and wellness first

For me, this is the main pillar to being my best. So, I will practice what I have learned with consistency, small simple steps daily to be more resilient and grateful.

Improve my communication skills- writing, speaking, listening, and reading

I think I know the secret to improve communication- quantity builds quality when the intention is in check. The more you experiment, the more you find what works for you and you keep getting better.

Networking

I want to network with more folks in areas of my interest 1:1 and learn more by building meaningful connections.

Celebrate every win, no matter how small

It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds with the fast pace of life. I intend to find ways to celebrate small wins like - publishing a blog post, finishing a run, reading a chapter, etc to build awareness around the progress I make.

Learn and Teach

I feel my learning compounds exponentially when I teach what I learn. I will find ways to do this as I know it also helps my goal of improving communication.

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2021 has shaped me to re-think my approach towards change, habits, priorities, and life overall. :sparkles: It’s been the year that has forced me to look inward first and think deep. I am confident entering 2022 with the quote by Brenè Brown as my mantra- ‘We are the mapmakers and the travelers’ :star2: :star2: