Happy New Year, everyone. Lots of experimentation at my end this year, especially during the latter part of the year with Claude and code generation tools. Earlier in the year, worked for a promotion, and the past 4 years of diligence paid off. Grateful to wife and boss who supported me in that leg of my professional journey.

Switched to a Mac centric workflow for my personal projects and built many this year thanks to AI coding tools. Among them are Praval (pravalagents.com), Vajra Search (https://github.com/aiexplorations/vajra_bm25) and Todacomm (https://github.com/aiexplorations/todacomm). Open sourced Praval, Vajra Search, Deep Lyapunov and Todacomm on PyPI. Followed a lot of AI models and their development, apps and read a bunch of papers - and at work, built a whole bunch of them around agents with my team. Got rejected from a big tech job after 8 solid interview rounds. But that was a reminder that I have to be a bit more independent and seek professional validation less - something I have known for years but which I haven't been able to execute on. In any case I have seen my work as something that pays the bills and treat it transactionally, while using spare time for things I love learning about - software tech, AI, mathematics, aviation/aerospace engineering, Vedanta, to name a few.

Big challenges this year - personal health and well being. Took exercise more seriously. For a time I did morning runs, especially in the summer and autumn, but as winter has come, have become more sedentary. Diagnosed with severe B12 and D vitamin deficiencies but went on to get treated and get better.

Rejuvenated friendships with buddies I have known since college (20 years ago for me). Found it hard to relate to some of them but made some thick friends as a consequence and trying to build a more independent professional existence as a consequence. The habit of prayer and meditation I had last year (2024) waned a bit this year. I think there's a mental/spiritual center I need to foster there, and perhaps 2026 will be the time for it.

More here: https://www.rajeshrs.in/blog/ai-explorations/2025-12-27-year...