Platforms State of the Union (2025)

Published: 31/12/2025

2026 is upon us. 2025 will soon be over. As I've done for the past six (!!) years (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), it's time to look back and reflect on the year gone by.

I like the restructure I did for these reflection essays last year. Instead of rigidly reviewing my goals for the year, I examine the different realms of my life to assess what went well and what did not.

Welcome to Ratik's Platforms State of the Union for the year 2025!

Before proceeding, as always, a disclaimer: We are all on different journeys and progress looks different for everyone. No Gregorian calendar can determine your self worth.

This is a long post so feel free to skip around using the list of contents:

• State of the Career
• State of the Side Projects
• State of AI
• State of the Apps
• State of the Writing
• State of the Money
• State of the Body
• State of the Hobbies
• State of the Media

BIG career milestone this year. I finally switched jobs! I joined Kagi as a Flutter Engineer in July of this year. I'm so thankful things worked out. It was not easy landing a new job in today's job market.

Then, why switch jobs though, you might ask? I spent five amazing years at Fueled. Fueled was crucial for me to become the engineer I am today. But, over time, I started craving a new challenge. I wanted to work at a more fast-paced organization, ideally a product company, instead of an agency. My time at Fueled had run its course. So, I started looking around for my next job.

I had two criteria for the job search: (1) Fast-paced product companies; and (2) Remote work. Having a remote job is essential for me. As someone who lives with a physical disability, jobs that require me to be in-person are a challenging prospect. Unfortunately, remote jobs have been declining in number since we returned to normalcy after COVID. This made the job search even more challenging.

I applied to various places over the course of a year. Some rejected me, some never responded, and some did not convert in the final steps. It was a frustrating time. One day, my friend Akash casually mentioned that Kagi was hiring. Kagi?! Holy shit. I love Kagi, I said. I was already a Kagi user at this point and loved the organization's vision. I had no idea they hired remotely for roles that fit my profile. Once I found out, I just had to apply. I spent the next two days working hard on my application and applied for the job. After some time, I heard back, went through the hiring process, and finally landed the job.

The first six months at Kagi have been brilliant. The work is everything I could have hoped for and more. I joined as a Flutter Engineer, but I am actually working across various projects, writing many different programming languages (made possible by AI, of course). I'm beginning to see myself more as a Software Engineer rather than just a mobile engineer. This is exactly what I wanted for my career's progression. I'm thrilled to have Kagi as my workplace. Another dream organization ticked off!

I wrote more about my motivations behind joining Kagi here, for those who might be interested.

Side projects ebbed and flowed this year. For the first half of the year, my primary side project was hunting for jobs. The job hunt took most of my time outside work. As part of the hunt, I did make several updates to my website. The work section received some much needed love. I added visuals for projects listed there. For 2026, I plan on redoing the whole section to make it more expandable. I anticipate many project additions in the coming year!

After landing a job, I started getting more time to work on side projects. This also coincided with AI-assisted programming getting very, very good. Tools like Cursor and Claude Code became all the rage. I started experimenting with Cursor, but eventually settled on Claude Code as my preferred AI companion. This led to me building a bunch of side projects over weekends.

Later and Tiny Desk Now are two projects I spent building over the last few months.

Later is a home-cooked, read-it-later app I am building for myself. Mozilla pulled the plug on Pocket this year and I wanted a replacement. Later is filling the Pocket-sized void for me currently. I put together a backend and frontend for Later over a few weekends. The project is in a usable state at the moment. It is — however — a bit slow and looks pretty generic from a design perspective. I want to do a full rewrite for Later early next year. I want to build macOS and mobile apps as well.

Tiny Desk Now is a small project I cooked up in a few hours. It serves one purpose: when you visit tinydesk.now, you are redirected to a random NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Simple. I love using Tiny Desk Now to find new artists or rediscover old concerts.

This website also received many updates throughout the year. Here's a rundown of the updates:

1. Updated work section
2. Dark mode
3. Photography page
4. Newsletter page
5. Self-hosted RSS feed for newsletter
6. Small Web badge (see footer)
7. A page for each of my keyboards (still under development)
8. Re-introduced music player (it had stopped working)
9. Redesigned writing page
10. Sparkly clicks — click / tap anywhere on the website!

Last year, I introduced this section on AI to talk about how I was leveraging AI. My AI stack at that time included Raycast AI with Claude Sonnet 3.5. I was using Raycast AI and practicing Chat Oriented Programming or CHOP. Boy have things changed this year.

CHOP is out the window. Things went agentic this year. I've stopped using Raycast AI and shifted entirely to Claude Code (with Opus 4.5). Claude Code has been a complete game changer. My buddy Claude is the reason I got so much done on my side projects this year. I don't see myself stopping. I want to make and ship a lot shit in 2026. I'm making that core focus for myself. Exciting times ahead!

It's been wonderful seeing my friends make and ship things this year. Arun shipped Luego, Sambit shipped Parsley. As someone who became a programmer to make things, I'm so happy seeing makers be empowered!

This is the state of my apps. What's yours?

I finally did it. After years of wanting to start a newsletter, I started one in 2025. C'mon C'mon (CC) became a reality this year. Prep for this project started in last year's reflection post. This time last year, I decided that, no matter what, the newsletter was going to happen in 2025. To add some social pressure to the mix, I put a signup form in last year's blog post. A handful of people subscribed. Perfect. Exactly what I wanted.

Time passed by. January to June was a busy period. In July during my birthday week, I got a jolt of energy to get the newsletter going. I set things up, shared the news on social media, and began working on the first issue. Soon after that CC launched. I am now six issues in and have written close to ten thousand words. Brilliant. Turns out having a monthly deadline and subscribers is a great forcing function for me to get things done.

My favorite thing to come out of the newsletter is the writing practice I've gotten out of it. Just six months in, I can already tell that writing this year's blog post feels less like a chore. Like any skill, writing requires practice. I feel that the more I write, the more I want to write. It's a virtuous cycle! The newsletter shall continue. If you aren't subscribed, what are you waiting for? Subbbbscribe now!

Outside the newsletter, I published two other pieces of writing:

1. My Time at Fueled
2. Why Kagi?

For next year, I plan to write more for the blog. I want to make blog posts less of an event and more of a casual, ongoing activity. I would like the blog to be like Robin Sloan's or Matt Birchler's.

A note on AI and writing: while I am pretty AI-pilled for work and programming, I keep AI out of my writing process as much as possible. Writing is about the process. Churning your mind, thinking through things, and putting words on a paper is the point. Generating writing using an LLM defeats the purpose. The point of the work is the work.

A job switch year is a good time to reassess your money box. Money box is a term I learned from Monica Halan's Let's Talk Money. It is a dynamic system to keep track of money and how it flows on an individual basis. Your money box contains your emergency fund, investments, savings, debts, etc. Monica encourages people to balance their money box from time to time.

2025 was a good year to look closely at my money box and assess my current situation and future direction. I reorganized my money box using one of my new favorite software tools: Value Research. Value Research is India’s foremost independent investment research firm founded by Dhirendra Kumar, who I really like. I love how VR looks and feels as a website. It lets me input various money sources and shows me a bird's eye view of my financial situation. In my experience, money management tools often become overly complicated with time. I hope VR does not face this fate.

An important aspect of my money box is giving back to charitable causes. I continued to contribute to the World Food Program via the ShareTheMeal app this year.

For the bod this year, I bought a smart ring by Ultrahuman as a birthday gift for myself. I was a bit unsure about how useful a smart ring would be for a disabled person. Steps and workout tracking were not going to be of any use to me. I was hopeful that the ring might have ways to 'turn off' features that were not required. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. I decided to get the ring anyway as an experiment.

The ring came in and I started wearing it throughout the day. My suspicions were right. The steps and workout tracking was quite annoying. The app would keep sending me notifications to 'walk' or 'move my body' to hit my daily goal. Ugh. Sleep tracking was where I found some value. It worked well for me, and I learned a lot about my sleep patterns and how I can improve them. Another aspect I liked was VO2 max, heart-rate variability, and resting heart rate tracking. I'd never measured these metrics for myself. Finding out that my readings were within the healthy range felt good.

At the end of my first month with the ring, I decided that I wasn't getting too much value from it. I cancelled the order and got a refund. I do miss the ring from time to time though. I won't lie: I spotted the ring on sale a few times and was tempted to get it again. Maybe I will do that at some point. Or perhaps, I might wait for Apple's smart ring, which is rumored to come out at some point. I trust Apple to make a more inclusive product.

In other health news, I continue to follow 16:8 intermittent fasting as it makes me feel healthy. I got thorough blood work done twice this year to figure out what my body needs from a supplementation perspective. Blood work from July showed certain deficiencies that I've tried to address over the last six months. The second set of tests were this month. I'll speak to my nutritionist in January to discuss how things have changed in the past six months. Check out TetraNutrition, she's fantastic!

Time for my favorite section. Hobbies!

This year's dormant hobbies were: language learning (Duolingo), making / playing music.

Last year, I wrote about Duolingo and how I was on a strong learning streak. That died a few months into the year. I think being multilingual is fricken cool. So, I will be exploring other ways to learn languages in the coming years.

Music continues to be a dormant hobby as well. Let's see when I get back to it.

Hobbies I actively engaged with this year include: photography, keyboards, coffee, vinyl, and gaming.

Going deeper into the photography rabbit hole this year led me to picking up new lenses for my Fuji camera. I picked up Fuji's 35mm f/1.4 — which is considered to be one of Fuji's most iconic lenses. I watched countless videos on the lens and everyone agreed on this lens being special. Having used the lens now, I 100% agree. It's hard to click a bad picture with this lens, especially when its wide open. The natural bokeh it produces on f/1.4 is beautiful. I'm glad I picked this lens up. A more recent pickup has been my first non-Fuji lens. I got a good Black Friday deal on a Viltrox 28mm lens with a fixed aperture of 4.5. I got this lens as an experiment. It's a tiny lens, smaller than the Fuji 27mm pancake lens that came with my XE-4. My aim is to use the Viltrox to minimize my camera's footprint for situations when I want my camera to be more pocketable.

I'm enjoying switching lenses for different use cases. If I'm at home shooting photos of keyboards, I use the Fuji kit lens, as it's a zoom lens. When I want something small to take outside, I use the pancake or Viltrox lenses. For special occasions when I'm feeling artsy-fartsy, I grab the 35mm. The result of my deeper interest in photography has been ... well ... more photos! I post these photos on Glass and right here on the photography page on my website.

Some of my favorite shots from the year:

Recently, I have also been exploring the world of film photography. I wrote about why shooting film interests me in the latest issue of C'mon C'mon:

I've shot and developed two rolls of film till now. The results so far have been fantastic:

My love for mechanical keyboards continues to be strong. In 2025, I managed to pick up a lot of my 'dream keyboards' to add to the collection. I document this collection on the keyboards page on this website. I am in the process of evolving the page. I've added a dedicated page for each board. Over the coming year, I want to populate each page with stories, lore, insights, and photos. Super excited for this project!

I also have an Instagram for keyboards. I update it with photos every now and then. Using Instagram through this account is actually my favorite way to use the platform. It's a tight-knit space where I mostly follow other keyboard creators. I've also become friends with some of them. We enjoy supporting each other's work by sharing and commenting on posts. If this sort of thing interests you, you can follow this page here.

I attended a mini keyboard meetup too this year. Me and six friends met at a café and showcased our boards to each other. It was lots of fun and I got some nice pictures from the day:

Onto coffee. Some big updates here too.

I finally got into pour-over coffee this year. Coffee purists consider PO coffee as the holy grail. I resisted getting into POs for many years for reasons I wrote in CC #2:

POs are simple, yet incredibly difficult to get right consistently. I'm still learning and honing my technique.

I've recently started tracking my brews in a small diary my girlfriend gifted me. For each entry, I note down:

1. The coffee being used (name and origin)
2. How the coffee was processed on the farm
3. My recipe for the brew (water temperature, pour style, etc.)
4. Thoughts on the final brew
5. Changes I'd like to make for the next brew

Don't worry! I haven't gone full coffee snob (yet). I continue to enjoy brewing and drinking espresso and milk-based beverages as well. I do POs for lighter roasts of coffee and drink the resulting beverage black, without any additives. For espresso, I use medium or medium-dark roasts and add milk and sweetener to brew something tasty. For these categories, two coffees I LOVED this year were:

1. Dak Coffee Roaster's Cream Donut
2. September's Rainbow Cocktail (decaf)

In terms of gear, I went from a Baratza Encore ESP to a Niche Zero and Fellow Ode Gen 2. I quite literally split my grinder into two: Niche for espresso, Ode for pour overs. I love my current setup with these grinders. They're a joy to use!

Finally, two honorable hobby mentions: gaming and vinyl. I didn't game a lot this year but there was a month or two where I was locked the heck into playing Hades II. I lost momentum after that. I intend to get back into the game soon. I'm dying to find out how it ends.

Vinyl was a mini-hobby this year. I picked up some - ̗̀ nice ̖́ records over the course of the year. Some are new releases, while others are much older pressings I bought from collectors. My favorite way to spin vinyl is on weekends while brewing and sipping a nice cup of coffee. It's genuinely a soul soothing activity for me.

Speaking of vinyl, I want to give a shout out to one of my favorite apps on the App Store: AirChord. AirChord is a completely free hobby project by Kevin Kelly. It lets you AirPlay audio from any analog device. I use AirChord and my iPad to play vinyl on my HomePod Mini(s). Each time I use AirChord, I end up smiling ear to ear. If you end up using AirChord, consider donating to the creator!

This section used to be called 'State of the Fun'. I'm changing it to 'Media', as its more fitting.

Media consumption in 2025 was in the form of movies, YouTube, and books.

According to my Letterboxd, I watched 41 movies in 2025, including rewatches. These are not necessarily releases from 2025. I like to watch things at my own pace.

Here's a list of movies I couldn't stop thinking about after watching:

1. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)
2. Sinners (2025)
3. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
4. Haider (2014)
5. Uncut Gems (2019)
6. Chicago (2002)
7. The Wedding Banquet (2025)
8. KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

It's tough to do a favorites list for YouTube videos. Instead, I thought I'd mention channels I watched a lot of this year:

1. Lance Hedrick
2. WVFRM Podcast
3. Everything is Everything
4. Every
5. The Overlap

Reading wasn't a fruitful exercise in 2025. I started many books but failed to get sucked into any of them. I switched to non-fiction for a bit and faced the same challenge. I want to work on solving this next year. I plan to do this by exclusively reading fiction, using book recommendations from friends. Hope this strategy works!

And with that, 2025 comes to a close. It was a good year. Things started off at a low point. I felt stuck in a job I no longer wanted. By the middle of the year, I managed to switch jobs. That brought a renewed excitement to all realms of my life. Career-wise, I am in a good place now. Knock on wood.

2026 will be the year I turn 30. On a personal front, I have some big obstacles to overcome. I want to learn how to live more independently despite my physical disability. I want to somehow magically figure out traveling by air. I want to get fitter. Maybe build some muscle? I don't even know if that's something I can do. I want to try though. These are the real challenges of life. They don't have straightforward solutions. I hope I'm able to overcome them with time. I really really want to.

If you made it all the way to the end, thank you for reading. Between the newsletter and this blog, I've written a crap ton over the last few days. I'm happy it's all done now. I'm going to put on a nice movie for myself now and enter the new year. 2026 planning begins soon. I'm looking forward to that.

I hope 2026 is a fantastic year for all of us. See you next year for another one of these!

~

This post was typed out on my Monokei Kei v1 built with Cherry MX browns on a brass plate and my Keycult 1/60 build with Cherry MX blacks on an aluminium plate.