2024 - Retrospective

As 2024 draws to a close, I want to put into words my year-end reflection. It’s been an eventful journey filled with opportunities and unexpected changes.

Personal: I feel so lucky

Despite worrisome global events, I find myself profoundly grateful for my personal circumstances - I’m in good health, I love what I do for a living, and I’m always surrounded by better people than me.

My lifelong passion for travel holds special significance because it wasn’t always accessible to me. Now, each new destination feels like a gift, a chance to broaden my horizons and connect with different cultures and perspectives. This year was no exception. I traveled extensively within Canada (including multiple trips to Toronto), and also had the chance to visit:

• 🇪🇸 Spain, where I got to visit Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, Barcelona, and Montserrat.
• 🇫🇷 France twice, including Paris during the Olympic games, and Toulouse and Carcassone.
• 🇵🇹 Madeira Island, Portugal, where I got to hike through incredibly beautiful and diverse landscapes.

Professional: Exploring new Challenges

After four years at Unity, I decided it was time to step into something different. I joined Alan as a Full-stack Senior Software Engineer, a successful French scale-up in the health insurance space, to help them expand to Canada. This role pushed me into new territory - from building production-grade mobile applications to navigating a large Python monolithic codebase, quite a shift from my years in microservices backend applications.

There I met great people and learned a lot. The company has a strong culture and a clear, genuine drive to improve healthcare, which I found inspiring. But beyond the technical side of things—learning new tools, adapting to different workflows, and tackling challenges—it has also offered me the oportunity of self-rediscovery, and introspection helped me better understand where I excel, what excites me, and the direction I wanted my career to take.

This clarity ultimately led me back to Unity (with a fresh perspective). I’m joining the Ads team - a part of the company I’ve long been curious about but never had the opportunity to explore. My time at Unity has always been very rewarding (even when it was challenging), and I’m greatful and beyond excited to be back working with such talented, passionated, and carrying people.

Lessons learned

“I Never Lose. I Either Win or Learn.” - Nelson Mandela

This year has been a rollercoaster of emotions, challenges, and growth. I’ve learned a lot about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, and what I want from life. Here are some of the key lessons I’ve learned:

• Embracing uncertainty has become second nature after years of unprecedented change. The pandemic, followed by tech booms and busts, reinforced the need to be adaptable. It reminded me of something I already knew, that everything is temporary, and changing all the time.
• My perspective on failure has also shifted dramatically. I’m not stranger to taking risks, after all I’ve moved alone to a new country, changed careers, and started from scratch more than once. But I also feel that with age, our risk tolerance decreases significantly (as it probably should). This new perspective on failure makes me more confortable with taking calculated risks again.
• The importance of Self-compassion has also became obvious this year. I know I can be hard on myself, but as I move into 2025 I’m reminded that it is important to take things less seriously, to be kind to myself, and key to resilience is not to avoid falling, but to learn how to get up again and again.
• The value of relationships has proven immeasurable, both in terms of personal and professional growth. Beyond the human need for connection, it has also become more and more clear to me that having meaningful connections often open doors to new opportunities that wouldn’t likely be available otherwise.
• Perhaps most significantly, I’ve learned the wisdom of strategic retreat. I know I have a tendency to push through hard times, especially when early in the process. But this is not always beneficial, and it is what drove me to spend 5 years in Law school when I knew it wans’t for me. Being able to step back, be honest with myself and reverse course when needed has proven to be invaluable.

Looking ahead

2025 feels poised to be an eventful year. There’s much to be hopeful and optimistic about, but also plenty of challenges and uncertainties. I’m reminded of the importance of focusing on what I can control, being kind to myself and others, and staying committed to learning and growth.

Here are my goals for the year ahead:

Personal Goals

• Dedicate more time to improving my knowledge of French, something I’ve neglected recently.
• Build a more consistent routine for tracking progress and reflecting on achievements.
• Exercise more regularly.
• Continue traveling, absorbing new perspectives.

Professional Goals

• Deepen my expertise in the technical complexities of Unity Ads.
• Contribute to aat least one major feature that significantly enhances the ads ecosystem.
• Mentor junior team members and share knowledge through tech talks or blog posts.
• Engage more actively in Montreal’s tech community by attending meetups, as well as making more effort to reconnect with former colleagues.

I’m thrilled to rejoin Unity, collaborate with the Ads team. While I don’t yet know where 2025 will take me, I’m confident I’ll come out a better version of myself.