2025 - Retrospective

As we approach the end of 2025, I want to reflect once again on what I’ve experienced and learned this year, as well as my hopes and goals for the next. I’m reminded of how fortunate I am to have had the experiences and opportunities I’ve had.

Personal

I’ve revived an old hobby: photography. This is something I’ve always enjoyed. I remember when I was 10 or 11, my parents got me an old Kodak Instamatic 333-X (I think) camera that was popular in the 60s and 70s. By the 90s, it was being rebranded and promoted as a cheap camera for kids, complete with Disney characters and all. I must still have some of those random pictures at my parents’ house.

The fondness for pictures never went away. Around 2010, I got a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ that was very decent for the price, but had fixed lenses, and because of that I later sold to get a Canon Rebel T2i. For the longest time, I was very happy to use it. I never got too technical—that wasn’t really my goal—but I understood the basics. Over time, I stopped bringing my camera with me. It was too big, too cumbersome, and cellphone pictures were getting better and better.

But something gets lost when we use an iPhone to take pictures. Not only are you not really in control (the camera is constantly trying to compensate for bad lighting, etc.), but I also find that the photos all look artificial and clinical. Smartphones are impressive little computers and can take great pictures, but due to the limited space for a good sensor and lens, they compensate with computational photography. This makes the pictures look dull and artificial—in my opinion—with distinctive HDR-like quality I’ve never liked.

So I got myself a Fujifilm X-M5. I’m very happy I did. It’s tiny, which removes the excuse of being burdensome to carry around. It takes beautiful pictures: Fujifilm is known for their “colour science” and film simulations. The pictures look the opposite of iPhone photography—they imitate the nostalgic look and feel of film. Had I known fujifilm would be releasing the X-E5 just weeks later, I would have bought that instead. I’ve also considered the highly sought-after X100VI, but being stuck with one single focal length wasn’t really what I was looking for.

I liked it so much that I’ve started a new website to showcase some of my amateur pictures at https://victorpierre.photos

This year, I had the chance to travel to:

• [🇫🇷] Southern France: Visited Bordeaux, Saint-Émilion, Montpellier, Nîmes, and Toulouse.
• [🇬🇷] I’ve long dreamt of visiting Greece, and it didn’t disappoint.
• [🇵🇹, 🇪🇸] Met my parents in Porto and Santiago de Compostela (first time in Galicia).
• [🇨🇦] Quebec City during Christmas was beautiful.

Professional

I rejoined Unity this year, which reinvigorated me and brought a lot of new learning experiences. As part of the ads team, focusing on privacy, I’ve dealt with an amount of throughput and stored data that I haven’t encountered before. I’ve worked on a very small but efficient team of three, modernizing existing services and building new ones. We’ve also built libraries and data enrichment pipelines. I’m surprised, to be honest, with how much we’ve accomplished this year.

Lessons Learned

Personal:

• Learned to tune out all the noise from news and politics. I’ve also been trying to significantly reduce my exposure to social networks and the like. I feel very good about it.

Professional:

• Building mainly event-driven applications, with heavy usage of Kafka and asynchronous requests/processing.
• Data enrichment pipelines using Apache Flink, as well as ETL using Airflow.
• Libraries to be used by other teams, forcing me to think about design and documentation differently.
• Collaborating with other teams to build a shared infrastructure, which required a lot of communication and coordination.

Looking Ahead

2026 might turn out to be quite different from what I expected. There are a few things brewing that I’m not ready to talk about yet—too many moving pieces. But if things line up the way I hope, it could be a very interesting year.