Year in Review: A Testing Ground

This year was extremely mentally satisfying in terms of what I learned and how it shaped me. I changed roles, and in many ways this year reflected the kind of engineer I’ve become. It felt like a testing ground for everything I’ve picked up over the years.

Early on, I spent a couple of months working around Sonatype Nexus, mostly on HA setups, some Terraform work, and operational improvements. It was a small part of the year, but it helped set the rhythm.

After moving into a new role, I started noticing something interesting. In unfamiliar situations, my way of approaching problems felt natural, almost automatic. I would break things down, build a quick POC, validate assumptions, and then execute. Over time, I realized these habits weren’t formed in isolation. They came from working alongside many strong SREs over the years, most of whom were true jack-of-all-trades.

That realization was powerful. Without consciously trying, I had internalized ways of thinking, debugging, and operating from the people I learned from, and this year is when it really showed.

Becoming Comfortable in Ambiguity

Deep Dives: Specs and IAM

A big theme this year was reading RFCs and turning them into concrete implementation ideas.

I spent a lot of time understanding sessions, how they’re created and revoked, and digging into OIDC revocation. I also focused on one of the most ignored parts of IAM: logout, and what it really means across systems.

CIBA and DPoP took up a good chunk of time. Reading and re-reading those specs, implementing parts of them, and closing gaps was genuinely fun. DPoP especially pushed me to better understand JWKs, JWEs, and how to choose the right algorithms instead of relying on defaults.

I also worked extensively with PingFederate and PingAccess SDKs, developing:

  • custom JARs, including a CIBA authenticator
  • PingAccess custom rules
  • Lot of Splunk dashboards, which were genuinely fun to build

Along the way, I solved a few interesting problems that brought out a side of me I hadn’t fully recognized before.

Building, Breaking, and Learning

On the homelab side, I discovered Talos, this made setting up k8 so easy.

Vibe Coding

I started more than 15 unfinished projects using Claude Code. The pattern was familiar: a strong idea, a working happy path, and then hesitation to ship because I didn’t fully own the code. Still, those experiments helped me think through ideas faster.

Two of the most notable side projects were exploring

  • TOTPS
  • Passkey as for authentication.

One project did stick. While working on DPoP, I built a small, local DPoP proof generator in a single JS and HTML file for quick testing and sharing. After letting Copilot clean it up, it turned into something genuinely useful.

Closing Thoughts

This year wasn’t about flashy work. It was about repetition, depth, and learning through real problems. More than anything, it made me realize how much of my engineering mindset comes from the people I’ve worked with.

Looking back, this year shaped me quietly but deeply, and I’m grateful for that.