It's been ages since my last post, and the new year has passed by - both the usual and the Lunar one. I feel like I should give an update.

Life has been going on, but at an insane, hurried pace. I've gone through one of the most stressful moments in my career and, quite frankly, it's still ongoing and won't be settled until I see the end of February.

It's that bad. But things are also coming along, hence this post. I can at least take a breather once in a while.

But anyway, I did have updates in plenty of my usual places in my website here ( and Jeriel’s Technology Radar), and the occasional Bluesky post and Twitter post, so there’s that too.


What’s Cooking

Well, besides the AI community being disrupted by Chinese companies' releases of Deepseek-R1 and Qwen-2.5, I've been teaching folks about Generative AI myself. It's quite challenging when you're aware that what you're teaching might quickly become outdated compared to recent developments, and sometimes it's more productive to just build and create stuff.

And honestly, it's hectic because I'm both teaching and learning, and when that's all done (roughly 100% of my day already, excluding rest), I also have to think about everything in between, like normal work and actually putting these learnings into practice.

I've been working with the Python ecosystem lately, and while the Pythonisms aren't in my brain just yet, the dealing with the bullshit part is. I'm amused at being able to handle it too—things like Python's environment issues and rapidly changing libraries, especially the GenAI-focused ones.

Teaching is truly the fastest way to learn things since not only do you review your knowledge multiple times, but you also have to be good at it, and that pressure actually helps you.

But it also leads to burnout when there's too much going on at once.

And considering how the entire field of AI in general is intensely technical and difficult to comprehend? It's hard mode.

So far at least, it's calming down now that it's less lecture-based and more practical. But it's still quite stressful even when you're just facilitating since you have to be prepared for everything, and it takes more time than what attendees spend on it.