Code Zen

Its that time of the year again. Reflecting on this year, I am thankful for so much but its also been a year where optimism was is lesser supply than usual. As a technologist, I was excited to explore the possibilities opening up with AI, and with my new-ish role of Director, I enjoyed setting a vision and direction for my team. But a lot of this happened with the backdrop of increasing negativity in our society as well as a mad rush towards an AI-powered techno-utopian vision whose human consequence has been barely a consideration. I still remain optimistic about technology and human nature, but I do worry about where we are heading.

Work

One of my biggest projects in the last few years was taking the Xfinity digital collectibles project from pitch to prototype to production in 2024. That momentum continued for the first half of the year as we supported other major initiatives including Bravo TV and the MIT/Intuitive Machines moon lander that we also supported as part of our MIT relationship, but my favorite part of that project was working with the SNL marketing team to support the 50 years of SNL celebration. As a big SNL fan, this was a dream come true.

I collected all 6 SNL digital logos and unlocked a reward 🙂 https://t.co/jaIVzFpTCZ pic.twitter.com/qmfXGoDjjW

— arpit @ substack (@arpit) February 12, 2025

All fun things come to an end though and we ultimately transitioned the project to the core entertainment team mid-year and moved to other projects.

For the rest of the year, our team continued to pilot new ideas. The domain to explore this year was Agentic systems and we did multiple prototypes using simple LLM interactions to more robust frameworks like LangChain. With LangChain being part of Comcast Lift Labs’ cohort this year, it was great to get deeper understanding into their system with the LangChain team.

AI also changed the way we built our prototypes. After many months of working with AI now, I feel I have crossed the Gartner over-optimism and over-pessimism zones, and feel a real boost in productivity. My entire software engineering workflow is now built on top of Cursor, Github Copilot and Gemini code review agents while tools like Google Stitch have become interesting for getting quick designs together that I can finesse in Figma. That said, getting the best out of an LLM still remains almost an individual skill and adoption across teams remains a challenge. Something to work on in 2026.

GDG

If I dropped the ball on one thing, it is the Philadelphia Google Developers Group. The core team that I used to work with has moved on and I am hoping to recruit a new set of leaders to manage it. Even with me mostly distracted this year, the group is still more active than I thought it would be – possibly because a lot of the monthly calls become conversations on AI and a lot of people are doing interesting stuff with it. Stay tuned for a reboot next year and join the community if you haven’t yet.

Family and Friends

I usually have a hard time squeezing a vacation every year, mostly because of bad planning and the regular India trips that use up most of my vacation days in alternate years. This year my parents came to visit me for over three months, which was great and we had a great time exploring Philly and the neighborhood cities. We also went to Florida in April for my sister-in-law’s surprise birthday party and in Dec, I took a week-long vacation to Europe (Amsterdam and Paris) – my first! Seeing a different society always resets my brain to the realization that our lives here are based on explicit choices we make, and not just how life is.

Social

Having mostly left Facebook and Twitter, I was really hoping to get the same value I used to get by posting on Mastodon/BlueSky/Threads. I dont think I am there yet, which could be a function of both the audience on those platforms and my own age. I did write a fair bit on my Substack before taking a hiatus while my parents were visiting and time got scarce. I’ll definitely be writing more there so do subscribe if you are interested.

It does raise one question: Whats the point of having a blog as well as a newsletter. I dont have an ironclad answer there yet but a lot of this blog’s value has been in my documenting technical details that I learn or personal-ish updates that I want to remember in the future. My hope with the newsletter is to share ideas on where I think technology could be going and the kinds of experiences

Books

I maintained a healthy balance between books and graphic novels this year, and even manga which is new to me. The 12 books that make up the 20th Century Boys series were a great read.

Having written a retrospective pretty consistently for the last decade or so, at this point its almost customary to start with how different this year felt compared to previous ones. But this one was truly one for the books!

Work

A big year for Xfinity Moments

Moments is the internal name for the digital keepsakes and gamification platform my team launched late last year. The project has been my baby for the last 2 years and taking it from an idea to an internal prototype to a system in production with hundreds of thousands of keepsakes now unlocked has been an amazing journey. We ran 5 experiences around Moments this year with a 6th one around the SNL coming very soon. I have written about the success we had with the Olympics experience before, but in general it has been a very rewarding experience for me personally to see something you truly believed in now actively considered for various initiatives. I have learned so much about building systems at very different scales through the project but am even more thankful to the small team that built it and the various leaders at Comcast who both believed in it and championed it at various forums.

Managing teams

For the last 20 years I have worked as a technical contributor in various teams at various capacities leading up to a Senior Principal Engineer role at Comcast Labs that led me explore various emerging technologies and how they might fit at Comcast. However the last couple of years with the gaming initiative previously and the Moments project more recently, my role has been more directional with day-to-day engineering time often getting subsumed by things like release plans, coordination meetings and defining and allocating tasks to my team. This year, after a lot of deliberation, I took the advice of various mentors and transitioned to management and took on the role of Director of Engineering at the Emerging Products and Technologies team. The new role brings with it the opportunity to influence multiple projects and work with a lot more people. I still get to write code to explore some technical avenues, I just don’t have to worry about holding up the deliverables for the project sprint in progress which has relieved a fair bit of guilt 🙂

Agentic AI

One of the new areas I have been focusing on at work is the rise of Agentic AI and its impact not only on products themselves but in the processes and workflows that go into creating and evolving products. Exploring that landscape for the last couple of months and seeing a new breed of tools that can completely disrupt the traditional processes has eye-opening to say the least. If this is a space you have any thoughts on, do drop me a line.

Non-work

Becoming an American citizen

Having lived in the US for about 22 years now, I finally became an American citizen this year. It feels weird to think that I don’t have to stress about any kind of mistake in my paperwork or some change in government policy that might force me to leave the life I have built here. It is also a moment of reflection on my own identity. It is poetic that this happens this year, my 22nd year in the US when my first 22 were spent in India. I have a lot of thoughts that I hope to condense into something sharable soon.

Writing

Having moved-off Twitter for the most part, I have been trying to use the alternatives (you can find me on BlueSky, Mastodon and Threads) and they are fine but I have lost most of my Twitter friend circle in the transition. I had been noodling on starting a newsletter for a while and I finally pushed the trigger a couple of months ago and started a Substack newsletter. I am still trying to find the right format there but its been a good place to collect and share the various links I read in a week or 10 days, which is mostly what I used Twitter for. Please subscribe!

Reading

2024 was not the greatest year for reading book, but I did enjoy a few. Ended up reading a lot more graphic novels which were great.

Here is to a great 2025!