How I’m Doing at the End of 2025

I am in the process of updating my résumé. Not because I’m looking for a job[1], but because I like to feature my résumé on my website and the current published copy doesn’t reflect my pivot from engineering management to an individual contributor role two years ago. I feel a little bit weird about the misrepresentation, and would rather update the document than take it down. While working on some edits, I was reflecting on how things have been going, and decided to write this “what’s been happening” post as my productive procrastination.

Caretaking

Two years ago, I wrote:

I’m living with my mom in upstate New York, somewhere between Poughkeepsie, NY and Danbury, CT. My mom has several health conditions, including chronic pain and memory impairment, that my sister and I have been helping her manage.

All of this is still the case, but it’s gotten progressively more difficult. Summoning the patience and grace, every day, to show up for someone else who is almost always in pain and is regularly in need of help navigating tasks involving any kind of bureaucracy — it’s hard. To tell you the truth, it’s been really hard. And before you ask, in my experience, it’s harder to find in-home help that actually helps than to shoulder this myself, if that makes sense. Especially in a rural area.

I don’t have much of a community or much in terms of friends where I live. In-person dating also isn’t viable here. I haven’t moved me and my mom closer to friends I have down in the city because her home is familiar to her and she says she’s comfortable here and doesn’t want to move. This is negotiable, but the thought of project managing a move is just too much for me to handle given my regular responsibilities. There’s also no other family besides me and my sister.

The way that I relieve the stress from my caretaking role is to travel to see friends domestically and visit new places internationally as often as I reasonably can. When I travel, my sister, who lives about a half hour away, steps in to take care of things with my mom. That’s hard on her, because as I know full well from doing it for a decade, caretaking is harder without having passive eyes and ears on the person being helped; phone calls and visits reveal less of the ground truth.

But my travels are fun! And travel is especially nice because I no longer use nearly all of my vacation time visiting home, and because I’m lucky enough to travel for work sometimes. This last year I was able to visit Australia, New Zealand, Türkiye, Japan, the SF Bay Area, Seattle, Denver, and Boston.

Putting this together, it feels like I’m living my life in a cycle. I spend a few weeks or months in upstate New York keeping everything on the rails at home while working my sometimes also stressful full-time software engineering job; and then I go somewhere else and feel like a young, vibrant person at the top of my game — funnier, hotter, and smarter than I’ve ever been at any other point in my life; until the point where isolating upstate for a couple of weeks sounds kind of nice.

The balance is very far from perfect, and I know I’ve made it sound difficult in this post, but I am profoundly grateful and happy that I’m able to be here for my mom. She doesn’t deserve her chronic illness. (In fact, nobody deserves chronic illness, and seeing the way that society treats the chronically ill first-hand has been one of the most impactful experiences in my life). She’s a sweetheart, I love her dearly, and being able to be here is meaningful to me. It’s just hard.

Oh, and don’t worry — I have a therapist, and they’re great. :)

Zepbound

I started taking Zepbound earlier this year, and it’s been one of the best things to happen to me in my entire life. With the help of this medication, the constant preoccupation with food I’ve felt my entire life is under control. If you’ve known me for a while, you’ve seen my body change in shape over time as I’ve oscillated between my “regular” state and a way of living where I was managing the stress-eating that I’m prone to at the cost of a wild amount of willpower — almost a singular focus of my being alive. This medication is helping me with my relationship with food more than anything else I’ve tried and I tolerate it extremely well.

Despite all of the bullshit shame that society wants us to feel around needing help with food, I am so happy to talk about this. My primary reason for starting the medication was to address some early signs of potential health issues my doctor and I could see on the horizon. My goal wasn’t and isn’t a target weight or appearance. Instead, it’s to consistently measure some better health markers. I’m happy to say that I’ve started hitting some of those goals!

My employer is paying for most of this very expensive medication, and I’m really happy about that. Early this year I was ready to start paying for it out of pocket ($1000+ a month, ~$500 with coupons), but I figured I’d check with my insurance one last time before ponying up, and it turns out, in 2025, my employer started offering a relevant benefit to employees. After going through a 90 day online course that coaches you through healthy eating, sustainable exercise, and habit building, you’re a candidate for medication like Zepbound.

I was legitimately devastated to have to wait another 90 days to try out this new-to-me form of help after a lifetime of being coached on healthy eating, sustainable exercise, and habit building. And the gatekeeping of it all is legitimately offensive to me. But no matter how devastated or offended I felt, I figured it’d be worth going through the program if I could potentially save hundreds of dollars a month on a medication that, other than the cost, I have no reservations about being on for the rest of my life. With my insurance, I pay roughly $25 a month.

(An aside: If you would benefit from getting help in this area of life, and your health insurance is provided by your employer, and you aren’t your own employer, and your insurance doesn’t cover it, keep checking to see if coverage has changed. I also recommend sending a quarterly letter to your employer’s benefits department making a case for coverage. I also wouldn’t blame anyone for leaving a job ever, but especially for leaving to get coverage on a life-changing medication. And if you work where I work, hit me up if you have questions or want details about the program.)

Career

The last two years have been good for correcting something important: making the work I do in the tech industry matter less to me, compared to other aspects of my life, than it used to. Living with and helping to take care of my mom has helped foster a sense of perspective I was struggling to grow by myself in California[2].

And yet, and I think this is a good thing overall, my work in tech still matters to me and motivates me. I surprised myself earlier this year when I finally accepted a standing invitation to speak at the FIDO Alliance’s “Authenticate” conference and started the difficult work of putting together a story, finding my emotional center around that story, and iterating on how I told that story with the help of my colleagues until it was a story I was excited to tell.

Said more directly, putting a good conference talk together is a shit-ton of work. I was asking myself, “Who is this Ricky? Am I happy that they’re back?” And during the more busy moments with the rest of my day job and the tougher moments of taking care of my mom, I was very seriously cursing myself. A feeling I find to be unpleasant, but also useful and validating, is when I have enough presence of mind to recognize that I’ve stretched myself too thin, and that some part of my life is merely getting the best I can give it right now and not what I wish I could give it right now. (What’s much worse than this feeling is to lose myself enough that I don’t even realize I’m letting people down!)

Fortunately, even I have convinced myself that the talk was good and worth doing. An ongoing project for me right now is iterating on the value proposition of passkeys by collecting and distilling feedback, advocating for changes internally where I work, and talking to my industry colleagues inside and outside of standards to address problems. This is challenging because although I deeply believe in passkeys, I cannot immediately effect change on the many websites, apps, and other passkey managers that make up the overall global experience of and sentiment around them. Despite any and all criticisms people have about passkeys, I am stunned by how well the industry transition away from passwords and to passkeys is going. The momentum is wildly outpacing my expectations.

Outside of passkeys, in 2025, I was really proud of the work my team did to polish the Passwords app after its 1.0, and I figured out how to bring two features to the world that I love because they’ll save people time and maybe make them smile. The first was to offer AutoFill of security codes contained in the contents of app push notifications, including apps like Gmail and WhatsApp, in iOS 26. The second was to offer AutoFill of security codes in all apps on macOS 26, including web browsers. The engineering on this last one was wild, and it wasn’t without complications at launch, but we got ‘em cleaned up, and now more people than ever can use their brains to do things other than manually type six digit codes.

:)

If you read this far, it probably means that you have supported or are supporting me in some way in my life, and I appreciate that! If we’re friend friends we haven’t chatted in a while, reach out! And if we’re not, please do take me up on meeting up when I toot or skeet that I’m visiting near where you live. Please be kind to yourself, happy holidays, and happy new year!