Written by Susan Shu Chang
on November 07, 2026

Year in review 2025-2026

I haven’t posted on this blog for some time, but it felt like a good time to write one of the year in review posts. So here is my reflection on the last two years in one post.

I moved away from Toronto

I moved to Boston in the US. I’m grateful that I get to stay close to my family and friends in Toronto - it’s an eight hour drive, or two hour flight. The time getting to and from the airport is often longer than the time in the air.

Some things I’ve had to get used to:

converting Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head. My trick: subtract 30, then divide by 2. Close enough mental math.
- Example to convert 70F: (70-30)/2 = 20. Close enough to the correct answer: 21.11C.
still not used to the speed limit signs in miles. Gas is priced in gallons but in Canada it’s priced in litres.
health insurance here is gnarly. I miss going to the doctor, getting ultrasounds, blood tests, all for free in Ontario and no mental load of in-network or not.

Massachusetts & Boston

Massachusetts has a lot of lakes, fun for kayaking and pedal boating, which I enjoyed during the season. The Charles River is beautiful, and I enjoy these walks: the Cambridge side by the Harvard boathouses, and the Boston side along the Charles River Esplanade. Then swing by Chinatown to get food and bubble tea (they say boba here).

In the city itself, I like the Public Garden - the nearby Boston Common feels a bit small and the grass is often just dirt. Maybe I’ve been going at the wrong times though. The little pond in the Public Garden is beautiful, and it’s often full of Canada geese, which gives me a sense of familiarity.

Talks

It was a full house!

I spoke at 3 major conferences in the Boston area despite having just moved here, which I’m proud of:

QCon Boston 2026, Building Reusable Evaluation Frameworks for Agentic AI Products
ODSC (Open Data Science Conference) 2026, Lessons from evaluating production AI agents for over a year
PyData Boston 2025, Evaluating AI agents in production with Python

Plus a keynote at GPS Toronto Career Summit, a talk at Data Day Texas 2025, Elastic User Groups in Toronto and Boston, a guest lecture for University of Toronto, CSC490, and hackathon judging (HackMIT 2026).

I do miss the conferences in Toronto where I knew a lot more people, but I’m definitely getting to know people (and coworkers) here - shoutout to PyLadies Boston and Boston Python who have a lot of events.

I know that in my last year in review (2024), I mentioned that I was slowing down my talk schedule. It seems like a lot, still, but this is actually really slow for me. It helps to reuse general themes of the talks. Talks also are a forcing function for me to compile and deeply digest what I’ve been doing at work, so it’s useful in that way.

Travel

I took a longer trip in 2025: we went to Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka), Taiwan (Taipei, Kaohsiung), and Hong Kong. I’d been to all of them before, but it was fun to go back to familiar places. The food in Taiwan was as tasty and cheap as I remembered: beef noodles, fried chicken cutlet, fried sweet potato balls (地瓜球)… YUM! I’ve lived in Taipei and Kaohsiung before, so I was the unofficial tour guide. I also met up with friends from high school. Glad to have friendships that last for so long.

I also went to Yellowknife, Canada: the northern lights, ice fishing (I didn’t catch anything), and dog sledding were a lot of fun. We needed to wear heavy duty winter clothes such as snow pants, as it was as cold as -40 Celsius. Getting outside was an ordeal, it would take 15 minutes to get dressed with all the layering. But I survived the trip and I gained a new respect for nature. Ptarmigans (white fluffy birds in winter) are really cute and it was my first time seeing them.

It was really cold, but worth it.

Other: went to Spain, and the UK. I loved London a LOT, for all the history there - it’s one of my top cities to visit now. Washington, DC: went to my second Smithsonian museum there, it could be fun to visit them all.

Games and music

Some games I played recently:

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (co-op)
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Learned a lot of Greek history here)
Old Skies (really good point and click time travel game)
Assassin’s Creed 3: I was inspired to play it by my move, since it’s set in Boston and New York, but dropped it near the end because of the clunkiness.
(Some more, too many to list)

Games I’m looking forward to: Solasta 2 (co-op), CRYMELIGHT.

Top artists on my Spotify Wrapped 2025:

Weezer
The Weeknd
Olly Alexander (Years & Years)
Ariana Grande
PinkPantheress

Other reflections

Despite the move, I’m glad that I made a lot of new memories with family and friends in the last two years.

Honestly though, there was a lull in things at some point in these two years. What I noticed is that getting back into this blog helped me feel more motivated. It turns out I need more mental stimulation, and I think freshening up this blog has helped.

Various things I think about

If other people are doing it, doesn’t mean you have to do it.
If you don’t give yourself stuff to do, you’ll browse Reddit. If you give yourself something to do, you’ll stop browsing Reddit.
Air fryers are amazing.
Communication is one of the hardest things humanity has to deal with, and it’s a process for life.
The unexpected is always expected.
The principles from University is a Pull-Based System work for the rest of life.

Looking forward to

Learning to cook more dishes, and baking more.
Traveling more within the US, and visiting Canada at a set frequency every year.
Speaking and attending more conferences.

Well, that’s about all I can think of. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great year ahead!