On this last day of 2025, the year I moved into tech, I’m thinking intently about the experience of being a human amongst all this new technical knowledge. The tech landscape and the facets of that that matter most to me – data, responsibility, safety – are as dynamic and urgent as I suspected they would be when I made the leap nearly a year ago. I am exactly where I wanted to be.
And my biggest core belief and value remains the same as it was back then: new tech needs new humans, it needs humanity, it needs all the vast swathes of knowledge that led up to its invention, because everyone’s lives will be – are being! – shaped by emerging tech. (One of the things I really enjoy about working with tech, in fact, is the tangible sense of history shaping NOW, yesterday even. The consequences are always here NOW, and our responsibilities as developers and users are already here too.)
This is all why I feel so strongly that, as tech progresses, we need to be even more human ourselves and assert the features of our world that seem unrelated to tech. This isn’t a contradiction. I’m really talking about reading. The machines COULD read for us, but they AREN’T human and so they don’t need to read the way we do. A summary isn’t a poem, or an image, or a sentence crafted in a beautiful way for the sake of that beauty and the feelings it brings.
In the spirit of being more assertively human by reading, therefore, I read 73 books in 2025, including as part of a genre challenge from the brilliant Storygraph app. This challenge was designed by a human user of the app and included thoughtful prompts to read a graphic novel written by a woman, a book about visual art, a non-fiction book by or about a sports personality (I devoured the Lionesses’s coach Sarina Wiegman’s memoir What It Takes, even though I wouldn’t usually read about sports!) and a few other prompts to push me out of my usual reading comfort zone.
In a few days, I’ll get going again on my data engineering and development projects with I hope, a more sharply human sense of my responsibilities while in tech. I’ll be working with data about students’ use of educational tools, among other things, with a small sense of the vast, recent historical and social context in which this happens. Oh, and I’ll start a few new Storygraph reading challenges. Storygraph aren’t paying me – I truly love them and the magic that happens when tech meets books!