New year resolutions for 2025
Hey,
I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋
I took an offline break this holiday season to recharge. Welcome to my first Newsletter of 2025. Happy New Year!
In the last edition of 2024, I retrospected on how last year went for me. Since then, I took a 2 week break from social media and writing online. I did it to travel with family over the New Year's break, but also to brace for a crazy start of 2025. More on that in a second.
Today, I'm telling you about my New Year's resolutions for 2025, and I stick to my "Finite and Infinite Games" framing. If I had to boil it into one sentence, I really just want to continue working remotely with the level of freedom I've had in recent years, and ideally build some anti-fragility to avoid this lifestyle to ever be removed from me.
So, let me tell you how I plan to do it. These are my resolutions for 2025:
1/ Publish more content online
Writing online transformed my life ever since I started publishing my thoughts on Twitter/X and on Linkedin, in 2022. These became the main channel for clients to find me and hire me as their Fractional CTO, or as an instructor, or as a conference speaker, or as something else. It's an incredible way to expose myself to luck.
One of the opportunities that came to me was writing a book with O'Reilly, which will be published this year. I'm sure more such opportunities will come to me, and beyond that, I should self-publish some books too. I've been procrastinating on writing a book about starting (and growing) a Fractional CTO career.
But besides the income opportunities, it brings a lot of good will to me. Almost every day I have people in my DMs thanking me for some article, or course, or just a tweet that helped them in their trajectory. The content I write is valuable to many people who read it. Even if they don't pay me for it, and even if I don't know them, this is a big reason pushing me to write online every day.
Now, I should carve out more quality time to write. Write on X/Linkedin, write this Newsletter, write books. It's something I enjoy doing, but I reckon it's not always easy to actually block those deep work slots for it.
2/ Build my personal Board of (AI) Advisors
I've been doing this ad hoc already, but in 2025 I'll put some time to build this properly, as an experiment. I'll train a bunch of AI agents, each to a specific goal, and have them together into a common chat interface. This will be my personal board of advisors, and the main goal is to spend less time prompting ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc, and to get higher quality outputs from these.
Of course some of these AI agents will be used to support my own work as a Writer and as a Fractional CTO. But way beyond that, I will built a personal trainer and nutritionist, trained on my bio-markers and fed with daily training sessions from Strava. I'll also build a stellar researcher based on my manual process that mixes Perplexity, web scraping and a VA in the loop. I have so many ideas, what an exciting time!
I'll build these AI agents for my own personal goals, but it's likely that some of them will make it into actual products that I'll launch in public. If I'm happy with the outcome and if I see business potential, I'll make it available to everyone, just like I did with the JobsCopilot.ai, last year. In any case, the main goal is for me to have fun building something that's useful for me.
For this, I've been assembling a small team around me to build AI agents for myself, for my SaaS products, and for my clients, whose tech roadmaps increasingly include LLM-enabled workflows and products. Drop me a message if you're interested in joining.
3/ Continue growing my Fractional CTO career
Growing is a tough word, because I must define what direction I want to grow into. Most times, career growth is defined as making more money. Well, making money is good for sure, but my goals with "growing" this career are a bit more nuanced. Let me explain.
I want to protect myself from the downside of this "freelance" career. Historically I've had quite serious anxiety issues and panic attacks in times when I had no clients, or when clients didn't pay me on time. In recent years, my main goal has been to create inbound distributions channels, so that I have more clients in my DMs/email than those that I can accept. This is my status in this beginning of 2025, and I like being oversubscribed, but I remain vigilant. I need to keep publishing content that future clients will find useful, and I need to keep nurturing the agencies, fellow Fractionals, investors, accelerators and some other referral networks that consistently bring me clients.
As I look into 2025, I'm confident that I'm on to my best year to date. Q1 is shaping up to be one of my highest income quarters ever (reason why I delayed this first newsletter edition of the year, I've been swamped). I've also closed a few clients that I'll likely be working with for a long time, with cool products, capable teams, and believers that a Fractional exec can be an integral part of the team long term. This is a big change for me, since I've played the role of a "turnaround CTO" with most of my clients over the years.
This year, I'd love to be more public about my client engagements (with client's consent, of course). On one hand, clients gain exposure through my channels, as we hire teams and launch products. On the other hand, my audience gains visibility into what my career looks like on a more ongoing basis. I'll be hiring a lot this year, so if you're looking for a job feel free to drop me a DM with your CV.
4/ Publish a book and speak at tech events
O'Reilly invited me to write the book "Generative AI for Software Development", currently available in early release at their website. It has been fun to write, and I'm excited for the learning experience on how to write, publish and promote a book with the best publisher in tech.
The promotion will include speaking at events and doing some sort of a roadshow, I believe. I look forward to it, and I certainly look forward to seeing my book when walking randomly through some bookstore.
I'm told that my courses on the O'Reilly platform were the most popular in 2024, with over 25000 students. I'll aim to continue leading the discussion about Generative AI in Software Development, and I'm confident that the book will do well. If anything, I should write more about this topic on my social channels.
Now, what are your resolutions for 2025?
Once again, I saw a big uptick of people subscribing to JobsCopilot and joining the Remote Jobs Braintrust. It seems like finding a new job is a very popular New Year's Resolution. If that's your case, go ahead of join too 😄
Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.
See you next Friday,
Sergio Pereira,
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover
