My 2025: The Fifth Year of All-in DB

If I had not sprained my ankle on Labor Day in 2021, I might not have walked the path from lakehouse cloud-native to vector multimodal AI native. Yes, 2025 marks my fifth year of grinding in the database industry. It is year-end reflection time again. I recently did a hard retcon of my own history, but the ritual still matters. This time I want to talk more about myself.

Just Talking About Work

I still work at a database company. Yes, "still" means I switched again. At the end of December, I joined OceanBase to work on open-source projects around databases and the AI ecosystem. This is the third database company in my career.

For most of 2025 I worked on GraphRAG at NebulaGraph. Even though the track is crowded and no longer hot, my team and I still delivered a solid answer over the past year — 95% accuracy in domain-specific evaluations, and overall cost reduced to a level comparable to vector plus full-text hybrid indexes. It almost paved the road for wider adoption of graph-based document RAG.

Work-driven outputs also created some positive impact. In March, when I researched MCP integration, I designed and implemented the first MCP integration in the LlamaIndex ecosystem, and contributed it upstream as llama-index-tools-mcp. After the community refined it further, it became a top 2% download package in the Python ecosystem.

I am not a workaholic or a researcher. If we talk about code taste, among the colleagues I have worked with, I am probably just average. Even so, I can still shine. In the NebulaGraph community awards at the end of 2025, I was recognized by my peers. Thanks to everyone for the support and help. Though our paths are far apart, we will meet again.

May Open Source Bless Us

Because the GenAI platform I work on is a commercial product, my open-source participation has changed. More often now, I do things from the angle of requirement research and delivery. The llama-index-tools-mcp mentioned above is one such result.

I also explored coding agents. Following ampcode's article, I made a simple Python implementation. Later explorations became the foundation of my PyCon China 2025 talk, "Building a Multi-Agent Collaborative CLI Coding Assistant from Scratch."

As a snippet from that talk, I introduced a Python SDK I wrote for the agent client protocol. I never expected that a few months later it would be integrated by kimi-cli, openhands, and others, and eventually become part of the official SDK. Monthly downloads passed one million, and I gained a new role as a maintainer.

I also put work into Apache projects. I split several OpenDAL subprojects out of the repo, and recently spent some late nights on the Rust implementation of DataSketches.

Open source might not be better or worse with me in it, but I do draw nourishment and momentum from it. The good things I once had seem to have come alongside open source. Even so, I still have too many promises left behind and failed to deliver.

Toward a Better Life

The most important change this year is that, because I moved to Hangzhou for work at the end of the year, I finally ended a four-year long-distance relationship, now in its eighth year. I also unlocked more memories with my girlfriend, like practicing "goldfish mouth" at G.E.M.'s concert, and getting fan-made materials from wmls at a Mayday concert.

I tried to pick up new skills through learning. I can still only play "Lan Hua Cao" by following the sheet, but at least I can recognize my guitar chords again. I practiced house dance for a while. Keeping up with other people's rhythm is already a big challenge for me, but moving with the beat always helps me relax.

I have two not-so-cute cats. For a while they would scratch the door open at midnight and jump onto me to rave. Honestly, I have not taken good enough care of them. But Goji still shows me his little belly, and Aloe has been willing to come over for a tiny bite of cat treat after we moved to Hangzhou.

Life, oh life. Days and nights, but when I pick up the pen I do not know what to write. Things are okay, no big storms. In a recent checkup, I did not see fatty liver on the report anymore.

A Few Lines for AI

Aside from some changes in efficiency, process, and rhythm, my work and life have not been stirred much by AI. Value does not shift dramatically just because one or two tools are added.

I do not plan to count how much code I generated with AI, or how many tokens or dollars I spent in the past year. But, rarely, this is a piece of writing typed 100% by me.

The world is going through profound change. I am honored to be part of it, one wave among countless, breaking against a rock.