Q3 2025 Update
update on what I've been working on in Q3 of 2025!
This quarter felt less like adding chapters and more like writing the abstract while the paper is still being finished. I’m working on grad school applications, had a couple papers accepted to a journal, kept building on the foundation models team at Shopify, stepped back into my final year at UofT, continuing my presidency at UofT AI, and shipping at Fallyx. On paper it reads like momentum. From the inside it feels more like compression, forcing messy work into clean claims and noticing what the compression removes.
A few patterns surfaced that I didn’t expect:
Compression exposes taste. Grad statements are a lossy codec. You decide what survives the squeeze. I noticed the ideas I kept cutting were the ones I didn’t actually believe in, even if they sounded impressive. The edit revealed the work.
Publication changes nothing material. Acceptance didn’t upgrade the idea; it froze a snapshot. The real milestone was deciding the claim was “good enough” to stop tinkering. My relationship to uncertainty shifted more than the result did.
Two clocks, one body. Research optimizes for discovery; product optimizes for reliability. They run on different frequencies, but they need the same hardware: attention. At Shopify, I’ve been learning how to bridge the two. How to preserve the long-horizon thinking of research inside the short feedback loops of product. It’s taught me that novelty without scale is chaos, and scale without novelty is stagnation.
Subtractive ambition. Senior year makes abundance look like progress, but I’ve realized that too many good opportunities can blur the truly great ones. Saying no became a filtering mechanism — a way to protect compounding focus. The work got deeper once I stopped trying to make it broader.
Momentum ≠ speed. The weeks that felt strongest weren’t the fastest; they were the ones with the lowest context-switching cost. Depth came from fewer state transitions, not more hours.
The more I do, the more I realize the work only starts to mean something when it starts to shape how I think. This quarter wasn’t just about stacking things onto my Linkedin, but rather, it was about learning how to build and think differently. Slower, maybe, but with more intent behind every move.
two clocks, one body.
For the past few months at Shopify, I’ve been learning what it really means to build things at scale, not just to get something working, but to make it dependable, adaptable, and real. It’s a kind of rigor that feels different from research. Research rewards depth i.e long hours chasing an idea until it unfolds. Product rewards momentum, consistent progress, clean systems, and things that don’t break.
For a while, I treated these two modes of work like separate identities. I had my “research brain,” curious and theoretical, happiest in uncertainty. And I had my “product brain,” practical and deliberate, focused on making something that people can actually use. They demanded different parts of me; different tempos, different metrics, even different kinds of patience. But the longer I stayed in both, the more I realized they weren’t opposites at all. They were two expressions of the same pursuit: paying attention.
Attention has become something I think about a lot, not the passive kind, but the kind that carries weight. In research, attention means noticing the details that don’t fit, the subtle inconsistencies that lead to new questions. In product, attention means understanding where abstraction breaks down, where human behavior refuses to align neatly with theory. Both depend on the same thing: caring enough to notice.
The hard part is that attention moves differently across the two domains. In research, you protect it → long stretches of deep focus where one thought builds quietly on the last. In product, you divide it across juggling feedback loops, standups, and the realities of collaboration. I used to think one was better than the other, but they’re really just two different calibrations of the same instrument. Each one sharpens you for the other.
Working on foundational models makes this tension almost poetic. These systems are built to generalize — to encode broad understanding that can serve countless downstream applications. But to make them actually work, you need to obsess over the smallest details: tokenization quirks, data drift, training dynamics, evaluation gaps. It’s an odd duality, zooming out far enough to think about general intelligence, and then zooming in close enough to debug a single misfired prediction. Two entirely different clocks, running inside the same body.
What’s tricky is learning how to switch frequencies without burning out. Research asks you to tolerate ambiguity for weeks. Product asks you to make decisions before the picture is clear. Research wants you to think slowly and deeply; product forces you to act quickly and confidently. Bridging those two clocks means constantly shifting between expansion and compression, knowing when to stretch your thinking wide and when to pull it tight.
That tension used to frustrate me. I wanted to find a stable rhythm, a clean separation between exploring and executing. But now I’m starting to see the beauty, and maybe even the necessity in the overlap — the way uncertainty sharpens execution, and execution grounds uncertainty. When you get it right, research gives meaning to the product, and product gives direction to the research.
The deeper I go into this work, the more I realize that building at scale isn’t just about algorithms or systems, it’s about alignment. Between curiosity and constraint. Between the ideas that excite you and the discipline required to make them real. The hardest part isn’t having both clocks, it’s learning to live in both without losing your sense of time.
If research taught me how to wander, Shopify is teaching me how to land. And maybe the real craft lies in knowing when to do which; when to drift, when to descend, and how to move between the two without forgetting why you started in the first place.
subtractive ambition.
As I’ve entered my final and senior year of my undergrad, I’ve been thinking a lot about ambition. Not in the traditional sense of striving for more, but in learning when to stop adding. For most of my life, ambition looked like accumulation. More projects. More opportunities. More proof that I was moving forward. But lately, I’ve started to notice that real growth sometimes looks like subtraction — like saying no to things that once made me feel accomplished, simply because they no longer move me closer to the work that matters.
Senior year makes this tension especially visible. It’s a season of abundance; everything feels open, possible, urgent. Every day brings a new application, a new opportunity, a new thread that could lead somewhere interesting. It’s easy to mistake movement for progress. But the truth is, optionality is only valuable if it aligns with direction. Without that, it becomes noise, the kind that fills your time but leaves your mind restless.
I used to think discipline was about endurance. I thought it was about how much I could handle before burning out. After having committed myself to numerous commitments throughout my undergrad, I’m starting to see that it’s about discernment, knowing what to let go of, what not to chase, what deserves your full attention. There’s something quietly liberating about committing to fewer things and going all in on them. When you stop scattering your focus, your work starts to compound in ways it never could when divided.
It’s a strange shift. Early ambition is loud; it wants recognition, traction, momentum. Mature ambition, I’m learning, is quieter. It wants clarity. It doesn’t need to prove movement because it’s finally confident in direction. The more I prune, the more signal I find. And the more signal I find, the easier it becomes to tell which kind of “busy” is worth being.
I’ve realized that I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to give away. Every new commitment isn’t just an addition, it’s a trade-off against something I already care about. And the more I run that calculation, the more I realize how expensive divided attention really is. The best work, the kind that feels like it’s moving through you rather than being forced out of you, only happens when your energy isn’t fragmented.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself a simple question before saying yes to anything: will this deepen something I already love, or dilute it? Most of the time, the answer is clear if I’m honest enough to listen.
Ambition isn’t about doing everything. It’s about doing the few things that make everything else make sense.
compression exposes taste.
Compression reveals what you actually believe in. When space gets tight, when you’re forced to summarize years of work into a few paragraphs or distill a sprawling story into a few sentences, the noise starts to fall away. The parts that stay are the ones that mean something.
I felt this most while writing my grad school statements. At first, I tried to include everything, every project, every accolade, every carefully chosen phrase that made it sound like I had a complete narrative. But the more I edited, the less any of that mattered. The process became less about showcasing what I’d done and more about confronting what I actually cared about. Every sentence I deleted made the remainder truer.
I started to see that the ideas I kept cutting weren’t random. They were the ones I didn’t really stand behind, the things that sounded impressive but felt hollow once stripped of context. Compression exposed that gap between what looked good and what felt real. The edit revealed the work.
There’s something humbling about that realization. You begin to understand that clarity isn’t a byproduct of eloquence, it’s a byproduct of honesty. The more you compress, the less room there is to posture. Taste, I realized, isn’t about having a refined sense of what’s good, it’s about knowing what’s yours. It’s about protecting the things that still resonate after everything unnecessary has been stripped away.
That’s what compression does. It corners you into truth. It shows you what you actually think when the easy phrasing and padded explanations are gone. It leaves behind the ideas that have weight, the ones you’d defend even if no one was watching.
I’ve started noticing how this applies everywhere. In research, compression is the discipline of translating intuition into something testable. In engineering, it’s the art of removing every redundant line until only the essential logic remains. In writing, it’s the edit that hurts a little because it’s cutting through ego. In life, it’s the quiet practice of choosing what to hold onto when time, energy, and attention are finite.
Constraints, I’m realizing, aren’t the enemy of expression, they’re the proof of it. They force you to decide what’s worth the bandwidth, what deserves to survive the squeeze.
And in that process, the cutting, the refining, the stripping away, you start to see the outline of your own taste emerging. Not as style. Not as performance. But as identity.
closing thoughts.
If this quarter had a theme, it would be refinement. A refinement of pace, of focus, of conviction. I’m starting to see that growth doesn’t always mean building more; sometimes it means sanding things down until only what matters remains. The work, the writing, the reflection, they’ve all started to feel like different ways of learning the same lesson: subtraction sharpens everything it touches.
The deeper I go into my work, the more I realize that clarity isn’t something you stumble upon, it’s something you carve out through deliberate constraint. Whether it’s distilling a complex model into a few clean abstractions, choosing one research problem over ten, or deciding what’s worth saying in a single paragraph, the act of compression keeps forcing me back to the essence of things.
This quarter has been about that essence, the balance between intensity and restraint, between ambition and focus. It’s shown me that taste isn’t just what you notice, but what you’re willing to let go of. And that most progress, in research or otherwise, comes not from adding more inputs, but from paying closer attention to the few that matter.
Maybe that’s what refinement really is, not a narrowing of ambition, but a deepening of intention.
Thanks for reading. Onward to Q4 .
Until next time,
Dev
This update was incredible, maybe your best! Really well thought-out sections. I especially enjoyed the 'two clocks, one body' section - you articulated it so well! Looking forward to Q4 :)