Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613
Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800
Here are mine:
Technical skills:
- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.
- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)
- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.
- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.
Non-technical skills:
- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!
I am pretty sure I'm a 50th percentiler. I'm mid 40s, kinda burned out but still struggling forward in my ok-but-not-hollywood IT career, I still have a passion for doing things well in a technical society that values doing things cheap (and well). The things I am known for being good at, I still google daily, and for a long time, I've been hungry for a change - any change - but especially one that isn't chaotically negative.
So in 2026, I wanna learn how dirt works.
I actually have a giant box of dirt sitting on a shelf at the UNH community co-op soil analysis lab, waiting to give me some kind of data about the soil behind my house. (Or is it dirt? I don't know what I'm getting into).
In 2024 I tried growing some corn. It never sprouted.
In 2025 I tried growing some corn. It sprouted and a few ears had enough kernels to make one full mouthful. Tasty, but maybe 7 calories of food for a year of effort.
So in 2026 I'd like to grow: one entire fully formed ear of sweet corn. Anything else is a bonus.
That's what I wanna develop in 2026 - learning how soil works enough to make it make a thing. Small moves, Ellie.
We are inheriting about 50-100 bonsai plants from father. All my life I’ve been wondering how he’s been caring for them, but never gave a chance to actually learn from him.
He is not doing well and we don’t know how many years he has left.
That’s why 2026 will be the year of finally learning the craft from him, taking time to acquire his techniques and in general just spend more time with him.
- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.
- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.
- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.
In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.
The first point is the hardest. It affects every aspect of my life and I have no idea how to really tackle it. This is the first year where I feel the need to take drastic action to achieve some kind of improvement.
What’s your plan? How is it working?
- Schedule time for it
- Understand that I will have slip ups and that's okay
- Make it hard to do the bad things (in this case, I have domain blockers to stop me redditing, I move my phone to another room etc.)
- Make it enjoyable. For me it's finding a particular energetic DJ set and just bopping along while I do the focused work.
And so on.
So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.
I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results.
Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not spending enough, or if it’s just my standards are too high for the code that is produced but I usually always end up going back to doing things by hand.
I try to keep the AI focused on small well defined tasks, use AGENT.MD and skills, build out a plan first, followed by tests for spec based development, keep context windows and chats a reasonable length etc, but if I add up all that time I could have done it myself and have better grasp of the program and the domain in the process.
I keep reading how AI is a force multiplier but I’m yet to see it play out for myself.
I see lots of posts talking about how much more productive AI has made people, but very few with actual specifics on setup, models, costs, workflows etc.
I’m not an AI doomer and would love to realize the benefits people are claiming they get.... but how to get there is the question
Initially I was astounded by the results.
Then I wrote a large feature (ad pacing) on a site using LLMs. I learned the LLMs did not really understand what they were doing. The algorithm (PID controller) itself was properly implemented (as there is plenty of data to train on), but it was trying to optimize the wrong thing. There were other similar findings where LLM was doing very stupid mistakes. So I went through a disillusionment stage and kind of gave up for a while.
Since then, I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively. I have used it mostly on existing Django code bases. I think everybody has a slightly different take on how it works well. Probably the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. Existing code bases seem easier, as well as working on a spec beforehand, requiring tests etc. basic SWE principles.
This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)
> the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things.
This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me.
Then I wonder if it’s just my spend? I don’t mind spending $30/month to experiment but I’m not going to drop $300/month unless I can see evidence that it’ll be worth it, which I haven’t really seen, but maybe there’s a dependency and you don’t get the result without increased spend?
Some posts I’ve seen claim spending of $1,500/month, which would be worth it if it could increase productivity enough, but there’s very few specifics on workflows and results.
I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money.
Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.
Fair enough :-)
This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the moment the food appeared with the reward.
I think we humans have similar psychology, i.e. we tend to associate superstitions about patterns of what were doing when we got rewards, if they happen at random intervals.
To me it seems we are at a phase where what works with LLMs *(the reward) are still quite random, but it is psychologically difficult for us to admit it. Therefore we try to invent various kinds of theories of why something appears to work, which are closer to superstitions than real repeatable processes.
It seems difficult to really generalize repeatable processes of what really works, because it depends on too many things. This may be the reason why you are unsuccessful when using these descriptions.
But while it seems less useful to try to work based on theories of what works -- although I had skeptical attitude -- I have found that LLMs can be huge productive boost -- but it really depends on the context.
It seems you just need to keep trying various things, and eventually you may find out what works for you. There is no shortcut where you just read a blog post and then you can do it.
Things I have tried succesfully: - modifying existing large-ish Django projects, adding new apps to it. It can sometimes use Django components&HTMX/AlpineJS properly, but sometimes starts doing something else. One app uses tenants, and LLM appears to constantly struggle with this. - creating new Django projects -- this was less successful than modifying existing projects, because LLM could not imitate practices - Apple Swift mobile and watch applications. This was surprisingly succesful. But these were not huge apps. - python GUI app was more or less succesful - GitHub Pages static web sites based on certain content
I have not copied any CLAUDE.md or other files. Every time Claude Code does something I don't appreciate, I add a new line. Currently it is at 26 lines.
I have made a few skills. They are mostly so that they can work independently in a loop, for example test something that does not work.
Typically I try to limit the technologies to something I know really well. When something fails, I can often quickly figure out what is wrong.
I started with the basic plan (I guess it is that $30/month). I only upgraded to $100 Max and later to $180 2xMax because I was hitting limits.
But reason I was hitting limits was because I was working on multiple projects on multiple environments at the same time. The only difference I have seen is that I have hit the limits. I have not seen any difference in quality.
You will certainly understand a program better where you write every line of code yourself, but that limits your output. It's a trade-off.
The part that makes it work quite well is that you can also use the LLM to better understand the code where required, simply by asking.
Maybe that’s just the level I gave up at and it’s a matter of reworking the Claude.md file and other documentation into smaller pieces and focusing the agent on just little things to get past it.
The difference between delegating to a human vs an LLM is that a human is liable for understanding it, regardless of how it got there. Delegating to an LLM means you're just more rapidly creating liabilities for yourself, which indeed is a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the complexity of what you're losing intimate knowledge of.
In the end the person in charge is liable either way, in different ways.
It doesn’t have to be exactly how I would do it but at a minimum it has to work correctly and have acceptable performance for the task at hand.
This doesn’t mean being super optimized just that it shouldn’t be doing stupid things like n+1 requests or database queries etc.
See a sibling comment for one example on correctness, another one related to performance was querying some information from a couple of database tables (the first with 50,000 rows the next with 2.5 million)
After specifying things in enough detail to let the AI go, it got correct results but performance was rather slow. A bit more back and forthing and it got up to processing 4,000 rows a second.
It was so impressed with its new performance it started adding rocket ship emojis to the output summary.
There were still some obvious (to me) performance issues so I pressed it to see if it could improve the performance. It started suggesting some database config tweaks which provided some marginal improvements but was still missing some big wins elsewhere - namely it was avoiding “expensive” joins and doing that work in the app instead - resulting in n+1 db calls.
So I suggested getting the DB to do the join and just processing the fully joined data on the app side. This doubled throughout (8,000 rows/second) and led to claims from the AI this was now enterprise ready code.
There was still low hanging fruit though because it was calling the db and getting all results back before processing anything.
After suggesting switching to streaming results (good point!) we got up to 10,000 rows/second.
This was acceptable performance, but after a bit more wrangling we got things up to 11,000 rows/second and now it wasn’t worth spending much extra time squeezing out more performance.
In the end the AI came to a good result, but, at each step of the way it was me hinting it in the correct direction and then the AI congratulating me on the incredible “world class performance” (actual quote but difficult to believe when you then double performance again).
If it has just been me I would have finished it in half the time.
If I’d delegated to a less senior employee and we’d gone back and forth a bit pairing to get it to this state it might have taken the same amount and effort but they would’ve at least learnt something.
Not so with the AI however - it learns nothing and I have to make sure I re-explain things and concepts all over again the next time and in sufficient detail that it will do a reasonable job (not expecting perfection, just needs to be acceptable).
And so my experience so far (much more than just these 2 examples) is that I can’t trust the AI to the point where I can delegate enough that I don’t spend more time supervising/correcting it than I would spend writing things myself.
Edit: using AI to explain existing code is a useful thing it can do well. My experience is it is much better at explaining code than producing it.
I laughed more at this than I probably should have, out of recognition.
`database-query-speed-optimization` "Some rules of thumb for using database queries:
- Use joins - Streaming results is faster - etc. "
That way, the next time you have to do something like this, you can remind it of / it will find the skill.
When I’m writing my own code I can verify the logic as I go and coupled with a strong type system and a judicious use of _some_ tests its generally enough for my code to be correct.
By comparison the AI needs more tests to keep it on the right path otherwise the final code is not fit for purpose.
For example in a recent use case I needed to take a json blob containing an array of strings that contained numbers and needed to return an array of Decimals sorted in ascending order.
This seemed a perfect use case - a short well defined task with clear success criteria so I spent a bunch of time writing the requirements and building out a test suite and then let the AI do its thing.
The AI produced ok code, but it was sorted everything lexicographically before converting to a Decimal rather converting to Decimals first and sorting numerically so 1000 was less than 900.
So I point it out and the AI says good point, you’re absolutely correct and we add a test for this and it goes again and gets the right result but that’s not a mistake I would have made or needed a test for (though you could argue it’s a good test to have).
You could also argue that I should have specified the problem more clearly, but then we come back to the point that if I’m writing every specific detail in English first, it’s faster for me just to write it in code in the first place.
Good luck!
- Continue to take old-time music classes at the folk school, play more music with people that way
- Finally run some water through my hydroponic setup
- Finish electrifying part of the basement
- Play some noise shows with my friend and the synths I've built over the years (and make some recordings)
- Make a dating profile, setup instagram (which seems necessary for a successful dating profile these days)
- Actually catalogue, export, and post the extensive photography I've done of the last years and continue my black and white development processes
- Get back in the swing of eating from-scratch bread, fermented sauces, mayo, saurkraut, ginger ale, and home-cooked food in general
- Actually make blog posts, improve my web presence
- Finish my woodworking bench, tackle some of the woodworking projects I've had backed up
That's a lot of things, but I already have every piece of the puzzle to tackle all of them stored neatly in my house and the experience to do it all, which cuts down on a lot of it. I also really need to save money, so all that should dovetail nicely. I'm at a point where tech projects crop up and sort themselves out on their own regularly in my life so I'm not mentioning that here. Really, the 'skill' I need to learn is having the mental energy and drive to get things done as I go about my work week, or maybe to realize that I don't need perfect energy / motivation / clarity / whatever to work on something in the afternoon.
I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.
That said, PFA only compliments your classical syllabus, not replaces it.
I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.
I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.
I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.
I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.
Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.
I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.
Pick a language you love, and put together a text editor, or even just a quick utility to search through all your files for a keyword and show the results in a window. Write your own Clock app for Android, just to fix that little niggling detail that no other app quite gets right.
I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to put things together, once you start.
The point isn't to build something anyone else would care about - don't worry about the polish, you don't need to publish it, you don't even need to use it yourself. The point is just to make something. Although, personally, I now have a collection of random utilities that all make my life a little bit better, and it's nice knowing that any time a simple app like "Clock" or "Calculator" bugs me, I COULD fix it.
Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho. Anyway happy new year!
That and I'm trying to re-learn Spanish to a useful degree¹ - better attentiveness to the task would help with that too.
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[1] I did pretty well at GCSE level three decades ago, then never used it again. I fancy spending time over there in future and don't want to be that guy who turns up and expect everyone to speak some English.
Also, 'systems' doesn't mean code here. It could be business processes, people processes, ways of working, etc. AI is eventually going to impact all of it (it has already really), and that means being able to think about how to build systems that work well, and especially how to describe systems so that AI can help improve them.
But what will happen is that I use my working days writing code/producing software, evenings to make dinner and be with family, and nights gaming with friends.
Weekends are for recharging.
And that is completely OK.
It is a healthy balance between getting stuff done, recovery, and enjoying life.
To avoid burnout again, I take a day or two off whenever I feel like I need some time off.
Learning it all is also about learning those other things, too.
This has helped me a lot, makes me realize I want to learn how to relax better, to sleep better, and to slow down better.
Thank you!
- Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.
- OSS development: Programming was set aside these couple of years and I want to be active and help the community. Either by contributing to a project or an OS (9front is always on my mind).
- Be a good father and partner: this is one of my primary goals this 2026.
- More time for outdoor sports: As much as I like being indoors, playing with computers, I need to go outside and spend time in nature doing something that I enjoy (ie. running or surfing)
- Mindfulness and spirituality: Grown so much in the past couple of years and now is time for me to meditate on these topics.
- Last but not least, participate in the old-school internet: Be more active and talk to real people, read their blogs, donate to their endevours for a better internet, enjoy their art, etc.
I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.
Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE
Seems like kind of strange / yet somewhat appropriate choice since Forth "traditionally use neither operating system nor file system." and "A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself". Bootstrap your own operating system on a computer with literally nothing.
Interesting to read about though as a tangent, very different kind of language. "grammar has no official specification" "looks the word up in the dictionary" and then does whatever the dictionary specifies.
Good luck on the project though, seems like it fell out of use in the 80's and only got recovered recently. The Forth Interest Group comments on the subject are funny too. [1] "What ANS Forths are available?" -> "The simple answer is: none" Apparently somebody (Vincent Hamp) got it to work on Thumb-2 ISA (ARMv7-M and newer) though. Tiny. 7kb flash, 320B of ram. [2]
As for tech skills in 2026, I’d love to develop a photogrammetry pipeline mixing shoulder mounted SLAM scanner, DSLR terrestrial photography, and aerial LiDAR data sets. I’m lucky to have access to these data sets, just gotta put the pieces together.
I’m already familiar with UAS (unmanned aerial systems) photogrammetry and mixing that with terrestrial photos for high detail models. Aerial Lidar and SLAM datasets are something new I’ve been working with over the past 6 months.
> new volunteer undertaking
Check with your local department to see if they offer CPR and basic first aid courses. If your local FD (fire department) doesn’t offer any, neighboring town stations may.
As in, it’s all very well to reverse engineer something for your own edification or benefit, but sharing the fruits of your labour with others would be so much better.
And further, serendipitously discovering (possibly abandoned) reverse engineering efforts on GitHub is better than nothing, but having a community working on such things, sharing progress and techniques, and offering a central point of discovery would also be so much better.
I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels
Although I have "known" how to drive for a long time, I didn't get my formal license until much later in life than most people, for similar reasons to yours.
Now that I have it, I kick myself for not doing this earlier, but as they say: the best time was ten years ago, the second-best time is now.
Owing to the city life I often go up to six months without driving anywhere, but when I finally get out on the road again it feels great. Country driving is amazing, in any country where people drive safely. It's even pretty nice where they don't. City driving still stresses me out, but I'm determined to get better at it.
Good luck! If you find yourself having trouble getting the license in Singapore, there are other countries where you could get a license more easily, and with that license you could drive in third countries.
Two low-risk and cheap ways to develop relevant driving skills are bumper cars[0] and go-karts[1]. This may appear to be silly at first, but both involve the same hand-eye coordination and decision skills of vehicular driving (though the latter is no where nearly as fun as the others).
In the park, I made it a hard point not to ride the bumper cars because I thought it would mess with my muscle-memory as the designated driver. If not for that, I really love bumper cars. However, I've found that responsiveness of bumper cars vary a lot per park; it either depends on the maintenance or the maker of the rides. And IME, none of them are really comparable to even the shittiest cars I've driven (e.g., the ones from the driving school, the assigned car for my license test).
But my bigger concern that day was the fact that the bumper car mindset is not the roadcar driver mindset. For learners, the free-for-all chaotic nature of the track is not even a good simulation! Not even if you're driving somewhere like India or China.
Speaking of simulation, I really want an affordable but legit way to practice dealing with outlier driving scenarios. Like, what if my brake fails in the highway, what if I get a flat while doing 100KPH---stuff even the safest, most defensive drivers can't entirely rule out. Anyone know of games that might fit the bill?
On a bike, this mostly reduces pedaling; in a car this can reduce unnecessary braking, safer driving distances, which make you a more predictable driver.
* CW (also known as Morse code) - I'm not able to have an amateur radio station at home, so I have to work portable/QRP. Given current band conditions, CW is one easy option to make contacts
* Learn a "low level" programming language, likely C - I never had any kind of formal CS education and kind of fell into the field, initially doing web development and then data engineering. Most of my career has been dominated by Python with a smattering of Java and Scala. Maybe this year will be the year I learn something a little lower down the stack!
- Build something boring that makes money. Excitement is optional; users are not.
- Use AI less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure, background processes that think while I sleep.
- Go back to fundamentals that compound, graphics, systems, taste.
- Experiment selectively; curiosity without commitment.
- Invest in people, not “networking.” Fewer pings, more real conversations.
- Protect focus like equity.
Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.
I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.
On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.
I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.
So I want to build up 3d modeling skills.
I am not surprised but its much much slower to get a physical product business going than just writing some code and launching.
Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.
So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.
> Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was better at following instructions I would 100% be profitable. The YouTuber I mentioned doesn't sell any courses.
> Edit 2, screw you guys for the downvotes. I'm sharing something I've found useful. You don't have to buy into the idea, but there are some people who do very well off of trading. Hence "if it's a match"
The most profitable (and effort efficient way) is to routinely invest in a broad basket of stocks over a long period. Ie Voo and Hold.
Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.
I'd love to develop an art/tech practice and make custom embroidery pieces, maybe even daily - ie make up some words for a new t-shirt or hat every day?
Speaking of, I also learned during my initial research into this world that a lot of embroidery software seems... expensive/not competitive/a bit arcane? So I'm wondering if I'll get into all of this and start writing & releasing open source software..? Time will tell!
If anyone has played around with entry-level (or pro) machines, and has tips/tricks, I'd be super grateful! Thanks. I'm considering an entry level Brother SE700.
- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!
- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)
Non-technical: - I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.
- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.
- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.
* Learn complex analysis!
* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!
https://www.amazon.com/Possible-Human-Enhancing-Physical-Abi...
but involves martial arts, eastern religion, character acting, Ericksonian hypnosis, and all sorts of things. In my case it I use to express myself-as-a-fox [1] but outwardly as social artistry that functions as a form of ‘witnessing’. I will certainly not advocate that others to do what I do as a whole but I can offer people little useful things out of a large toolbox.
I’ve been working on this for a long time, felt I received an invitation to Kitsune-tsuki 2 years ago but it came together late this year when I got my motivation right and began to see it as a form of activism and service.
[1] a creature of the forest instead of a creature of the engineering school
As someone interested, though : care to explain in a bit more detail for a layperson?
https://www.jeanhouston.com/Social-Artistry/social-artistry....
I put on my hood and people see my ears and I wait a beat and then say or do something fox like (comment on smells, a compulsion to chase after squirrels, or raise a paw glove) and it is like the set up and punch line of a joke and they laugh with me and they are in my field -- but it is not a comedy act.
If I have to explain something or do the work of myself-as-an-engineer or talk about my personal history I put the hood down and the detransformation can be startling as I shift from a voice patterned after Michael Jackson's speaking voice (always trying to be as soft as I can and still be legible) to my old booming voice that raises in pitch as emotions get high.
I practice distinctive gaits (collected trot, walking quietly, ...) with an eye on my heart rate monitor to keep my cardiovascular load low to keep it sustainable. It can take a lot of energy, one trot across campus to the Arts & Architecture school (where I feel the most out of place) I came back to my office drenched in sweat despite it being a cold day. My photo backpack became an essential part of my kit because it functions as my "tail" giving me more control of my center of gravity and a place to put my hood and other parts of my kit if I need them out of my way. When I first went out-as-a-fox with my camera I found I couldn't hold my adjustments but with the counterweight of the backpack it was easy -- but I have to pack lightly to control my cardiovascular load.
To speak in the register of the fox I need to think in the register of character acting but it is not really an act, not really a costume, but an expression of my own liminal nature as a person who has always crossed boundaries wandered between worlds.
If I am against anything it is the trauma theory, when I started looking into the "human potential" movement in my area I found so many people inclined to build an identity and discover meaning by licking their wounds. I think people should "get over it" [1] but telling them to "get over it" will only bring about backlash. I begin by being an example (witnessing as Christians would put it) of getting over it with courage and heart and authenticity in expressing myself but behind that is a vast toolbox of trickery and seduction applied to the greater good.
Does that make more sense?
[1] enjoy the pleasures of the moment, find joy inside themselves, raise their spiritual pressure, increase their "gong" as Falun Gong would put it, etc.
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
I also find this relentless pursuit of more more more, especially in what relates to productivity, increasingly maddening and (ironically? paradoxically?) counter-productive. We are always doing more in a worse manner with less attention. And what do we do with the extra time we “gain”? More of the same shit we were doing before. To get more time to… do more of it? It’s insane, bordering on societal mass hysteria.
We’re all going to die, and all you did will mean nothing. So stop and smell the roses. Be kind to your fellow human being. Stop trying to get ahead and lift others with you instead.
What I’m suggesting instead is to not tie a date or a goal to it. Let your interests and desires guide your learning process, not the calendar. I’m also advocating for reflection in the choice of what to pursue. Learning manipulation techniques and scams because you’re interested in the ingenuity of ideas or want to better defend yourself and your loved ones may count as smelling the roses, but learning those same techniques to apply them to other people for personal gain does not.
It’s an arbitrary day on the calendar, yes.
I want to grow as a person, in terms of character and ability. My desire to evolve is a product of curiosity and vitality and ethics, not some capitalist mania for MORE.
Putting a random day on the calendar where I tell myself that I’m at an inflection point, that I’ve decided to bend my path, it’s useful. There are religious holidays where you atone, forgive, and so on. Those are also just days on a calendar. But they serve a purpose.
I’m suggesting that those who identify should cut themselves some slack and not feel pressured to have something planned to do in the New Year. Do it calmly. Don’t get hyper specific.
For example, instead of saying (in December) “I know nothing about plants, and in 2026 I’ll grow a giant sequoia”, one day during the year you may be walking around, see a book on home gardening with some seeds attached and decide to buy it to finally start to learn about plants.
It all kind of adds to the background clutter of my life, by promising I'll "finally" do the "basic" things I need to do to somehow transform my life into a better version of itself, but those things get added to the list of things I feel like I should do every day.
I think I'm done with that. I don't know what I'm doing next year but we will find out in five days.
But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.
LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.
since then, my live became chaos on all levels :-X
(I havent used my new 200 EUR running shoes one time, I bought them 13 month ago)
I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.
Remember that paper is cheap and that experimentation is valuable. Make all the bad art you can. The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza. There is a valuable life lesson in there about being okay with making mistakes so that you can learn from them.
Nowadays I always carry a notebook, and more often than not pens and watercolours. You can build a really tiny kit out of makeup palettes.
I also loved taking painting lessons and going to live nude drawing at one of my favourite pubs. Making art is such a pleasant disconnect from work and digital life.
Once you get into it, there is an amazing assortment of papers that can cost up to a pizza per sheet. Especially if you're going for the larger formats.
https://arches-papers.com/arches-range-of-papers/watercolor-...
Besides that, there are plenty of resources to learn particular topics/techniques out there. For drawing people with any degree of realism, you'll need at least drawing proportions at first and then anatomy later on.
While you can brute-force it from zero on your own like I did, I wouldn't recommend it. You'll learn faster if you study it like a proper discipline.
Drawing on paper allows for a wide range of physical setups, such as using a notebook on your lap or on a table, large sheets mounted on a wall, or a board on an easel. Each configuration engages different muscle groups. Large-format drawing relies primarily on shoulder movement, whereas smaller, more detailed work involves the wrist, forearm, and fingers. I'm convinced that deliberately training hand–eye coordination at multiple scales (finger–eye, wrist–eye, or shoulder–eye), is beneficial in learning to draw better.
It is also a good idea to experiment with a variety of media: pens, pencils, chalk, charcoal, and different surfaces such as paper, wood, or canvas. The differing tactile feedback and resistance will improve your motor control. You don't need to spend a fortune on this, but don't limit yourself to the cheapest color pencils and toilet paper.
That said, if your primary goal is accurate photo replication, it's probably easiest to start with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [1], along with some YouTube tutorials.
As for the subjects, being a horny teenager at the time I mostly drew scantily clad women. Sometimes portraits/caricatures of teachers or other students, mostly on request. All together, that led to an unfathomable number of hijinks.
Thankfully, the one time that a teacher came across their caricature, it ended well. A fellow student requested it while in class (of handwriting Java of all things). She then took my handout and brought it to the teacher, proudly stating with glee "look at what boricj drew!". Cue the laughter. Then the teacher stated flipping pages and stumbled upon the rest of my usual bodywork, so to speak. Cue the laughter again. By that point, I was rolling on the floor, my sides hurting.
I don't think I'll ever top that, but the reception of my doodles at the conference by academics reminded me of that past. Hopefully I'll manage to rekindle it.
https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...
I want to be able to speak and listen at at least a B1 by the end of next year. We will be spending a bit over a month in Costa Rica next year and I want to get as immersed as possible.
Work related get better at pre-sales. Currently, I’m a staff architect at a cloud consulting company leading post sales implementations. While there is some ambiguity when it gets to me, for the most part I know the shape of the business problem they want to solve, working in pre-sales has a higher level of ambiguity. They can’t outsource pre sales since it involves travel
As far me, I learned a little in school decades ago so I knew basic grammar. DuoLingo gives me a guided learning path to explore. But I use ChatGPT to create drills like creating sentences using words and phrases “at an a2 level using present and past tense verbs” using whatever I need to practice.
I practice speaking using Apple’s voice to text and not ChatGPTs voice to text since it is a lot less forgiving.
Anyone knows a good YT channel that explains my options? Money is tight these days so I'm unable to buy the latest and greatest but I'm curious of the new technology used.
Feel free to get in touch if you're interested:
https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBU...
I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].
If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.
I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.
Non-work: 1. Improving my writing skills and start my blog with a few technical and non-technical posts.
— Learn Rust. I'm halfway through the Rustlings exercises and I'll continue with more challenges. Advice is welcome. I might also ask LLMs to pose as teachers and create exercises for me and check them.
- Cooking. This has been something I neglected all my life and I really want to get better at it. It's so fundamental to quality of life.
- Persian language. Studied it for six months, I can read and write the script and I understand basic sentences, but I want to get better at it. If there are any Persian folks reading this, ping me. It's a beautiful language and culture.
> Cooking
Here's some advice I've given about learning Rust in the past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020654
There are also project-based resources beyond Rustlings like Entirely Too Many Linked Lists[1] you might check out. I've found Gjengset's videos[2] great for intermediate content, and they include both project and lecture formats.
Best of luck!
Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.
Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.
Become conversational in Ukrainian.
> Become conversational in Ukrainian.
- Contributing to Homeassistant community by integrating non-standard zigbee devices. A lot of lighting devices in my house are zigbee. There are some companies that deviate from the standard protocol though to force you to use their hub or software.
- Hone my motorcycle riding skills. Curves, breaking and the rest.
- Learn and manage to do some basic home renovation stuff by myself.
- Learn the basics for keeping a garden.
- Start playing table tennis
Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
Therein lies the problem.
To want to "focus on the task at hand" and then express the desire to "try being a bit of a jack of many trades" is a mutually exclusive goal set.
If you want to improve focusing skills, then it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another. If the "ability to focus on the task at hand" is not really all that important in the grander scheme of things and topically bouncing around is where you find happiness, then I humbly suggest to not beat yourself up about focusing on "the task at hand."
Either is an equally valid choice which none need judge, since it is your own after all.
This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year
But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).
Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?
(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)
I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.
Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.
I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.
Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.
I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.
https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/
I really just ADHD'd the hell out of it, I suspect [0], and absorbed everything I read. I was in financial difficulty and things were expensive so it took me a couple of years to get me from "I'd like a 3D printer" to "this 3D printer is affordable but viable and even if I never learn design there are plenty of tools I can make with it that will save me money".
In that time I read everything I could about what I'd need to learn, convinced myself that I was not so clumsy and inept I couldn't maintain a printer. These days printers don't need so much mechanical knowledge to get started.
On the CAD side of things, I learned a bit of OpenSCAD, found it basically helpful to make one simple thing but also frustrating and disappointing, joined really useful non-public Facebook groups where people were working on similar things, decided to get properly into FreeCAD, and dug in with the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube (which actually are now organised into a course structure, but weren't really then).
The thing that motivated me mostly was having simple real things I wanted to make for a project I was working on (though my brain being what it is, I still haven't got round to that exact project...)
If you have a need for a thing you would like, and you're able to break it down into simpler projects, particularly if they are things you might find useful along the way, it's not very difficult to find the motivation to learn these two things.
The positive feedback loop is so strong, and 3D printing is such a concrete way to learn CAD and design because you get to hold your design so quickly: I designed this thing in CAD, I printed this thing, wow it works but I could improve this, I need to learn this new thing in CAD, I printed it, it works but… etc.
Pretty soon you find yourself staring at some real world object on your desk and modelling it in CAD for fun.
The really interesting thing is when you begin to understand that the design of things is fundamentally influenced by the tooling used to make them. When you grasp how 3D printing and injection moulding differ, for example, and start designing your own items with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, rather than just to look like an existing plastic part which was moulded, then you're really getting there.
[0] hilariously I am still not formally diagnosed. Though I'm pretty sure I could be diagnosed just based on these two comments.
I'm still reading the rest of this and your other comment, thanks so much. Inspirational.
- General knowledge: by intentionally curating the information I consume
- Chess: by practicing tactics, watching videos, and learning new openings
- Salsa: by dancing a lot
- SEO: by building a side project and trying to get it to rank well on Google
* Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChain?)
Non-tech:
* Sales - from feedback it seems like I’m not actually that bad of a salesman/people person but I would like to formalize that skill, maybe getting an entry-level technical sales/solutions engineer position and grow from there.
Personal:
* Letting go of projects and prioritizing: I’ve always had a ton of tech projects going at once which leads to my free time being spread thin across all of them and ultimately wasted as no meaningful progress is made. While it’s been an amazing learning experience when I started it’s since stopped paying off on that front once I mastered the tech involved. I need to let go for good and just delete the unfinished code once and for all so I’m never tempted to get back to it.
I'd be interested to learn more!
All in all a pretty basic and boring use-case that I’m sure I’m not the only one doing, but it’s frankly the first use-case I have where the probabilistic and imperfect nature of LLMs is actually fine.
- Understand how to deploy teams of agents effectively to accomplish significant goals
- Learn ECS/Dots in Unity to scale a system to hundreds of thousands of actors
Non Technical:
- Improve people management skills for leading technical teams with a target of helping each person grow in 2026 and level up the team
- Automate more of my personal finances to gain leverage from systems instead of hoping I make good decisions consistently
Plastering (walls, ceilings, etc).
Releasing side projects at a faster pace. This gets harder with more children alas. But they're starting to help with the gardening.
Buy the cassette 4-track I had in ‘93 and reconnect with my teenage self - record whole songs on it, not worrying about sound quality and knob tweaking. It is what it is.
Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.
The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.
- Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field.
- Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a very desired skill for any new career opportunities.
- Learn how to manage a small SaaS company and the product. I'm in the finishing stages of a platform that I have been developing by myself(while my cofounder is the industry expert). Neither of us has knowledge on what it takes to launch and sell this product, for which we know there is demand in the industry.
- Create practical real life ML workflows. I have only theoretical experience since I never had the need or opportunity to work with a more real scenario. This is both from personal interest and for career growth.
- Start and actually approach university in a meaningful way. I have a respectable career, but no higher education, which has always weighted on me
Some non-technical:
- Force myself into more social situations, especially with absolutely non-tech people.
- Just started treating ADHD, so hopefully wrangle that
Sell first. Building the tech is just an excuse to not learn how to sell. You don't really know what customers really want until you start asking for money.
I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking
Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.
Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).
Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn
Not only great for cooking, but it can also help with wrist strength - you may need to ease into lifting the pan with a single hand.
For 2026, other than more traveling, I have just started a course at the local tech university on solar power, and asset management/O&M of solar installations. The hope is to gain basic domain knowledge for potentially transitioning my career into this field in a year or two, taking advantage of my SWE, data analytics, and PM experience.
I'm also planning to take my host country's driving exam. That means I first need to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission, after 30+ years driving in the US.
Honestly, I could not do what you have done. Hats off. I am a bit jealous! I really need the daily structure of a regular office job. (Hold your tomatoes folks!) How do you fight they tyranny of structurelessness? Or maybe you don't have it at all...
Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.
I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.
- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.
- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.
- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"
Also swimming and rope climbing. Can't swim
To me it's deep learning compilers since mid 2025. I am a person who can't learn just from reading books, so 80% of time I learn by doing (contribute to PyTorch) and 20% of time I read books (now: Engineering a Compiler from Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon) and talk to LLMs to fill gaps in my understanding.
My main quest now is to build a bridge [0] between PyTorch and universal GPU computing world - which I believe WebGPU might become. What it requires is to build is 1) a runtime for executing PyTorch ATen operations on WebGPU by running WGSL shaders and 2) a compiler, so you can use full PyTorch power with @torch.compile
Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job. One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.
For building websites: If you don't already know HTML/CSS/JS definitely start with a vanilla site. No matter what framework is in right now, having the fundamentals down is absolutely a huge boost. So start with a simple static site. If you already have that knowledge, don't go crazy. React is basically the "boring technology" at this point and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Use Vite to create a basic React app
Also want to read Designing Data-Intensive Applications as I have worked with things like Kafka and Spark for many years on and off but have never dove into more details that I assume the book could help with.
if anyone in Bengaluru, India having meetups invite me, duckydude20 at gmail.com
- Complete Agile Project Management course and apply this new knowledge to my Scrumban team - Learn Go and Linux in greater detail - Experiment with other frontend frameworks like Remix and Astro.js
Non-tech:
- Make new friends with similar interest and develop my social life a bit (if you're in London, hit me up) - Learn how to promote my side projects - building them is fun but I can't seem to get even 1 user to sign up and use them - Read more Warhammer 40k books
Will start with the 2 minutes breathing on Apple Watch and try to increase by time.
But most importantly, I want to finally become as kind, patient, and charitable as I have always wanted to be.
Best of luck.
2. Make one cool toy from scratch with my kid using esp32
3. Reduce snacking and junk food to 1 day a week
4. Learn to tumble turn in swimming
New models like functiongemma are promising and I think we may be at a point where consistent tool calling is all we need.
I have never had a proper formal IT education, just learned everything on the go. I can write essentially everything in Python or Bash using AI. I know most (data)concepts and what data to move where in what fashion, I just don't have the hours in it to be able to do it from the top of my head.
I feel the AI is great, but it's also holding me back. Like how driving a automatic transmission is nice, but you'll never learn to drive stick from it.
Also Docker / k8s ecosystem seems to be mostly Go based. And it looks cool, the syntax.
If anyone has any courses that are interactive and can keep an ADHD mind invested in it I'm all ears.
Might be a bit of a tame goal for hckrnews but yeah.
Other: Better time management and micro napping. After a working day sucking mind and kids energy, the brain stops working for anything but doom scrolling or TV.
Background: I've spend the bigger part of the past 20 years of my life continously extending and enhancing my technical knowledge and skills, mostly in IT/Coding but also in some other fields. Meanwhile i kinda let my social life completely degrade and also always care more about solving others problems than my actual own problems.
Therefor the "skills" i want to improve and develop in 2026:
- Learn to take care of myself instead of always putting others first (its not my job to safe the world)
- Don't try to got 150% all of the time and rather slow down
- Care for my health
- Get back into social life
- Actually try to not spend 95% of my free time in front of a screen and go outside (touch grass)
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While i accumulated alot of knowledge over the past two decades, if i don't start to care for myself more ill probably won't have much benefit of it other than having accumulated it. Health (biological and mental) are important, neglecting it maybe works shortterm but will kick your ass longterm.
Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.
I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.
As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?
I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.
Do you have ADHD?
- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.
- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.
- Do more coding with AI.
- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)
Non-technical skills:
- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.
I donno, I think I kind of like somebody else's skill objective about trying out shitposting. It's the age deucine (credit @naasking).
I also want to learn how to ask better questions.
How would you go about learning to ask better questions?
*Thinking how strange this sentence would sound 20 years ago.
One thing that's helped me is solo hikes which I've done many times before. I still do them for workouts and use them as an opportunity to get bored.
I just can’t longer spend my life doing stupid corporate nonsense work contributing to widespread enshittification of the world.
but the other things such as writing, just can't do it without LLMs's help. Looking up things, I defaulted to LLMs.
So in 2026, I just want to stop relying on LLMs.
Lol but I do like building LLMs (training from scratch, pre-training, fine-tuning, etc.). as a matter of fact, I'm pre-training a 1b model for last 2 days.
1. Rust, I quite like it but I still need AI assistance.
2. Desktop app dev, I'm making one in Tauri and love it, now I want to "go native."
3. Lower-level AI stuff, so far everything has been with APIs, and while that's great it feels a little too abstract.
4. Leetcode pattern matching. (Grumble grumble, but when job-hunting in Rome...)
Differently tech:
5. City driving. Thanks @kenrick95 for reminding me!
6. Color grading, and video editing in general.
7. The Thai language (speaking and reading).
8. Writing for the public.
Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).
Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.
- Architecting larger scale applications
- A project which is related to fundamentals (like compilers, OS) rather than run of the mill web development.
Not SW:
- Motorcycle internals and general repair skills
- Ancient sanskrit grammar
Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.
And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.
I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.
Regarding how computers work under the hood, i can recommend Nand2Tetris.
Lastly I must say with the help of AI i can now finally develop good frontends
> Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out.
Edit:
Another thing I just thought of: If a personal trainer is too expensive, consider signing up for a free trial of one of a million different online apps that help you build and structure a workout. Example (no shill here): https://rpstrength.com/. There are lots of competitors. Don't worry about getting everything perfect on the first try. The real trick to exercise is finding what works for you. Dr. Mike (from RP) is constantly banging the drum about experimenting with your own body and health through exercise and diet. Ultimately, you know yourself better than anyone else on this planet.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
> I've written about
Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.
- Lean into vibecoding. Day job is in finance, and enthusiastic hobbyist coder so despite the happy path nature of it I suspect it may be worthwhile getting good at this from a job market future proofing angle. Whatever comes being able to describe to machines what you want seems like it'll be useful
- Improve non-vibe Rust coding
- Improve homelab. The internet enshittification continues so keen to build out more personal infra. In short term focus is on pipeline to package & deploy. Think docker build -> k8s deploy. If that pipleline is frictionless that'll be good for vibe coded personal tools
I also don't want to be derailed from hyped up technologies that ultimately sell me on a quick path to reach a delusional goal. I want steady and consistent growth and understand the makings deeply.
I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.
Any tips are welcome.
- There are 12 keys on the piano just repeated - A scale can start on any of those 12 keys - The "home" key of the scale get labels with a roman numeral one, I - The rest of the keys in the scale get roman numerals ii,iii,IV,V,vi,vii - The I,IV,V are all upper case to represent major chords, the lower case for minor chords - Most pop songs use I,IV,V from a scale. In C-major scale, C, F, G major chords. - You can start on any key on the piano and if you play the same sequence of I, IV, V, you'll get the same song, just transposed into a different key. (the scales are slightly different due to even temperament for advanced ears)
So, learn songs by the chord structure first. It is easier to remember and you'll start to recognize patterns in other songs and unlock them faster.
Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.
I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.
Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.
What's the plan to make sure that progress in AI leads to predominantly positive outcomes for people? All the people I've asked who work at the major AI companies haven't given an answer, except to say that they don't study safety or societal impacts, but know others who do.
If you don't have an answer, can I humbly suggest that you add finding one to your list?
Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)
Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.
Non-technical:
Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.
2. Being more effective at using LLMs
3. Being able to improve in multiple areas of my level simultaneously
I've been out of work 2 years, had to do a GoFundMe just to survive the winter, and I raised 5k which gave me a runway to get off Uber and Lyft and focus on finding clients to build for add with chatGPT I think I'm in the verge of figuring this freelance thing out ..
other things to learn: I want to get AWS certified and work on other certifications like Service Now... or sales force...
I'm wanting a digital agency but need to figure out the sales aspect.
1. Releasing a solo product. 2. Writing more about code and the intersections of the field in history and world events. 3. Trying to do more talks.
Not-tech:
1. PR like there's no tomorrow. 2. Run two half marathons. 3. Move out of Florida.
Also it'd be nice if a bunch of data centers burned down but... odds are against this