Well, nearly another year in the books. How did it go?
It’s genuinely surprising to me how consistent my reading stays year-over-year. I don’t set reading goals or have a predictable pace, and every year has at least a month in which I’m reading nothing, my momentum growth to a halt. But at the end of every year, it’s range-bound between 19 and 22 for the past five years.
The count is 19 at the moment, but I’m reading a fast-paced sci-fi so it’ll probably be 20 by the end of the year.
A Confederacy of Dunces was easily the most entertaining book this year - an absolute riot, funny and unique. Things Become Other Things, from Craig Mod, was the most affecting book of the year, the only one that made me cry a little. And The Fort Bragg Cartel was the most engaging, can’t-put-it-down book. If you can stomach the difficult material - detailed descriptions of war crimes and domestic abuse - I highly recommend reading it.
This was a decent year for running, too. I ran five 5ks and two half-marathons in 2025, and achieved my simple goal of running sub-20 in the 5k. The thing about running a mediocre 19:13 PR in high school and then running mid-19s twenty years later is that now I’m in the top 10% of my age group! On a relative basis, I keep getting faster.
Mostly I blame the extreme summer heat for some of the higher times: many of the races had warnings about high humidity, high heat, and bad air quality, warning people from overexertion. A sample from their pre-race email:
The weather forecast is for temperatures in the low 90s. Please dress and hydrate properly, and avoid overexertion. The Air Quality Index is predicted to be over 100 at race start, members of sensitive groups may experience health effects. Limit outdoor exposure if you are sensitive to ozone. This might be a great night to run easy or tempo effort, please adjust your pace expectations!
That said, I think I could still do better. Running low 19 minute times would be lovely and I think within my abilities. I’ve been following an ‘intuitive training plan’ this whole time, which in other words means not having a plan. 2026 I plan to have a plan, and probably the cornerstone of that plan is logging many more easy miles.
How’s work been going? I can point to the Val Town Retrospective that I wrote for most of the answer to that question. 2025 for Val Town was a year of big ups and downs. Simultaneously, the job became both more demanding and I became more adjusted to it: it’s remarkable how adaptable people and organizations can be.
On a day-to-day level, as an engineer, the codebase has grown to the point where it’s a bit difficult to keep all in my head, and there are important components that I shamefully haven’t directly worked on. For a ‘CTO’, needing to have the system memorized might feel like an no-no, but for an organization of this size my job is really to be a general-purpose builder, fixer, and understander.
I was really into rhythmic instrumental music: SML’s take on jazz in Small Medium Large and How Have You Been are amazing, the kind of music that works for focused coding, a dinner party, or a long drive.
I loved John Carroll Kirby’s alternative take on jazz too - which can sound cheesy, like elevator music, until you get a minute in.
Slow Mass’s Low on Foot was probably my album of the year: almost every song is marked with five stars in my music library in Swinsian.
I feel unsatisfied with my productive output in 2025. But this is a permanent condition I think.
Sewing was the big new thing. I sewed about five bags, including three for my bicycle, and rode almost 1,000 miles with them.
It’s a fantastic hobby. Designing the bags exercises my brain in just the right ways, it’s tactile and low-tech. My sewing machine was manufactured around 1970, and works great. I love the learning process involved: my first attempt at sewing a bag for the front rack of my bike yielded clear lessons for bag 2, things like using stiffer fabric where the bag needs support and trying to minimize seams in areas that are on the top, to preserve waterproofing.
Pending another bike, I’m pretty much done with bike bags, but there are plenty more projects on the horizon for the sewing machine.
Besides the flashy bags-from-scratch, it’s been useful for simpler things like:
- Restuffing my couch cushions and sewing them back closed
- Repairing the pocket in some running shorts that had developed a hole
- Hemming some jeans that were too long, and an oversized shirt
It’s been really rewarding, and sewing goes really well with instrumental jazz.
That said, my free-time coding projects have been fewer. I implemented indiepixel, a pixel-art rendering layer in Python for my Tidbyt display. And I maintained Placemark, putting time into simplifying it and adding a handful of new features, like drawing lines with automatic routing.
But that’s about it? The coding I’ve done on weekends has mostly been work-related, and not much of that either. I still have fun coding, but I have to say that it’s changed for me. The tech industry just feels bad in so many ways, from its open embrace of fascism to the nihilistic startups that advertise via rage-bait. LLMs have changed things a lot too: it’s hard to tell what people value anymore, and how people have fun. I’ve written a lot about LLMs, so won’t repeat it all. See: Would LLMs democratizing coding be a pyrrhic victory?, Hallucination City, LLMs pivot to the aesthetics of thinking, and more.
I’ve long aimed to diversify my joys: part of finding a love of music, art, sewing, running, and so on is that they can serve as backup ways to feel happy when the world’s tough. I see some of what’s happening now - people using computers to do art, automating the skillful work they used to do, and I wonder what this leaves time for them to do: in the excess time, where do you find joy?
I’ve been finding most of that joy away from the keyboard, this year. I hope I rediscover some of that spark in 2026. I have been having fun learning Effect and writing some Rust, and there are plenty of ideas left.
Brooklyn continues to be good to me. Living here delivers on my priorities in life: things like never drive and live near friends. By those metrics, it does great, and always surprises me with just how much of the world is packed into the 97 square miles of the borough, and Manhattan and Queens nearby.
And yeah - the election of Zohran Mamdani makes it even better. This year was the first time that I knocked on doors for a mayoral candidate, and so did a majority of my friends. It’s pretty exciting. I think that the next few years will be great for the city, and though it’ll be really tough to deliver on all of his promises, even just having a mayor in office who shows up to the job and wants the best for his constituents will be a welcome change from the previous administration.
I started this blog in 2011 with a vague photo of San Jose and some non-committal prose. So 2026 will be the 15th anniversary of the blog.
Blogging has been, for me, an unalloyed success. It has connected me to people, given me a place to develop my thoughts, made some of my work on the internet - a place always decaying and forgetting - a little more permanent. I absolutely recommend everyone do it.
I know why most people don’t do it: not enough time and too much fear of publishing ‘bad writing.’ Maybe ‘nothing to write about,’ too, though this never seems that real to me, given how the average person I meet has interesting thoughts and ideas to share.
I forget exactly when I removed analytics from the blog, but it was a long time ago. Since then I don’t know what ‘takes off’ or ‘goes viral’ and it’s mostly fine with me. Lately though, I have been discovering other indie blogs with articles that reference or respond to mine, and I really want a way for this to be slightly more social. Not fully social of course - no comments and this is not part of any network - but I want to know about link-backs. That’s probably the focus for 2026.
I think this idea has been going around - my friend Waldo was discussing it the other day, and webmentions came up as an option. I’ve tried webmentions in the past with little success - not many blogs supported them and I got a lot of spam - but it’s worth another shot. It’s hard not to get a little discouraged off the jump because webmentions have spam, their predecessor pingbacks were ripe with abuse, trackbacks had even more spam, and even if I try to find backlinks with ahrefs.io, there are plenty of spam domains there too or SEO schemes. The internet is an adversarial place.
In meta-blog news, this blog has been hosted on Netlify since 2017 and I can’t find a strong reason to switch off. It’s been rock-solid. I’ve been using Jekyll since I started in 2011 and it continues to work great, though if I started from scratch I’d probably use 11ty. It would be nice to have a little more power over server-rendering and deploy on Hetzner, but it seems like it’d be a step-up in complexity.
Photo from riding the GAP trail + C&O Canal this year
every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted. - Louise Miller