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TL;DR - In 2026.01, I started parental leave, started my Recurse Center batch, began learning Rust, released my first Rust crate, read 6 (short) books, built a web game, got a bowling ball, wrote 19 posts and hit 1000 blog posts on my blog, improved my vibe engineering workflows, and generally tried to figure out how to be a stay-at-home-dad.
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My main job this past month has been to take care of the baby. I'm on parental leave for a few months while Megna heads back to work. I've been managing but it's definitely not something I want to do full time, long term.
But this time has been a breath of fresh air:
I'm also doing Recurse Center (a writer's retreat for programmers) and it's been great. But it's really geared away from business / profit so not much money-making to be had there. But I am doing a lot of exploration into new tech / areas and I think several of those have potential for making money some day:
I've been building a lot with my time off. Recurse Center has provided a nice mix of accountability system, supportive community, and ideas / collaborations which has all fueled different aspects of my builds.
Some things I built:
And those are just the public, semi coherent ones. Have also done:
Shares come naturally with a lot of new things to learn and build (thats 2/3 things I typically write about).
This month I stumbled across a pretty big milestone - 1000 posts published on my blog over the last 13 years (see my site stats). I did a reflection about that.
I've been leveraging AI more for research and reviews of my writing. This is an area I don't want to outsource completely as I believe writing is thinking. But I think having a personal researcher and reviewer is really nice - that's what professional writing teams do and it's cool to make that accessible as a hobbyist.
Health is going well. I'm making some intentional changes to my lifestyle:
Idea is to optimize for health long term which means small tweaks that fit into my daily life vs doing things that feel hard and trying to stay disciplined through that.
We've also started sleep training the baby and she's taking well to it which has been AMAZING for my sleep. I'm finally getting back up to 7 hours and sleep in the 80s-90s.
Another practice I've started is morning pages. This came from a book the artist's way I think but I've never read it. But I have had it recommended to me several times by various people and thought I'd give it a shot. Just 2-3 pages every morning of writing. No filters. It's been very helpful for me - a kind of active meditation. Helps get my thoughts out on paper so I can organize them and get on with my day without that noise buzzing in the background. Worth a shot if you're into journaling at all.
Finances are doing fine. Both Megna and I are holding jobs and while spending on the baby is up, it's down on social / explorations / travel which helps offset it.
I still think an AI, tariff, poor fiscal policy, loss of global trade partners, potential avoidable armed conflict driven crash is inevitable though unclear when it will actually happen and to what extent. I think the big indexes are too weighted on AI and prices are too high so am continuing to diversify away into large cap value, international, bonds, and emergency funds.
Things are going well. But also just taking things day by day, week by week.
Full time care taking is new to me and I'm sure I'll be sick of it in a few months but for now I'm enjoying what I can.
Having a lot of small hangs this month!
Also started bowling semi regularly with my family and got a bowling ball so I guess we could say things are serious. I'm learning how to hook balls and bowl 2-handed so maybe I can crush at the next corporate event.
We can reasonably make it out for a lunch or dinner about once a week and that's been the limit on social time.
Contumption:
That's all I got, see y'all next month!