Essay - Published: 2026.01.01 | reflect | reflections |
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TL;DR - In 2025 I had a baby, got a new job, vibe coded projects, lived in Atlanta, reached 423k people, stopped drinking coffee, blocked scrolling apps, moved from Windows to Linux (again), read 10 books, and played 24 video games.
Top Releases:
Top Shares:
My build time has been cut short by moving and baby logistics. We lived in Atlanta to take care of / get help with the baby in her early months and the baby has had a large negative impact on my free, uninterrupted time as well as my sleep scores. So I'm still building but in much more sporadic chunks.
On the other hand, I've been using AI more for building which has helped me become more efficient in some areas. It helps me with research, planning, building, and reviewing features. It can work on things while I go deal with something else. So in some regards it's helped offset my productivity losses. I currently use Claude and Claude Code the most.
Some things I was able to ship:
I continued writing ~weekly this year, shipping 110 posts and ~101k words. I like this writing habit as it is a forcing function for refining my thoughts and getting them out there.
Impact wise my shares have plateaued. Views are flat, my audience isn't growing much, and I don't have many ideas for ways to improve them that also fit within the work I'm willing to take on. So I'm thinking this is probably what my shares will look like long-term.
This is currently sustainable for me as I enjoy writing this much and the proceeds generally pay for my tooling and some of my build costs but it's not likely to become a full self-sustaining business at any point.
Instead I'm thinking of my blog and shares as more of a digital garden where it's more personal notes that I happen to share out to others. I think this works better for me long term than trying to turn this into a commercial project when the prospects are pretty low.
In 2025.01 I left my job at Rippling to search for another job. The primary reason was that they wanted to move to 5 days RTO and I didn't. So I went looking for a job that could work remote while still fitting my other values.
My job search took 2 months across 65 different interviews. It was a harder market than usual but I'd done ~4 job searches in my career so I knew what was required and the general game plan so wasn't that worried about it. Still a lot of work but a lot less anxiety.
The hardest part about this job market was finding remote roles. I found a ton of in office roles for NYC but few that would let me be remote. I expect this is a pendulum that will swing back to remote in the next ~5 years but right now it's all in on in office.
My new job is at Vanta which is a remote-first company. We build compliance and security tools. I'm on a product team building tools for auditors and am currently building fullstack across React, TS, and Mongo.
HAMY LABS has not done that well this year. I haven't shipped much that makes money and haven't done much improvement / marketing of my existing projects and that's reflected in the plateaued revenue.
Ideally I would have a few passive businesses on the side but haven't been able to achieve that yet. In many ways doing solo projects leads to more work, not less overall. I'll still iterate on these and probably launch a couple things each year but not quitting my day job anytime soon.
In 2025.01 I stopped drinking coffee to see what it would do. Now 12 months later, I'm still coffee free. I've observed several benefits like better sleep, reduced anxiety, improved gut health, easier to bounce back from bad sleep, easier to do morning workouts, less need for external motivators, among others. I do still drink caffeine in the form of 2 teas a day but that's generally on par with a decaf coffee and less than a single small coffee per day.
Sleep has taken a big hit this year, largely driven by the baby's sleep schedule. Early on she woke up every ~3 hours to feed so we moved to sleep shifts. Lately she's just been whiny around 0100 and 0400 which requires some soothing to put back to sleep. We're on the cusp of starting sleep training and moving to another room which should help but my sleep is precious and I've missed it these past 6 months.
I've been able to mostly keep up with my workouts this year, averaging around 5 days per week. These have ranged from full 4 mile runs to slow 2 mile walks and full gym workouts to light bodyweight workouts. Currently maintaining some fitness but definitely want to pick this up if/when schedules and energy solidify again.
I blocked most of my scrolling apps for most of the day earlier this year and I've noticed it really helps me stop scrolling. I have scrolling time from 1800-2100 each day and find myself on the apps for ~1h each day. But this has helped lower the random scrolling time throughout the day which I've found keeps me more focused. Relatedly, I've swapped around my calendar such that Sunday to Wednesday is for my projects / building and Thursday to Saturday is for hanging out with friends, playing video games, etc. I've found this helps me stay productive on productive days and enjoy my "time off" on rest days without any productivity guilt.
Stats:
Spent a bit more than usual on the baby and moving around and brought in less as I was unemployed for ~3 months. So savings rate took a hit. Still okay but less than I'd planned.
My investing strategy remains the same:
It's boring but it's simple to implement and is quite effective. So I'm sticking to that.
This year the stock valuations have gone a little crazy, the market is not being very rational about various policies / macroeconomic effects, and the AI companies seem to be default dead so I've taken some precautions against what I believe to be a bubble and impending market crash. I still invest in my indexes because I'm against timing the market but I've been building up a larger cash reserve so I can buy the dip and investing in alternative funds that will likely weather the crash better like tax advantaged bonds and international stock markets.
I'm just a random guy on the internet though so this is not advice and just my personal opinions. To hedge against my fallibility, I'm still sticking to my typical plan for ~80% of investments, just swapping around the edges to see if can find more upside there.
Another big change this year is starting to save for the baby including current expenses and funds for their future and education. I've started looking into the various funds and putting money aside to invest in them - likely starting sometime next year.
If you're interested, I'm using You Need a Budget (YNAB) for budgeting and would highly recommend them. You get a free month and I get a free month when you sign up with my link.
Did a few things this year to improve my workflows.
Biggest news this year is that I had a baby! It's changed my whole life - for better and worse.
The biggest change is that a baby requires a lot of things. They are fully dependent on you to live - eating, sleeping, cleaning, etc. That adds up to a lot of hours a day of taking care of them - basically they need 24/7 support and at least 8 hours of active engagement (though likely more).
The bright side is that it's been a very fulfilling experience. It's amazing to watch them learn and laugh and explore and this is at a stage when they can barely sit up. So I'm really excited to see what happens when they start walking and talking.
This also led to us hanging out with family more - largely cause we lived closer to them. We see our parents a few times a week now and they help out with the baby a ton which has been a huge weight off our shoulders. This is typically when I get some deep work time to work on projects or just take care of chores that have been sitting for awhile.
We've been trying to hang out with friends but scheduling around kids, energy levels, sicknesses, adult plans, etc has proven challenging. We get out about once a week on average to hang w ppl which is workable but a lot less than our 3 times per week we were doing before the kid. Maybe we'll do more as schedules solidify but I hear that every new development phase comes with its own challenges so this might just be the going meta.
Exploration has had mixed impact from the baby. On the plus side we do a lot more day-time excursions to places where we can walk around. Baby loves being pushed around in the stroller and it gives us a chance to get out of the house, get some steps in, and usually try some new food.
On the minus side, we have taken a lot less large excursions to new cities, countries, etc. Babies require a lot of extra baggage to take care of them plus they don't really like sitting in a seat / new environment for hours on end which tends to happen frequently during big travel.
The travel I did do was mostly by myself for business / fun. These were nice to get a break from all the day-to-day but hard to get back on sleep schedules / systems when coming back.
Places:
Stats (according to GoodReads):
Top 3 reading:
A few shows I liked:
And a few we watched a bunch:
Not much. Baby likes a song about a purple monkey in a bubble gum tree and that's been stuck in my head.
Stats: (via Steam)
Note: This is probably an undercount as I couldn't get at my Xbox data.
Top games:
Things are going well so can't complain too much.
I do feel like I'm chilling a bit too hard. It scares my younger self. Just kinda going day by day without any big plans to change the world or make a step change in my cycles.
But at the same time I'm kinda like - isn't this the goal? A happy, healthy family with a safety net. Comfortable with low anxiety. Looking forward to mornings and hanging out with friends.
Raising a kid takes up a lot of the spare time / focus / energy I had to devote to those dreams (and anxieties) so I'm attributing this current state to that. I've just got less cycles to worry about it so I'm worrying less.
I'm sure I'll get the bug to make a lot of money and impact in the coming months and years but for now I'm just chilling and it's kinda nice.
2026 starts off with 4 months of paternity leave for me so I'm excited to hang with the kid, rest a bit, and enjoy some side projects / hobbies.
Aside from that, I don't have too many set plans. I've got a couple top level goals to hit but looking forward to enjoying my cycles and not worrying so much ab where we're going.
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