2026.01 Release Notes

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.

• High: Recurse Center has been fun (Build)
• Low: Figuring out full-time childcare while Megna back at work (Profit)
• Seed: Baby is sleep training and sleeping through night (Health)

Top Releases

• LightClone - Compile-time safety for cheap clones in Rust
• AI Token Clicker - Infinite clicker game about burning tokens, built with TS + Phaser 3
• Vibe Engineering workflows - wrote ab them and code is available to haminions members

Top Shares

• 5 AI Coding Best Practices from a Google AI Director
• How AI Killed Tailwind's Business - And How To Avoid a Similar Fate
• How I Built a Clicker Game with Raylib + C#
• How I think about writing quality code fast with AI
• Vibe Coding a Stats Page for my Website

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Create

Profit

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:

• Changing my routines
• No deadline pressures
• Choosing what I want to work on
• And spending wayyy more time with the baby, catching a lot of little moments of joy and wonder

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:

• Games
• HAMINIONs example projects
• New boilerplates like CloudSeed
• Whatever little projects I ship w these learnings

Build

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:

• AI Token Clicker - A small incremental game about AI built with TypeScript and Phaser
• LightClone - A Rust crate for compile-time enforcement of cheap clones
• CloudSeed Rust - WIP
• Vibe Engineering Workflows - Have iterated a lot to find a nice balance of quality, speed, and learning

And those are just the public, semi coherent ones. Have also done:

• More games in various technologies, and various states of completion
• Dove into some weird programming languages
• Lots of adhoc exploration with AI

Share

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.

Reflect

Health

Health is going well. I'm making some intentional changes to my lifestyle:

• Eating less snacks, less desserts, less fried foods, more whole foods - both at home and away
• Less abs, more cardio and stretching in my gym sessions - even if cardio is just walking on a treadmill

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.

Wealth

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.

Happiness

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.

Observe

Connect

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.

Explore

• Places: Bowling, restaurants around the city

Contumption:

• Reading: The Rust Book, Murderbot diaries #7, Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
• Watching: The Grammy's, Bridgerton, New Yorker Netflix documentary, YouTubes on how to bowl 2-handed
• Listening: Ryan Peterman Pod, Pragmatic Engineer, and My First Million
• Playing: Claude. Not really a game but fun to build little systems and automations for / with. Kinda feels like Factorio. Looking forward to some good games on sale / to be released to dive into. Also playing a lot with Rust - cool little language.

Improve

• Vibe Engineering with AI - New systems / principles for how to use them effectively to get high quality outputs with speed ups. Thinking about ways to stay in the loop to retain learning speeds.
• Rust - New language for me. Ownership and borrow checking is fascinating. More memory management / thinking than I'm used to and want to do but it's still very reasonably high level. Think it has a place in my stack if it doesn't slowly become my stack. More thoughts in The Missing Programming Language, High Level Rust, and the Problem with Clones in Rust.
• Video games - Building video games has given me a new appreciation for how much work goes into the polish and how much of it isn't the system but the presentation - story lines, rewards, JUICE.
• Notes - I've moved back to Obsidian. Which gives me a good 540 for PKMs this year (Notion to Obsidian then Obsidian to Notion). The tipping point for me was how easy it is to get Claude Code to read my files when everything's local. And I was able to look up solutions to my most common issues and make a few changes to how I take notes to make it ergonomic in Obsidian. Overall I'm liking it but who knows - maybe will change next year. I currently have Claude summarizing my notes, giving feedback on morning pages, and helping me gather summary stats from my various online profiles but I think there's a whole world of crazy things I can do in personal automation and I'm just scratching the surface.

Next

That's all I got, see y'all next month!