2026.Q1 Review

TL;DR - In 2026.Q1 I participated in a 12-week programming retreat, published my 1,000th blog post, started building with Rust, solidified my agentic engineering workflows, shipped my first game, started walking more, played Pokopia, and might've found my second mountain.

High: RC programming retreat (Build)
Low: Anxiety about the long-term sustainability of my creative practice (profit)
Seed: Watching Aaarya grow (Connect)

Top Releases

CloudSeed Rust - Fullstack webapp boilerplate in Rust
Phase Golem (AI orchestrator) and Task Golem (AI task tracker)
Labs Server - Rust + Datastar prototypes, planet box, AI token clicker

Top Shares

Create

Profit

2026.Q1 was the longest time I've been off from work sans starting my own businesses or searching for a job. Instead I've been taking parental leave and taking care of the baby among other things.

But I'm a bit of a busy body and a little obsessive about Creation so I wasn't completely idle. I leveraged the proximity to grandparents to carve out some time each day to focus on a programming retreat at Recurse Center. It's specifically focused on non monetary projects but still the closest thing to a job I had during this period. (More on this in Build).

I did ship a few things focused on money:

CloudSeed Rust - I dropped F# and ported my boilerplate to Rust
HAMINIONS - Working on new Rust examples for my HAMINIONS membership

If I had one anxiety from this whole period, it's largely how I make my creative practice sustainable. RC let me rediscover a lot of joy in creating little technologies and my parental leave has shown me what it's like without a standard 9-5, both of which have brought me a lot of joy.

But as I look towards returning to work I fear this happiness will be opposed from two fronts

less time to work on the things I want
more time spent on things I must do

I don't have an answer for this except to try and shift what I'm working on at work to more closely align with things I want to work on anyway and to have clear time / focus boundaries between work/life. That and increasing my side project income to allow me to go independent seem like the long-term answers.

Build

As I mentioned, I spent much of my quarter at Recurse Center for a 12 week programming retreat. It's like a writer's retreat for programmers. A bunch of people get together, we workshop ideas, learn from each other's techniques, and build new things. It was really fun and I built a lot of stuff - too much stuff to fit into a concise reflection so if you want the full list, checkout my Recurse Center return statement.

I focused on 3 main areas:

Agentic Engineering - AI is here to stay so worth investing in. I've overhauled my workflows to build quality software fast with agents and rearranged my computer to be more effective / flexible for them.
Webapps with Rust - I got nerdsniped that Rust may be a good high level language and developed High-Level Rust, a set of rules that gives you 80% of its benefits with 20% of the pain. This largely fulfills my search for the missing programming language.
Video Games and Simulations - I launched my first public video game AI token clicker and started publishing some prototypes on my Labs server, including SSR single and multiplayer snake and fully autonomous planetwars.

Overall I'm really enjoying agentic engineering and really don't see us going back unless ai gets insanely expensive but I personally think it's gonna go the way of the internet so the bubble will pop but we'll be left with good enough models to run at decent prices and will go back to incremental improvements much like today's internet services, computers, and storage devices - roughly doubling every couple years in efficiency.

Stats:

46 posts
~40k views / month (across hamy.xyz, YouTube, and HAMY LABS Podcast)

My writing is typically around things I've built, learned, and found and I built a lot while at RC so naturally I had a lot to write about. I like writing for solidifying my ideas and I've found this particularly valuable in the age of AI when I'm moving a lot faster with more half-formed ideas - the writing is a great way to review my thoughts / plans and further push the work from coded to engineered.

I also happened to cross the 1,000 blog post milestone on my blog this quarter over the last 13 years, which I discovered after building a stats page for my blog. I thought it was a good reflection point so wrote up my thoughts on blogging.

Overall I love writing and think essays are more valuable than ever in the age of AI - if not for others, at least for yourself. I've still got several projects I need to write about so more to come soon.

If you want updates when I publish new posts, you can follow me on socials to get day of updates or my email newsletter to get ~monthly roundups.

Reflect

Health

Health has been in a good, sustainable state.

I'm eating healthier with less carbs, more salads / bowls. These help me feel full while managing my calorie and carb intake. I mostly think about this at restaurants where I try to stay away from the fried / heavily processed foods. This still gives me a lot of freedom / options but removes a lot of things that are fattening / make me feel sluggish.

I started a more chill workout routine that is prioritizing lifting weights and walking over running. I've found this works very well and is something I actually look forward to in the mornings. It's not as intense a workout as I used to do in high school / college but it feels sustainable and is managing my fitness pretty well. At some point you have to make a tradeoff between what's most effective short and long term and I think this is a good balance of smth I'll stick with long term while also getting reasonable results.

We're getting a lot more sun and walks in with the baby which I think has also been really good physically and mentally. I think this is part of that healthy lifestyle idea where it's not a workout per se but doing it regularly really adds up

Wealth

I still have a job! So that's been good for my savings rate.

Expenses are evening out as we get acclimated with the kid which has been good and we're eating in a lot more which has helped as well.

I still think there's an AI downturn coming and also think there's an upcoming reorganization of the economy so I'm still stockpiling money a bit to extend my emergency fund and position myself to buy whatever dip happens. I'm not much of a gambler (and when I do I tend to fair poorly) so I'm still DCAing regularly but I'm just not putting extra money in and instead pushing it into other fund types / saving it for a rainy day.

I'm generally bullish on AI but the economy is still figuring out what its effect will be and I believe it's drastic changes to how we do knowledge work. So positioning myself to weather that storm and try to lockin some upside.

Improve

Lots of small improvements over the last several months.

AI agents - Lots of small improvements to my workflows leveraging agents like a daily reflection bot that reads my context and sees my reflections and provides feedback / action items that may be useful. I'm trying to be more ai native where if I find myself doing a boring or long task, think about what AI can do to help me complete it better / faster. I'm thinking the sky is the limit here long term so everything that we did with software for automation can be done 10x better / faster with more AI.
Rust lang - Moving more of my systems over to Rust which has been fun and it feels very functional for a larger swath of possible applications than I had before - low level, cross platform
Moving to a terminal-based workflow on my computer - Feels pretty sick, more like a wizard (or technomancer). I'm able to do most things just with the keyboard which is a bit faster but also feels like I'm in flow more cause not moving my hands from keyboard to mouse as much.
My exercise system has been quite good so excited to do that long term.

Observe

Connect

Hanging with friends more now that baby is bigger. We can do 2-3 hour excursions pretty easily and even up to 5 if we pack right.

Doing a lot more daytime hangs like going for walks and grabbing food and exploring places. This has been fun for all of us and baby really likes being outside and looking at stuff.

The highlight has really been getting to know the baby and seeing her grow - learning new skills and learning to play. I hear seeing them grow into their personalities is wild so looking forward to that.

Explore

As I mentioned we're getting a lot more walks in and that's generally where we've been exploring physically.

Contumption:

Reading: Japan books (A Geek in Japan), Rust Book
Watching: Mostly YouTube, some shows but I can't remember what
Listening: The Pragmatic Engineer, Ryan Peterman Pod
Playing: Pokopia (see my tutorials on lava gates, infinite marble, laser sensors, and endgame setup), Ghost of Tsushima

Happiness

I'm really enjoying life. It largely feels like this is what I was aiming for all those years.

I'm reminded of that idea of the second mountain - you strive for your career ambitions for years. Then you achieve it to some degree. Then you look around and think "is this it?".

Then you settle down and start a family. And the second mountain appears. The first is still important but it's no longer the most important and you start to optimize for a new goal.

Largely that's how I feel. Life hasn't really gotten easier and we're largely doing the same things we used to but the fulfillment level has skyrocketed.

I think this is partly because I'm on parental leave so not working 40h per week and partly because we have a lot of help with the baby so this is removing a lot of the toil we'd normally feel.

But I also think there's a celing increase by focusing on wants/needs (not shoulds) and doing work that is aligned with my goals short and long term.

I largely feel like I don't have room to worry about trivial things long term. They still happen ofc but they don't last more than a day or so. For the most part these daily tribulations are just deprioritized as they don't help me with that second mountain.

Been a really great Q1. I don't think I've ever been happier or more fulfilled in my life. I think some of this will change as I go back to work and my days / weeks start to look different but I'm hoping to learn from this phase and see what I can pull forward with me to make this a long term position.

Thanks for reading.

Live long and prosper, HAMY