Posts tagged: personal

2026 Resolutions

2026-01-08T10:48:12Z

It’s that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes.

Daily Notes #

Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM’s do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on.

Reader #

Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I’ve met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don’t need their hot takes, don’t care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with.

(Neo)Vim #

I’ve had these bad habits in my config for years, from day one of using vim. It’s time to kill these. jjgww. I killed them this morning, we will see how long I keep typing out jj all over my editor before I fix it mentally.

-- bad habits
vim.keymap.set("i", "jj", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jk", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "JJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "Jj", "<esc>")

Tip

I need to lean on <C-o> a little more to run single commands in normal mode from insert mode. The pattern that is hitting me hard right now is jjgwwA insert mode, format, insert at end of line.

Distrobox #

I was a heavy user of distrobox as my primary dev environment on Bazzite and I need to get back there. I have a lot of stuff installed on this current system. I’ve been sloppy. I am not sure I was planning on staying on arch/hyprland long, I did it to do it with my son, his got borked a month ago and he is back to bazzite, I think I’ll be back there and want to be ready to float freely between distros.

clean dotfiles
work from a distrobox image that I make
keep working projects backed up

Vibe Coding #

Agents are the future, people that I really trust are on both sides of the argument. Some saying they stopped coding months ago and claude does everything for them. Some in between, some are completely against.

It feels like the tooling has really taken off over the past few months, the models are getting better, but not at the same rate they were. The tools are really making this possible.

My experience is quite mixed, I’m often impressed with what it does, and appalled at how bad it does other things. I just want it to do what I mean with the fewest words possible. I’ve been working on deeper plans more and more, still with mixed results. With larger plans the models seem to do more work, but still not getting that great experience every time.

I really need to get my workspaces workflow down, have models working in a separate workspace, and be willing to throw away shit code quickly and try again from another angle.

The future is a deep understanding on what needs to be done, how do to it, and not the syntax. The tools are getting better. You need to know less and less about them, less and less about models as the auto routers get better. The core skills of architecture, design, and implementation are more important than ever.

Last year I was able to vibe out some POC work, but still not letting the agents touch my production code. It wasn’t there for me, I probably did not have access to the really good stuff either. Now I think what I have access to is catching up to Claude.

sandbox them
quick to POC
quick to move on from broken attempts
learn to lead
learn to let go of syntax opinions
learn what makes good products/tools/apis hold the vibes to this.

There’s something here, very respectable people are betting on this, but its not working for me, I don’t think I have the right tools. I already have it a day, and got a few hundred LOC out while theo is claiming opus can do 10k.

Not Everything will be a side hustle #

I’ve tried to start too many side hustles, none of them work out. Thinking of them as a side hustle steals the joy of the hobby. I have too much going on outside of work for adding things like this not to add stress to already stressful situations, I need to reduce stress and find the joy and happiness in side projects and not turn everything into something more.

Keebs #

This one is fresh on the mind only because I just built out a new keyboard for work. I want to have a good robust build at home, work, and potentially have a good backup. I have a good design that is very cheap and fairly easy to build, but is quite time consuming. I am going to put some work in early this year to get a couple of clones.

More Offline #

Looking back at 2025, I actually did fairly well of doing a bit more offline. It’s been a hard transition out of pandemic times for our family, we had a lot of extra health precautions that lasted longer than most other people.

This year I should do more of this. More bike rides, more skate, more basement hangouts, more art.

New dart board in the basement

More creativity. I designed and built fingerboard obstacles to work like legos with 3/4" plywood last November.

building a fingerboard park in the basement

More building

building set for Jolly Holiday with Rhiannon

building boxes for Jolly Holiday with Wyatt

More bike rides, fewer nice days wasted, they are relaxing and get good energy out.

Bike Rides

I took a break

2023-05-27T19:45:12Z

Life comes in waves, and sometimes you need to set down some of your projects to focus on others. For the first part of 2023 I’ve really had a lot of family stuff to focus on, we also are pretty new homeowners and are still trying to get our new to us house cleaned up and modernized.

Side Projects #

You can see in my growing list of repos that I have poked around on quite a few side projects over the past few months. This has been quite relaxng to me, mostly things that I use to learn from, but also a lot that are tools and things I use that bring me joy.

Pydantic #

I haven’t wrote about it at all yet, but I have really been starting to lean into pydantic on all of these side projects. I have really been enjoying the type system. A good friend @pypeaday got me hooked and we have been throwing around this phrase that he learned from a math professor “Make it So”. The idea boils down to leveraging pydantic to make all the values you want to exist up front, or fail validation, then have no more checks scattered all over your code.

I’ve really been deleting a bunch of logic from places within my code and putting it right in the pydantic models. This gives me one place I will know to look for it rather than many places some logic might come up. Then when it’s time to do things, the logic is typically a bit simpler.

Markata #

Markata continues to be my biggest side project. Currently its it a big refactoring phase to get everything moved into pydantic. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve had a release, but there has been steady progress going into the pydantic branch.

AI #

Ai is really hot in 2023. I’ve been trying to keep my finger on the pulse and play with it. I tried to make a library to interface with openai lockhart. It was a cli where you can store prompt template. I also made a full text adventure game with a new library from prefect.io, called marvin. marvin star wars text adventure.

I took a break #

It’s defintitely good to take breaks from big projects, and for me its often things like family and work that need to come first and I set things aside. I am not saying that I am back to daily writing, but I am going to give it a go and see where it takes me. I’ve got a big backlog of ideas to get out.

vows

2021-05-20T10:07:29Z

Story

I can still rememember the day that we we realized our new baby girl had gone days without a bowel movement. Holding her while she looked as if she was about to pop at any moment, completely nervous for what was to come.

Little did we know what that strong little girl had in store for us. She was perparing us for something much bigger. Little did we know how much scary medical journeys would soon become a “normal” part of our life. We spent two solid years fighting for this girl every day.

I still remember that Fall day. That day you drove my car home alone while I sat with our kids, patiently awaiting your arrival. When you arrived, no words needed to be spoken, the minute you opened the car door I knew our lives had changed forever.

Scared out of our minds we held it together the best we could for those two kids we were holding. Fast forward 6 weeks, you are recovering from the biggest surgery of your life, and we notice that little girl is now feeding enough for herself. No longer in need of the feeding pump the g-tube. No longer in need to wear a backpack with constant feed.

All along she was preparing us for something much bigger, soemthing we could not have imagined, something we could not have taken without the training she had given us.

Together we are stronger after the battles we have faced. The long battles we have won. Stronger than ever we are ready for anything.

Promise

I promise to stay strong and grow with you.

I promise to hold your hand through the scary moments and tell you everything will be ok. We will find a solution, we always do.

I will check the house in the middle of the night when there are noises no matter how tired I am. I know that it causes you really strong feelings that you cannot shake until its been checked.

I promise to sit by your side when you are down, no matter how many times we re-watch Big Bang Theory it will never be too much.

support

I will accept support on my bad days. I know that I try to be the rock of the family and push until I cannot push anymore, no matter how much you tell me to rest. I really do appreciate when you take notice that things are going harder than normal.

I will accept your coaching in handling social emotional issues that are hard for me to understand on my own.