I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc.
So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.
How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building?
I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results.
Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not spending enough, or if it’s just my standards are too high for the code that is produced but I usually always end up going back to doing things by hand.
I try to keep the AI focused on small well defined tasks, use AGENT.MD and skills, build out a plan first, followed by tests for spec based development, keep context windows and chats a reasonable length etc, but if I add up all that time I could have done it myself and have better grasp of the program and the domain in the process.
I keep reading how AI is a force multiplier but I’m yet to see it play out for myself.
I see lots of posts talking about how much more productive AI has made people, but very few with actual specifics on setup, models, costs, workflows etc.
I’m not an AI doomer and would love to realize the benefits people are claiming they get.... but how to get there is the question
Then I wrote a large feature (ad pacing) on a site using LLMs. I learned the LLMs did not really understand what they were doing. The algorithm (PID controller) itself was properly implemented (as there is plenty of data to train on), but it was trying to optimize the wrong thing. There were other similar findings where LLM was doing very stupid mistakes. So I went through a disillusionment stage and kind of gave up for a while.
Since then, I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively. I have used it mostly on existing Django code bases. I think everybody has a slightly different take on how it works well. Probably the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. Existing code bases seem easier, as well as working on a spec beforehand, requiring tests etc. basic SWE principles.
> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively
This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)
> the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things.
This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me.
Then I wonder if it’s just my spend? I don’t mind spending $30/month to experiment but I’m not going to drop $300/month unless I can see evidence that it’ll be worth it, which I haven’t really seen, but maybe there’s a dependency and you don’t get the result without increased spend?
Some posts I’ve seen claim spending of $1,500/month, which would be worth it if it could increase productivity enough, but there’s very few specifics on workflows and results.
You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?
I am honestly curious about your point on productivity boost. Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can? Or is it the point that tests written by AI is of much lower quality that is not worth using them?
I am at the role of solo-preneur now and I see a lot of benefit from AI. But then I read posts like yours that experienced devs don't see much value in AI and I start to doubt the things I do. Are they bad quality(possibly) or is it something else going on.
"The decision of all decisions is to reject the default path. To answer the call to adventure. To finally begin writing the first chapter. To leave the tutorial and start level one. That's when your life starts."
Wow, you sound exactly like me - except I have a bit less years of experience. Let me know if you want to connect to help keep stay motivated (email in profile)
I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.
I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.
I am going to get good at TIG welding. This is mostly because there's a lot of subprojects of my car that would really benefit from me doing TIG - stainless, aluminium, etc (I already got pretty good at MIG for mild steel).
But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.
LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.
* Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChain?)
Non-tech:
* Sales - from feedback it seems like I’m not actually that bad of a salesman/people person but I would like to formalize that skill, maybe getting an entry-level technical sales/solutions engineer position and grow from there.
Personal:
* Letting go of projects and prioritizing: I’ve always had a ton of tech projects going at once which leads to my free time being spread thin across all of them and ultimately wasted as no meaningful progress is made. While it’s been an amazing learning experience when I started it’s since stopped paying off on that front once I mastered the tech involved. I need to let go for good and just delete the unfinished code once and for all so I’m never tempted to get back to it.
I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.
I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.
I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.
I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.
I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.
Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.
I was in a similar situation a few years back. I wasn’t only focusing on CRUD, but it was a large part of my work too. Mostly working on web-based SaaS projects.
I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.
Looks like I'm in that path you've already passed. From January I have to learn CDK because my current job requires me to do. Also planning on to obtain those AWS Cloud Certificates.
Heh same here. Get stuck in crud apps because it's easy, comfy and well paid. I would like to start something entirely different than computer related but I'm limited to a flat. So something like mushroom growing, or hydroponics seems good.
Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho.
Anyway happy new year!
I want to be much more publicly unhinged and in general do a lot more art without worrying too much about why or what I'm trying to say. I've found a lot of beauty in shitposts this year and I want to develop my skills to really meaningfully contribute to the corpus.
I want to get better at Systems Thinking. I'm fairly certain that while AI is going to get better and better at most things, it's only ever going to be able to look as far ahead as the prompt it's given and the context available. Architecting a system that can be won't grind to a halt after years of prompt-based additions is going to be a key skill, and the foundation of that is building high quality systems on top of simple foundational systems. That is going to necessitate being good at Systems Thinking.
Also, 'systems' doesn't mean code here. It could be business processes, people processes, ways of working, etc. AI is eventually going to impact all of it (it has already really), and that means being able to think about how to build systems that work well, and especially how to describe systems so that AI can help improve them.
I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.
Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE
That's a very specific skill development. I'd ask why Forth, yet guess because "must be beautiful"?
Seems like kind of strange / yet somewhat appropriate choice since Forth "traditionally use neither operating system nor file system." and "A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself". Bootstrap your own operating system on a computer with literally nothing.
Interesting to read about though as a tangent, very different kind of language. "grammar has no official specification" "looks the word up in the dictionary" and then does whatever the dictionary specifies.
Good luck on the project though, seems like it fell out of use in the 80's and only got recovered recently. The Forth Interest Group comments on the subject are funny too. [1] "What ANS Forths are available?" -> "The simple answer is: none" Apparently somebody (Vincent Hamp) got it to work on Thumb-2 ISA (ARMv7-M and newer) though. Tiny. 7kb flash, 320B of ram. [2]
I'd like to learn a little bit about electronics and hardware. At the moment, I have a child's mental model like you plug something into the wall and then it "powers on". I couldn't really tell you what properties make something a conductor or not, and I also couldn't tell you various components like capacitors do. It's actually quite fun in that I have a pretty clear plan for learning about this stuff but because I've never done it, it's all very new and novel with lots of "Aha!" moments for why things are the way they are.
Technical:
- Just anything more programming-specific stuff at work. When I get to do something, it's a stress-relief, because the typical day involves dealing with meetings, people, etc. and I can't have that much anymore, now with my health. Even when I can just focus, I want to shake the worry of other people's issues. The programming I do mostly is handling precise reporting requests, but since that is going to be offshored, I can move to something else at least. I am hoping that I can take on anything outside of Java or .NET. I work at a consultancy and those projects do pop up.
- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!
- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)
Non-technical:
- I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.
- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.
- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.
My wife and I quit our tech jobs and moved from the US to a European country last year to learn/grow/explore. The plan is to renew the visa and continue our exploration.
For 2026, other than more traveling, I have just started a course at the local tech university on solar power, and asset management/O&M of solar installations. The hope is to gain basic domain knowledge for potentially transitioning my career into this field in a year or two, taking advantage of my SWE, data analytics, and PM experience.
I'm also planning to take my host country's driving exam. That means I first need to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission, after 30+ years driving in the US.
Nice post. Without doxing yourself, can you share the European country and your visa situation? If you want to stay and work in European as US citizens, I highly recommend you look at the DAFT treaty which allows US citizens to live and work (by starting a business) in the Netherlands.
Honestly, I could not do what you have done. Hats off. I am a bit jealous! I really need the daily structure of a regular office job. (Hold your tomatoes folks!) How do you fight they tyranny of structurelessness? Or maybe you don't have it at all...
- Woodworking. Bit of a cliché for an engineer, I know ;) I renovated my own house from the ground up over the past 2 years but I found the woodworking part always incredibly rewarding. At this point I have quite a good selection of tools and will setup a dedicated workshop in my basement.
- Contributing to Homeassistant community by integrating non-standard zigbee devices. A lot of lighting devices in my house are zigbee. There are some companies that deviate from the standard protocol though to force you to use their hub or software.
Scheduled for Fire 1 (basic Fire academy) in 2026. Looking forward to developing basic fire fighting skills and strengthen my knowledge in this new volunteer undertaking I started in mid 2025.
As for tech skills in 2026, I’d love to develop a photogrammetry pipeline mixing shoulder mounted SLAM scanner, DSLR terrestrial photography, and aerial LiDAR data sets. I’m lucky to have access to these data sets, just gotta put the pieces together.
I’m already familiar with UAS (unmanned aerial systems) photogrammetry and mixing that with terrestrial photos for high detail models. Aerial Lidar and SLAM datasets are something new I’ve been working with over the past 6 months.
Is your town/village fully volunteer fire fighters, or a mixed bag of paid pros combined with volunteers? Personally, I always thought a first aid course could be very useful in real life.
— Learn Rust. I'm halfway through the Rustlings exercises and I'll continue with more challenges. Advice is welcome. I might also ask LLMs to pose as teachers and create exercises for me and check them.
- Cooking. This has been something I neglected all my life and I really want to get better at it. It's so fundamental to quality of life.
- Persian language. Studied it for six months, I can read and write the script and I understand basic sentences, but I want to get better at it. If there are any Persian folks reading this, ping me. It's a beautiful language and culture.
For me, what sparked my interest in cooking was two things: (1) getting older (in youth, food was simply fuel, not so much to be enjoyed), (2) wanting to replicate favourites dishes from restaurants (my first first was channa masala). You can learn a lot from middle-aged house wives that have a YouTube cooking channel that show you how to cook classic dishes from various cultures. One thing that has been incredibly liberating is making small tweaks to recipes that will trigger a cultural native to immediately declare: "Oh, that's not authentic." To that I say: "Who cares, it is my food, and I will enjoy it!"
There are also project-based resources beyond Rustlings like Entirely Too Many Linked Lists[1] you might check out. I've found Gjengset's videos[2] great for intermediate content, and they include both project and lecture formats.
I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.
Thanks for your openness about with struggling with mental health. It is brutal. For me, exercise really helped. For others, it is reconnecting (or getting closer) with friends and family. Keep at it -- you can beat it!
I was in the same boat and started drawing again at around 30.
Remember that paper is cheap and that experimentation is valuable. Make all the bad art you can. The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza. There is a valuable life lesson in there about being okay with making mistakes so that you can learn from them.
Nowadays I always carry a notebook, and more often than not pens and watercolours. You can build a really tiny kit out of makeup palettes.
I also loved taking painting lessons and going to live nude drawing at one of my favourite pubs. Making art is such a pleasant disconnect from work and digital life.
That's awesome! I feel similar, I drew a lot back in the days because growing up in a small town I was bored so often. I did portrait art only but today I struggle because I just don't know what to draw and I'm just not good at doodling.
Best of luck to you!
Being entirely self-taught, I'm not sure how to describe my style. If I have to, it's kinda a nondescript knock-off of Gisèle Lagacé's recent webcomics.
As for the subjects, being a horny teenager at the time I mostly drew scantily clad women. Sometimes portraits/caricatures of teachers or other students, mostly on request. All together, that led to an unfathomable number of hijinks.
Thankfully, the one time that a teacher came across their caricature, it ended well. A fellow student requested it while in class (of handwriting Java of all things). She then took my handout and brought it to the teacher, proudly stating with glee "look at what boricj drew!". Cue the laughter. Then the teacher stated flipping pages and stumbled upon the rest of my usual bodywork, so to speak. Cue the laughter again. By that point, I was rolling on the floor, my sides hurting.
I don't think I'll ever top that, but the reception of my doodles at the conference by academics reminded me of that past. Hopefully I'll manage to rekindle it.
Wife and I started a 3d printing business. We just started a couple of months ago and have put our items in a few retail stores. Our goal is not to do this super fast but more like supplemental income. Also its fun to print stuff for ourselves. I already designed a finger mini golf game and may start to build my own board games out of 3d printed parts.
So I want to build up 3d modeling skills.
I am not surprised but its much much slower to get a physical product business going than just writing some code and launching.
This sounds very cool! Can you share a link to your company website, or are you only selling on eBay or Etsy? I think 3D printed stuff can make great creative gifts.
Pro:
After 10 year I feel that I am becoming a specialist of the software I work on rather than a software specialist. Needing to work in different domains where I am not the expert.
Other:
Better time management and micro napping. After a working day sucking mind and kids energy, the brain stops working for anything but doom scrolling or TV.
For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.
I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.
On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.
I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.
I want to learn how to swim. I never took lessons as a kid, and, while I can get from one edge of the pool to the other, I want to feel completely comfortable.
Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.
I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels
This is a great idea. Countryside driving is lovely in many places in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Since you are based in Singapore, you can easily go across the border in JB, rent a car and drive into the countryside. There so much beauty in a slow drive through the Malaysian countryside. I use Google Maps (satellite view) to find interesting nature, then try to drive to it.
Although I have "known" how to drive for a long time, I didn't get my formal license until much later in life than most people, for similar reasons to yours.
Now that I have it, I kick myself for not doing this earlier, but as they say: the best time was ten years ago, the second-best time is now.
Owing to the city life I often go up to six months without driving anywhere, but when I finally get out on the road again it feels great. Country driving is amazing, in any country where people drive safely. It's even pretty nice where they don't. City driving still stresses me out, but I'm determined to get better at it.
Good luck! If you find yourself having trouble getting the license in Singapore, there are other countries where you could get a license more easily, and with that license you could drive in third countries.
Two low-risk and cheap ways to develop relevant driving skills are bumper cars[0] and go-karts[1]. This may appear to be silly at first, but both involve the same hand-eye coordination and decision skills of vehicular driving (though the latter is no where nearly as fun as the others).
This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car. It would probably help, but at some point they're going to need to drive something with more weight and horsepower.
The real way is just to ride a bike. You can ride it on the road so you'll learn how the road works as well as how to operate a vehicle. When I got in a car the only things that took time to learn were operating the clutch and manoeuvres in tight spaces (you need to develop spacial awareness that you won't get from cycling). If I had learnt to drive an auto it would have been trivially easy after years of cycling.
Same here! I lived in big cities all my life and am used to the convenience of good public transport. Want to travel and rent a nice car, just when needed.
I always feel the jump in price from standard to nice rental car is too much to bother with (like a factor of 2.5-5x). So I drive a lot of crappy rentals, but they’re just a way to get from point to point.
Automatic transmissions (for EU where manual is popular - I guess this doesn’t apply in countries where everyone drives automatics already) are generally only available with higher trim levels and yet don’t cost much more to rent, so this might be an option to get a “nicer” rental.
I plan on learning driving this year too! I think I will still continue using public transit because I enjoy doing research things while on transit (which of course can't be done while driving) but I want to learn driving.
Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.
So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.
Stock trading can be quite lucrative if it's a good match. Have a look at Qullamaggie on YouTube.
> Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was better at following instructions I would 100% be profitable. The YouTuber I mentioned doesn't sell any courses.
> Edit 2, screw you guys for the downvotes. I'm sharing something I've found useful. You don't have to buy into the idea, but there are some people who do very well off of trading. Hence "if it's a match"
I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always.
Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting.
But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.
I started learning Latin in 2025, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I can read intermediate level pedagogical texts -- mostly adapted Greek and Roman myths. In 2026 I want to get my proficiency up to the point where I can comfortably read the first book of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. This is doable, many of the texts I'm reading now were designed to teach the vocabulary and grammar so High School students could slog through it.
De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!
I want to be able to speak and listen at at least a B1 by the end of next year. We will be spending a bit over a month in Costa Rica next year and I want to get as immersed as possible.
Work related get better at pre-sales. Currently, I’m a staff architect at a cloud consulting company leading post sales implementations. While there is some ambiguity when it gets to me, for the most part I know the shape of the business problem they want to solve, working in pre-sales has a higher level of ambiguity. They can’t outsource pre sales since it involves travel
I want to learn proper programming. Maybe Go, then C(++).
I have never had a proper formal IT education, just learned everything on the go. I can write essentially everything in Python or Bash using AI. I know most (data)concepts and what data to move where in what fashion, I just don't have the hours in it to be able to do it from the top of my head.
I feel the AI is great, but it's also holding me back. Like how driving a automatic transmission is nice, but you'll never learn to drive stick from it.
Also Docker / k8s ecosystem seems to be mostly Go based. And it looks cool, the syntax.
If anyone has any courses that are interactive and can keep an ADHD mind invested in it I'm all ears.
Might be a bit of a tame goal for hckrnews but yeah.
Reverse engineering. I cannot stand that every product I buy requires an app (that will break with the next upgrade/or lack thereof). I realise this is a problem possibly better suited to be solved on a policy level, but I rather learn some more reverse engineering skills (which can be both very rewarding as well as frustrating) than go into politics.
Sales - especially B2B.
I've got a strong technical background (PhD in Physics) and have been writing code for almost 15 years (most domains, with ML more recently).
I'm also comfortable with public speaking (talking a conferences, pitching etc).
I feel sales is the last piece of the puzzle I'm missing
* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.
* Learn complex analysis!
* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!
I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.
- Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field.
- Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a very desired skill for any new career opportunities.
- Learn how to manage a small SaaS company and the product. I'm in the finishing stages of a platform that I have been developing by myself(while my cofounder is the industry expert). Neither of us has knowledge on what it takes to launch and sell this product, for which we know there is demand in the industry.
- Create practical real life ML workflows. I have only theoretical experience since I never had the need or opportunity to work with a more real scenario. This is both from personal interest and for career growth.
- Start and actually approach university in a meaningful way. I have a respectable career, but no higher education, which has always weighted on me
Some non-technical:
- Force myself into more social situations, especially with absolutely non-tech people.
- Just started treating ADHD, so hopefully wrangle that
Good luck to everyone in achieving their goals and exploring new paths!
To me it's deep learning compilers since mid 2025. I am a person who can't learn just from reading books, so 80% of time I learn by doing (contribute to PyTorch) and 20% of time I read books (now: Engineering a Compiler from Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon) and talk to LLMs to fill gaps in my understanding.
My main quest now is to build a bridge [0] between PyTorch and universal GPU computing world - which I believe WebGPU might become. What it requires is to build is 1) a runtime for executing PyTorch ATen operations on WebGPU by running WGSL shaders and 2) a compiler, so you can use full PyTorch power with @torch.compile
I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.
> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
Therein lies the problem.
To want to "focus on the task at hand" and then express the desire to "try being a bit of a jack of many trades" is a mutually exclusive goal set.
If you want to improve focusing skills, then it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another. If the "ability to focus on the task at hand" is not really all that important in the grander scheme of things and topically bouncing around is where you find happiness, then I humbly suggest to not beat yourself up about focusing on "the task at hand."
Either is an equally valid choice which none need judge, since it is your own after all.
> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year
But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).
Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?
(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)
I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.
Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.
I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.
Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.
I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.
Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.
Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.
The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.
I would like to learn more about Web development and related knowledge (networking, security). Currently my programming knowledge is primarily system languages+python. I'm thinking of building a few websites / apps from scratch, and perhaps hosting my own server. Recommendations for frameworks or do's/don'ts are very welcome.
Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job.
One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.
For self-hosting: Buy a cheap VPS and use something like Coolify, Dokploy, or Dokku if you don't need a UI. These are half way in between "managed" PaaS (e.g. Vercel, Netlify, etc) and "hosting it yourself". Self-hosting is important experience but setting up reverse proxies, nginx, database backups, port-forwarding, firewall rules, secrets management, dependency updates, etc is not trivial. You should absolutely learn how to do those eventually but it's important to get something up and running first and the software I mentioned does just that for you
For building websites: If you don't already know HTML/CSS/JS definitely start with a vanilla site. No matter what framework is in right now, having the fundamentals down is absolutely a huge boost. So start with a simple static site. If you already have that knowledge, don't go crazy. React is basically the "boring technology" at this point and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Use Vite to create a basic React app
For web development I would say avoid high-level frameworks as much as you can. Most of them are built for hand-holding developers which is counterproductive to learning the fundamentals and are usually inflexible to demands outside the "happy path".
Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India
I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking
Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.
Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).
Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn
I was lost not sure of my career and I put too much focus on it, since now things are more stable, I want to:
- Work on projects that actually interest me, not just to fill the CV.
- Learn CS fundamentals but I know web development but not how computers work under the hood.
I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.
- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.
- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.
- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"
I'm going to learn to ship things. I can build a full SaaS in 5 days using Claude so there is no excuse for me not to ship.
I've been out of work 2 years, had to do a GoFundMe just to survive the winter, and I raised 5k which gave me a runway to get off Uber and Lyft and focus on finding clients to build for add with chatGPT I think I'm in the verge of figuring this freelance thing out ..
other things to learn: I want to get AWS certified and work on other certifications like Service Now... or sales force...
I'm wanting a digital agency but need to figure out the sales aspect.
I want to give away my tools for free and take on more ambitious projects, like building more capable browsers and local LLMs to get rid of corporate chokeholds. But that would probably never come true, because I would be tied up making money just to survive, rather than being able to give things away or take on more ambitious projects.
I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.
Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.
I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.
Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.
> I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.
What's the plan to make sure that progress in AI leads to predominantly positive outcomes for people? All the people I've asked who work at the major AI companies haven't given an answer, except to say that they don't study safety or societal impacts, but know others who do.
If you don't have an answer, can I humbly suggest that you add finding one to your list?
I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.
Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.
Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.
- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.
- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.
- Do more coding with AI.
- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)
Non-technical skills:
- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.
How to build and deploy web apps. I worked as a developer for many years (before becoming a product manager), but always in desktop apps. I still code for fun, but I never made the jump to web apps. Now with AI that's easier than ever, so I'm going to do it.
Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.
I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.
I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.
learn spanish and schematic design with pcb
I'm self taught programmer blessed to be working in the embedded space this year and I want to take my love for low level further and learn to build hardware from scratc
I need to improve my facility with Python and math and geometry sufficiently to finish up my current project, a previewer for G-code which allows creating design files programmatically.
Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).
Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.
but the other things such as writing, just can't do it without LLMs's help. Looking up things, I defaulted to LLMs.
So in 2026, I just want to stop relying on LLMs.
Lol but I do like building LLMs (training from scratch, pre-training, fine-tuning, etc.). as a matter of fact, I'm pre-training a 1b model for last 2 days.
To expand my knowledge of product management and JavaScript enough to build a strong prototype of app/business i have in mind with the help of Lovable and other ai tools.
Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.
And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.
Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.
I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.
As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?
I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.
Same here. I really want to stop peddling Microsoft stuff and support m365. Don't know where to go from here though. But if there's a will there's a way right?
Technical: release a simple, focused product. AI makes it easy to spam things out that look good. I would be psyched if something catches just a little bit of attention. I feel like my main limit is creativity now. Mine has been stifled by 15 years of rote web dev.
Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)
I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.
> Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out.
This is a great idea if you have the money for it. Don't feel guilty about just a few sessions to build up a set exercises that works for you. Then you can circle back 2-4 times per year, do a few more sessions to up your game. For me, exercise was a fuckin' game changer for my mental health. Even when I struggle to get out of bed in the morning, missing a workout makes me feel muuuuuuch worse (mentally and physically).
I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
Working out does SO MUCH to help with depression. There’s a lot of literature to support this, and plenty of anecdata as well. Good luck, you can do it!
I'm in a similar position but figured out how to work out last year. it's not a panacea, but working out is quite fun and is a great skill. I never had a personal trainer, but the best part about having one would probably be that they could set you up with some plans to follow, removing all the initial guesswork. The hardest part about working out for me is trying to figure out a goal to optimize for that's not too far away but not too simple either.
SQL, Postgres, Pandas, Polars, Airflow, Duckdb, and whatever else shiny object along the way which distracts me from actually doing something productive towards my goals.
I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again.
I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.
Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.
Non-technical:
Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.
By 2026, I plan to stop writing code myself and go all-in on AI coding tools like Claude. My focus will shift entirely to marketing, building products, and scaling my own company. AI is changing the game—soon, one person will be able to build a billion-dollar company with AI doing the heavy lifting.
I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc.
So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.
How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building?
I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results.
Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not spending enough, or if it’s just my standards are too high for the code that is produced but I usually always end up going back to doing things by hand.
I try to keep the AI focused on small well defined tasks, use AGENT.MD and skills, build out a plan first, followed by tests for spec based development, keep context windows and chats a reasonable length etc, but if I add up all that time I could have done it myself and have better grasp of the program and the domain in the process.
I keep reading how AI is a force multiplier but I’m yet to see it play out for myself.
I see lots of posts talking about how much more productive AI has made people, but very few with actual specifics on setup, models, costs, workflows etc.
I’m not an AI doomer and would love to realize the benefits people are claiming they get.... but how to get there is the question
For me, it has gone through stages.
Initially I was astounded by the results.
Then I wrote a large feature (ad pacing) on a site using LLMs. I learned the LLMs did not really understand what they were doing. The algorithm (PID controller) itself was properly implemented (as there is plenty of data to train on), but it was trying to optimize the wrong thing. There were other similar findings where LLM was doing very stupid mistakes. So I went through a disillusionment stage and kind of gave up for a while.
Since then, I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively. I have used it mostly on existing Django code bases. I think everybody has a slightly different take on how it works well. Probably the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. Existing code bases seem easier, as well as working on a spec beforehand, requiring tests etc. basic SWE principles.
> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively
This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-)
> the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things.
This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me.
Then I wonder if it’s just my spend? I don’t mind spending $30/month to experiment but I’m not going to drop $300/month unless I can see evidence that it’ll be worth it, which I haven’t really seen, but maybe there’s a dependency and you don’t get the result without increased spend?
Some posts I’ve seen claim spending of $1,500/month, which would be worth it if it could increase productivity enough, but there’s very few specifics on workflows and results.
You can achieve a lot on the $30 plan.
I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money.
Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.
You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?
I am honestly curious about your point on productivity boost. Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can? Or is it the point that tests written by AI is of much lower quality that is not worth using them? I am at the role of solo-preneur now and I see a lot of benefit from AI. But then I read posts like yours that experienced devs don't see much value in AI and I start to doubt the things I do. Are they bad quality(possibly) or is it something else going on.
"The decision of all decisions is to reject the default path. To answer the call to adventure. To finally begin writing the first chapter. To leave the tutorial and start level one. That's when your life starts."
Good luck!
Wow, you sound exactly like me - except I have a bit less years of experience. Let me know if you want to connect to help keep stay motivated (email in profile)
hmu if you need or want a partner...
I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.
I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.
I am going to get good at TIG welding. This is mostly because there's a lot of subprojects of my car that would really benefit from me doing TIG - stainless, aluminium, etc (I already got pretty good at MIG for mild steel).
But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.
LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.
Tech skills:
* Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChain?)
Non-tech:
* Sales - from feedback it seems like I’m not actually that bad of a salesman/people person but I would like to formalize that skill, maybe getting an entry-level technical sales/solutions engineer position and grow from there.
Personal:
* Letting go of projects and prioritizing: I’ve always had a ton of tech projects going at once which leads to my free time being spread thin across all of them and ultimately wasted as no meaningful progress is made. While it’s been an amazing learning experience when I started it’s since stopped paying off on that front once I mastered the tech involved. I need to let go for good and just delete the unfinished code once and for all so I’m never tempted to get back to it.
I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.
I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.
I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.
I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.
I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.
Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.
I was in a similar situation a few years back. I wasn’t only focusing on CRUD, but it was a large part of my work too. Mostly working on web-based SaaS projects.
I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.
Looks like I'm in that path you've already passed. From January I have to learn CDK because my current job requires me to do. Also planning on to obtain those AWS Cloud Certificates.
Heh same here. Get stuck in crud apps because it's easy, comfy and well paid. I would like to start something entirely different than computer related but I'm limited to a flat. So something like mushroom growing, or hydroponics seems good.
Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho. Anyway happy new year!
I want to be much more publicly unhinged and in general do a lot more art without worrying too much about why or what I'm trying to say. I've found a lot of beauty in shitposts this year and I want to develop my skills to really meaningfully contribute to the corpus.
I just wanted I support your enthusiasm for shitposting. The meta irony hidden in these posts is lovable.
I want to get better at Systems Thinking. I'm fairly certain that while AI is going to get better and better at most things, it's only ever going to be able to look as far ahead as the prompt it's given and the context available. Architecting a system that can be won't grind to a halt after years of prompt-based additions is going to be a key skill, and the foundation of that is building high quality systems on top of simple foundational systems. That is going to necessitate being good at Systems Thinking.
Also, 'systems' doesn't mean code here. It could be business processes, people processes, ways of working, etc. AI is eventually going to impact all of it (it has already really), and that means being able to think about how to build systems that work well, and especially how to describe systems so that AI can help improve them.
Write an operating system in Forth.
I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.
Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE
That sounds like fun! Which is THE paper by Niklas Wirth?
That's a very specific skill development. I'd ask why Forth, yet guess because "must be beautiful"?
Seems like kind of strange / yet somewhat appropriate choice since Forth "traditionally use neither operating system nor file system." and "A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself". Bootstrap your own operating system on a computer with literally nothing.
Interesting to read about though as a tangent, very different kind of language. "grammar has no official specification" "looks the word up in the dictionary" and then does whatever the dictionary specifies.
Good luck on the project though, seems like it fell out of use in the 80's and only got recovered recently. The Forth Interest Group comments on the subject are funny too. [1] "What ANS Forths are available?" -> "The simple answer is: none" Apparently somebody (Vincent Hamp) got it to work on Thumb-2 ISA (ARMv7-M and newer) though. Tiny. 7kb flash, 320B of ram. [2]
[1] https://www.forth.org/ansforth/ansforth.html
[2] https://gitlab.com/higaski/Shi
I'd like to learn a little bit about electronics and hardware. At the moment, I have a child's mental model like you plug something into the wall and then it "powers on". I couldn't really tell you what properties make something a conductor or not, and I also couldn't tell you various components like capacitors do. It's actually quite fun in that I have a pretty clear plan for learning about this stuff but because I've never done it, it's all very new and novel with lots of "Aha!" moments for why things are the way they are.
Technical: - Just anything more programming-specific stuff at work. When I get to do something, it's a stress-relief, because the typical day involves dealing with meetings, people, etc. and I can't have that much anymore, now with my health. Even when I can just focus, I want to shake the worry of other people's issues. The programming I do mostly is handling precise reporting requests, but since that is going to be offshored, I can move to something else at least. I am hoping that I can take on anything outside of Java or .NET. I work at a consultancy and those projects do pop up.
- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!
- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)
Non-technical: - I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.
- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.
- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.
My wife and I quit our tech jobs and moved from the US to a European country last year to learn/grow/explore. The plan is to renew the visa and continue our exploration.
For 2026, other than more traveling, I have just started a course at the local tech university on solar power, and asset management/O&M of solar installations. The hope is to gain basic domain knowledge for potentially transitioning my career into this field in a year or two, taking advantage of my SWE, data analytics, and PM experience.
I'm also planning to take my host country's driving exam. That means I first need to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission, after 30+ years driving in the US.
Nice post. Without doxing yourself, can you share the European country and your visa situation? If you want to stay and work in European as US citizens, I highly recommend you look at the DAFT treaty which allows US citizens to live and work (by starting a business) in the Netherlands.
Honestly, I could not do what you have done. Hats off. I am a bit jealous! I really need the daily structure of a regular office job. (Hold your tomatoes folks!) How do you fight they tyranny of structurelessness? Or maybe you don't have it at all...
- Woodworking. Bit of a cliché for an engineer, I know ;) I renovated my own house from the ground up over the past 2 years but I found the woodworking part always incredibly rewarding. At this point I have quite a good selection of tools and will setup a dedicated workshop in my basement.
- Contributing to Homeassistant community by integrating non-standard zigbee devices. A lot of lighting devices in my house are zigbee. There are some companies that deviate from the standard protocol though to force you to use their hub or software.
Scheduled for Fire 1 (basic Fire academy) in 2026. Looking forward to developing basic fire fighting skills and strengthen my knowledge in this new volunteer undertaking I started in mid 2025.
As for tech skills in 2026, I’d love to develop a photogrammetry pipeline mixing shoulder mounted SLAM scanner, DSLR terrestrial photography, and aerial LiDAR data sets. I’m lucky to have access to these data sets, just gotta put the pieces together.
I’m already familiar with UAS (unmanned aerial systems) photogrammetry and mixing that with terrestrial photos for high detail models. Aerial Lidar and SLAM datasets are something new I’ve been working with over the past 6 months.
Off the top of my head:
— Learn Rust. I'm halfway through the Rustlings exercises and I'll continue with more challenges. Advice is welcome. I might also ask LLMs to pose as teachers and create exercises for me and check them.
- Cooking. This has been something I neglected all my life and I really want to get better at it. It's so fundamental to quality of life.
- Persian language. Studied it for six months, I can read and write the script and I understand basic sentences, but I want to get better at it. If there are any Persian folks reading this, ping me. It's a beautiful language and culture.
> Advice is welcome.
Here's some advice I've given about learning Rust in the past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020654
There are also project-based resources beyond Rustlings like Entirely Too Many Linked Lists[1] you might check out. I've found Gjengset's videos[2] great for intermediate content, and they include both project and lecture formats.
Best of luck!
[1] https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@jonhoo
I want to draw again.
I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.
Thanks for your openness about with struggling with mental health. It is brutal. For me, exercise really helped. For others, it is reconnecting (or getting closer) with friends and family. Keep at it -- you can beat it!
I was in the same boat and started drawing again at around 30.
Remember that paper is cheap and that experimentation is valuable. Make all the bad art you can. The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza. There is a valuable life lesson in there about being okay with making mistakes so that you can learn from them.
Nowadays I always carry a notebook, and more often than not pens and watercolours. You can build a really tiny kit out of makeup palettes.
I also loved taking painting lessons and going to live nude drawing at one of my favourite pubs. Making art is such a pleasant disconnect from work and digital life.
That's awesome! I feel similar, I drew a lot back in the days because growing up in a small town I was bored so often. I did portrait art only but today I struggle because I just don't know what to draw and I'm just not good at doodling. Best of luck to you!
What subjects or style do you like to draw?
Being entirely self-taught, I'm not sure how to describe my style. If I have to, it's kinda a nondescript knock-off of Gisèle Lagacé's recent webcomics.
As for the subjects, being a horny teenager at the time I mostly drew scantily clad women. Sometimes portraits/caricatures of teachers or other students, mostly on request. All together, that led to an unfathomable number of hijinks.
Thankfully, the one time that a teacher came across their caricature, it ended well. A fellow student requested it while in class (of handwriting Java of all things). She then took my handout and brought it to the teacher, proudly stating with glee "look at what boricj drew!". Cue the laughter. Then the teacher stated flipping pages and stumbled upon the rest of my usual bodywork, so to speak. Cue the laughter again. By that point, I was rolling on the floor, my sides hurting.
I don't think I'll ever top that, but the reception of my doodles at the conference by academics reminded me of that past. Hopefully I'll manage to rekindle it.
Wife and I started a 3d printing business. We just started a couple of months ago and have put our items in a few retail stores. Our goal is not to do this super fast but more like supplemental income. Also its fun to print stuff for ourselves. I already designed a finger mini golf game and may start to build my own board games out of 3d printed parts.
So I want to build up 3d modeling skills.
I am not surprised but its much much slower to get a physical product business going than just writing some code and launching.
This sounds very cool! Can you share a link to your company website, or are you only selling on eBay or Etsy? I think 3D printed stuff can make great creative gifts.
Pro: After 10 year I feel that I am becoming a specialist of the software I work on rather than a software specialist. Needing to work in different domains where I am not the expert.
Other: Better time management and micro napping. After a working day sucking mind and kids energy, the brain stops working for anything but doom scrolling or TV.
For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.
I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.
On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.
I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.
I want to learn how to swim. I never took lessons as a kid, and, while I can get from one edge of the pool to the other, I want to feel completely comfortable.
Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.
I want to learn driving.
I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels
This is a great idea. Countryside driving is lovely in many places in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Since you are based in Singapore, you can easily go across the border in JB, rent a car and drive into the countryside. There so much beauty in a slow drive through the Malaysian countryside. I use Google Maps (satellite view) to find interesting nature, then try to drive to it.
Great idea!
Although I have "known" how to drive for a long time, I didn't get my formal license until much later in life than most people, for similar reasons to yours.
Now that I have it, I kick myself for not doing this earlier, but as they say: the best time was ten years ago, the second-best time is now.
Owing to the city life I often go up to six months without driving anywhere, but when I finally get out on the road again it feels great. Country driving is amazing, in any country where people drive safely. It's even pretty nice where they don't. City driving still stresses me out, but I'm determined to get better at it.
Good luck! If you find yourself having trouble getting the license in Singapore, there are other countries where you could get a license more easily, and with that license you could drive in third countries.
> I want to learn driving.
Two low-risk and cheap ways to develop relevant driving skills are bumper cars[0] and go-karts[1]. This may appear to be silly at first, but both involve the same hand-eye coordination and decision skills of vehicular driving (though the latter is no where nearly as fun as the others).
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_cars
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-kart
This is a curious suggestion. Higher end go-karts I can't contest, but I've never found bumper cars to be anything like operating a car. It would probably help, but at some point they're going to need to drive something with more weight and horsepower.
The real way is just to ride a bike. You can ride it on the road so you'll learn how the road works as well as how to operate a vehicle. When I got in a car the only things that took time to learn were operating the clutch and manoeuvres in tight spaces (you need to develop spacial awareness that you won't get from cycling). If I had learnt to drive an auto it would have been trivially easy after years of cycling.
Same here! I lived in big cities all my life and am used to the convenience of good public transport. Want to travel and rent a nice car, just when needed.
I always feel the jump in price from standard to nice rental car is too much to bother with (like a factor of 2.5-5x). So I drive a lot of crappy rentals, but they’re just a way to get from point to point.
Automatic transmissions (for EU where manual is popular - I guess this doesn’t apply in countries where everyone drives automatics already) are generally only available with higher trim levels and yet don’t cost much more to rent, so this might be an option to get a “nicer” rental.
I plan on learning driving this year too! I think I will still continue using public transit because I enjoy doing research things while on transit (which of course can't be done while driving) but I want to learn driving.
Learn to make money.
Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.
So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.
Stock trading can be quite lucrative if it's a good match. Have a look at Qullamaggie on YouTube.
> Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was better at following instructions I would 100% be profitable. The YouTuber I mentioned doesn't sell any courses.
> Edit 2, screw you guys for the downvotes. I'm sharing something I've found useful. You don't have to buy into the idea, but there are some people who do very well off of trading. Hence "if it's a match"
I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always.
Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that.
[0] https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I?si=5kEkLoUhHDkajlyy
I started learning Latin in 2025, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I can read intermediate level pedagogical texts -- mostly adapted Greek and Roman myths. In 2026 I want to get my proficiency up to the point where I can comfortably read the first book of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. This is doable, many of the texts I'm reading now were designed to teach the vocabulary and grammar so High School students could slog through it.
De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!
Get better at Spanish. Reading and writing, I’m hovering around an A2 with decent vocabulary.
https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...
I want to be able to speak and listen at at least a B1 by the end of next year. We will be spending a bit over a month in Costa Rica next year and I want to get as immersed as possible.
Work related get better at pre-sales. Currently, I’m a staff architect at a cloud consulting company leading post sales implementations. While there is some ambiguity when it gets to me, for the most part I know the shape of the business problem they want to solve, working in pre-sales has a higher level of ambiguity. They can’t outsource pre sales since it involves travel
My wife and hired a personal Spanish tutor
I hired my wife one too. She's really enjoying it [1] [1] www.lacasitaspanishschool.com.au
The Running Man. It's really the foundation action in a good shuffle dance and it really has to flow naturally and consistently.
I want to learn proper programming. Maybe Go, then C(++).
I have never had a proper formal IT education, just learned everything on the go. I can write essentially everything in Python or Bash using AI. I know most (data)concepts and what data to move where in what fashion, I just don't have the hours in it to be able to do it from the top of my head.
I feel the AI is great, but it's also holding me back. Like how driving a automatic transmission is nice, but you'll never learn to drive stick from it.
Also Docker / k8s ecosystem seems to be mostly Go based. And it looks cool, the syntax.
If anyone has any courses that are interactive and can keep an ADHD mind invested in it I'm all ears.
Might be a bit of a tame goal for hckrnews but yeah.
Reverse engineering. I cannot stand that every product I buy requires an app (that will break with the next upgrade/or lack thereof). I realise this is a problem possibly better suited to be solved on a policy level, but I rather learn some more reverse engineering skills (which can be both very rewarding as well as frustrating) than go into politics.
I've just started managing a team and would like to develop my EQ and think more before I speak.
Sales - especially B2B. I've got a strong technical background (PhD in Physics) and have been writing code for almost 15 years (most domains, with ML more recently). I'm also comfortable with public speaking (talking a conferences, pitching etc). I feel sales is the last piece of the puzzle I'm missing
* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.
* Learn complex analysis!
* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!
Out of curiosity, why are you quitting teaching? If you’re a high school teacher, I have to assume that it’s not the money.
I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.
My main ones are career focused:
- Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field.
- Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a very desired skill for any new career opportunities.
- Learn how to manage a small SaaS company and the product. I'm in the finishing stages of a platform that I have been developing by myself(while my cofounder is the industry expert). Neither of us has knowledge on what it takes to launch and sell this product, for which we know there is demand in the industry.
- Create practical real life ML workflows. I have only theoretical experience since I never had the need or opportunity to work with a more real scenario. This is both from personal interest and for career growth.
- Start and actually approach university in a meaningful way. I have a respectable career, but no higher education, which has always weighted on me
Some non-technical:
- Force myself into more social situations, especially with absolutely non-tech people.
- Just started treating ADHD, so hopefully wrangle that
Good luck to everyone in achieving their goals and exploring new paths!
To me it's deep learning compilers since mid 2025. I am a person who can't learn just from reading books, so 80% of time I learn by doing (contribute to PyTorch) and 20% of time I read books (now: Engineering a Compiler from Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon) and talk to LLMs to fill gaps in my understanding.
My main quest now is to build a bridge [0] between PyTorch and universal GPU computing world - which I believe WebGPU might become. What it requires is to build is 1) a runtime for executing PyTorch ATen operations on WebGPU by running WGSL shaders and 2) a compiler, so you can use full PyTorch power with @torch.compile
[0] - https://github.com/jmaczan/torch-webgpu
I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.
> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)
Therein lies the problem.
To want to "focus on the task at hand" and then express the desire to "try being a bit of a jack of many trades" is a mutually exclusive goal set.
If you want to improve focusing skills, then it is best to pick one thing from the "many trades" and master only it before beginning another. If the "ability to focus on the task at hand" is not really all that important in the grander scheme of things and topically bouncing around is where you find happiness, then I humbly suggest to not beat yourself up about focusing on "the task at hand."
Either is an equally valid choice which none need judge, since it is your own after all.
Talk to a psychiatrist about ADHD.
> I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.
This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)
> Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year
But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).
Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?
(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)
I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.
Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.
I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.
Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.
I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.
How did you develop your CAD and 3D printing skills? Did you use any online courses?
I hope to explore AI on edge devices and see how far it can get me.
New models like functiongemma are promising and I think we may be at a point where consistent tool calling is all we need.
SW:
- Architecting larger scale applications
- A project which is related to fundamentals (like compilers, OS) rather than run of the mill web development.
Not SW:
- Motorcycle internals and general repair skills
- Ancient sanskrit grammar
Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.
Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.
The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.
I want to improve my Nase fishing skills and finally catch 50cm one (46cm atm).
I would like to learn more about Web development and related knowledge (networking, security). Currently my programming knowledge is primarily system languages+python. I'm thinking of building a few websites / apps from scratch, and perhaps hosting my own server. Recommendations for frameworks or do's/don'ts are very welcome.
Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job. One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.
For self-hosting: Buy a cheap VPS and use something like Coolify, Dokploy, or Dokku if you don't need a UI. These are half way in between "managed" PaaS (e.g. Vercel, Netlify, etc) and "hosting it yourself". Self-hosting is important experience but setting up reverse proxies, nginx, database backups, port-forwarding, firewall rules, secrets management, dependency updates, etc is not trivial. You should absolutely learn how to do those eventually but it's important to get something up and running first and the software I mentioned does just that for you
For building websites: If you don't already know HTML/CSS/JS definitely start with a vanilla site. No matter what framework is in right now, having the fundamentals down is absolutely a huge boost. So start with a simple static site. If you already have that knowledge, don't go crazy. React is basically the "boring technology" at this point and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Use Vite to create a basic React app
For web development I would say avoid high-level frameworks as much as you can. Most of them are built for hand-holding developers which is counterproductive to learning the fundamentals and are usually inflexible to demands outside the "happy path".
Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India
I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking
Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.
Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).
Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn
If you're into the gym and cooking, consider getting a cast iron frying pan.
Not only great for cooking, but it can also help with wrist strength - you may need to ease into lifting the pan with a single hand.
I've got a wok (I make mapo tofu every now and then) and definitely agree!
I have had to put programming aside in 2025, probably for the rest of my life, so 2026 will be the year I reskill and reinvent myself.
But most importantly, I want to finally become as kind, patient, and charitable as I have always wanted to be.
May I ask why you have had to put programming aside?
I was lost not sure of my career and I put too much focus on it, since now things are more stable, I want to: - Work on projects that actually interest me, not just to fill the CV. - Learn CS fundamentals but I know web development but not how computers work under the hood.
I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.
- Do the splits!
- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.
- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.
- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"
I'm going to learn to ship things. I can build a full SaaS in 5 days using Claude so there is no excuse for me not to ship.
I've been out of work 2 years, had to do a GoFundMe just to survive the winter, and I raised 5k which gave me a runway to get off Uber and Lyft and focus on finding clients to build for add with chatGPT I think I'm in the verge of figuring this freelance thing out ..
other things to learn: I want to get AWS certified and work on other certifications like Service Now... or sales force...
I'm wanting a digital agency but need to figure out the sales aspect.
I want to give away my tools for free and take on more ambitious projects, like building more capable browsers and local LLMs to get rid of corporate chokeholds. But that would probably never come true, because I would be tied up making money just to survive, rather than being able to give things away or take on more ambitious projects.
I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.
Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.
I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.
Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.
> I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.
What's the plan to make sure that progress in AI leads to predominantly positive outcomes for people? All the people I've asked who work at the major AI companies haven't given an answer, except to say that they don't study safety or societal impacts, but know others who do.
If you don't have an answer, can I humbly suggest that you add finding one to your list?
I want to develop another game and release it on Switch or Steam. It used to be a hobby...
I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.
Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.
Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.
Become conversational in Ukrainian.
The latest over the air TV spec. is using OFDM, it's called ATSC 3. That's if you're looking for real signals to test your receiver on.
Does being "emotionally strong" is a skill to improve?
"Villages" help. Lean into yours, or, maybe it's the time to find or build yours.
Best of luck.
Tech:
1. Rust, I quite like it but I still need AI assistance.
2. Desktop app dev, I'm making one in Tauri and love it, now I want to "go native."
3. Lower-level AI stuff, so far everything has been with APIs, and while that's great it feels a little too abstract.
4. Leetcode pattern matching. (Grumble grumble, but when job-hunting in Rome...)
Differently tech:
5. City driving. Thanks @kenrick95 for reminding me!
6. Color grading, and video editing in general.
7. The Thai language (speaking and reading).
8. Writing for the public.
Technical skills:
- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.
- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.
- Do more coding with AI.
- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)
Non-technical skills:
- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.
I find it difficult to read "hand-rolled paper trading solution" without thinking toilet paper. "focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses"
I donno, I think I kind of like somebody else's skill objective about trying out shitposting. It's the age deucine (credit @naasking).
I got a headset and wanted to do vr apps but found the medium to addicting and now I just play with no desire to create.
How to build and deploy web apps. I worked as a developer for many years (before becoming a product manager), but always in desktop apps. I still code for fun, but I never made the jump to web apps. Now with AI that's easier than ever, so I'm going to do it.
Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.
I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.
I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.
learn spanish and schematic design with pcb I'm self taught programmer blessed to be working in the embedded space this year and I want to take my love for low level further and learn to build hardware from scratc
I need to improve my facility with Python and math and geometry sufficiently to finish up my current project, a previewer for G-code which allows creating design files programmatically.
Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).
Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.
I'm still good at what I do, so I'm looking forward to better models to help me atrophy and shrivel my remaining skills :)
I'm good at coding so hate using LLMs for coding.
but the other things such as writing, just can't do it without LLMs's help. Looking up things, I defaulted to LLMs.
So in 2026, I just want to stop relying on LLMs.
Lol but I do like building LLMs (training from scratch, pre-training, fine-tuning, etc.). as a matter of fact, I'm pre-training a 1b model for last 2 days.
Use transformers to predict prime numbers.
Good luck with this!
I want to go full into indie hacking and learn atleast a new language this year
Lastly I must say with the help of AI i can now finally develop good frontends
To expand my knowledge of product management and JavaScript enough to build a strong prototype of app/business i have in mind with the help of Lovable and other ai tools.
Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.
And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.
I want to learn how to be bored again.
I also want to learn how to ask better questions.
I didn't realize it was important to be bored until I read/watched this: https://hbr.org/2025/08/you-need-to-be-bored-heres-why. There are some pointers in there that you might find helpful.
One thing that's helped me is solo hikes which I've done many times before. I still do them for workouts and use them as an opportunity to get bored.
(Non-technical skill) To live with ambition.
Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.
I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.
As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?
I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.
I'm asking, curiously.
Do you have ADHD?
My #1 goal for the next year is to find a job that would re-ignite my passion for engineering.
I just can’t longer spend my life doing stupid corporate nonsense work contributing to widespread enshittification of the world.
Same here. I really want to stop peddling Microsoft stuff and support m365. Don't know where to go from here though. But if there's a will there's a way right?
Technical: release a simple, focused product. AI makes it easy to spam things out that look good. I would be psyched if something catches just a little bit of attention. I feel like my main limit is creativity now. Mine has been stifled by 15 years of rote web dev.
Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)
I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.
I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
Working out does SO MUCH to help with depression. There’s a lot of literature to support this, and plenty of anecdata as well. Good luck, you can do it!
I'm in a similar position but figured out how to work out last year. it's not a panacea, but working out is quite fun and is a great skill. I never had a personal trainer, but the best part about having one would probably be that they could set you up with some plans to follow, removing all the initial guesswork. The hardest part about working out for me is trying to figure out a goal to optimize for that's not too far away but not too simple either.
SQL, Postgres, Pandas, Polars, Airflow, Duckdb, and whatever else shiny object along the way which distracts me from actually doing something productive towards my goals.
GenAI security. I work in the security space as an engineering manager but need to be more versed in LLM focused attack vectors.
Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.
Marketing so I can show the stuff I’ve been making off
i wanna learn to play the kora. I've been listening to a ton of asake and it really sticks out as a defining sound
Also it'd be nice if a bunch of data centers burned down but... odds are against this
I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again.
I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.
Any tips are welcome.
What was too hard if I may ask? Maybe your teacher focused on the wrong things for/with you?
Me too! I'm using Alfred's Adult Piano course book.
Have you started yet? How is it going? Self learning?
I want to learn how to sit, stare at the wall, do nothing, and be happy about it.
I probably need to learn Go.
Tech:
1. Releasing a solo product. 2. Writing more about code and the intersections of the field in history and world events. 3. Trying to do more talks.
Not-tech:
1. PR like there's no tomorrow. 2. Run two half marathons. 3. Move out of Florida.
Technical:
Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.
Non-technical:
Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.
By 2026, I plan to stop writing code myself and go all-in on AI coding tools like Claude. My focus will shift entirely to marketing, building products, and scaling my own company. AI is changing the game—soon, one person will be able to build a billion-dollar company with AI doing the heavy lifting.