CB

2026 Goals

TLDR

Last year, really the last two years have been absolutely wild. A lot of good and crummy life things have happened, I learned a ton about myself, and I’m three months into a layoff where I’ve now pivoted into consulting work and working on hot rods a bit while I hammer out my next steps and move further into consulting. I have a lot of goals for the year. Something like read a lot of books, keep blogging and update my blog site, make some video games, get good at lower level programming, build and release my own product (and blog about it), a few fitness goals, get my BJJ purple belt, implement more minimalist / small living habits, and get multiple income streams, probably a few more too.

The Categories

  1. Operator - How I choose to operate or conduct myself and my time.

  2. Books - Just a list of all the books I want to read with a sentence or two on why. I’ll keep this short but this list will likely grow and I’ll add to it over the year if so.

  3. Hobbies - I have a few of them, and I have goals for just about every one of them, I will break those down and list them here.

  4. Programming - Lot of thoughts here and things I wanna focus on, here I will list those out and scope them down to keep my ADHD self accountable.

  5. Everything else - Anything the other categories missed goes here.

Operator

This one is a little deep but to me it’s the most important thing I could concern myself with this year and any other year so I’m dropping it here at the top.

The theme for this year is intentional/simpler living, slow productivity, leaning into joy and sharing it with others.

Let me start by saying I can tend to be a bit of a perfectionist and very results driven. Doing things well or right really matters to me at my core. There’s a personality concept for this called a reformer probably akin to something like described here although I hold to that loosely. That said, I can be a bit wound up with horse blinders on at times and miss out on things. I want to lean into this area of my life that I tend to naturally overlook.

For me addressing that is simple but not easy. It looks kind of like intentional/simpler living, slow productivity, leaning into joy (not results or right/wrong) and sharing it with others. I read a book recently that had a short story about a man named Dominique Voillaume. This story really hit home for me and I think it’s a really good picture for how I want to operate. Below is that story which I pulled from here

Death is man’s best friend when it is the vestibule to paradise. Dominique Voillaume was diagnosed at 54 with inoperable cancer. This sage who led a small band of youthful monks was no seeker of honor or personal aggrandizement. On learning of his death sentence he resigned from his small spiritual community and took a factory job in Paris as a night-watchman. This then enabled him to live out his final days blessing the lost, the least, the last and the lonely. He deliberately rented very sparse accommodation across from a park where he would serve those he loved and whom he lived for. Daily he shared a dilapidated bench and simply affirmed and never condemned these ne’er-do-wells. In serene and selfless devotion he lived his final days with ignominy, unnoticed by the masses but loved by the losers. One morning he failed to appear at his customary park bench. Below are recorded his final communications within this world, to out of this world. They were entered in his personal devotional diary just hours before he died. “All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and my witness. If He wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is His concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that.” * … and then He died alone, priorities so humbly in place at still a tender age. His heart was in heaven before his soul. He had already sent his heart to heaven. He was later found in his near empty hovel located in a still obscure Parisian slum.

So I guess to TLDR again this year I want to

I could rant here probably all day but I really want to keep things simple and loosen the reins a bit this year so that’s all that is going here.

Books

The following are books I want to read, reread, or finish reading. Listed in no particular order.

There’s a few more that I haven’t listed because I don’t have them yet but if I read anything not listed here I’ll include it.

Hobbies

I have too many of them 😅. This year I have a few goals for a few of them and that’s really all I want to focus on with them this year.

Programming

Ooooof where do I start with this one. Programming has been spiiiiiicy for me lately. I’ve been doing the webdev thing for like 4 or maybe 5 years now and I’ve developed a lot of opinions. To be honest the main one I’ve developed is

webdev kinda sucks in most jobs

Most of the time you have a task master constantly giving you tickets they want done yesterday, but say “no it’s ok take your time”. They usually don’t care about real quality and just want it to work, or work how they think it should. All the old heads have varying opinions on “the right way to build software”, or “what works for them”, or “what works for us”. There’s a variety of ways to go through getting work done, Agile, SAfe, Waterfall, blah blah.. you get it. Love it hate it, whatever, no one is really “right” here. What you learn to do or use at one company may get you in a pile of crap at another, even though at the of the day we are just managing data in a db to put text on a screen for users to read. I get it, there’s a whole lot of complexity there, I don’t mean to dumb it down. That said, with a crap ton of ways to do 1 thing, and even more opinions on top of that about that one thing, you could probably see how that might get old or be lame after a while. Not to mention the web is kinda broken. I’ve thought a lot about this and the environment that is “webdev” lately, and then I stumbled upon this podcast Things Web Devs Can Learn from Game Devs with Casey Muratori. It really spoke to me and I listened to a few more podcasts with Casey and other Game Devs as well as some lower level focused stuff.

That got me thinking, thinking I want to figure out another way to program, other things to work on or with. I don’t really totally know what that looks like yet and kind of blogged a bit about this last month, but yea I think I’m done. Done doing things in the same capacity that I have been for at least 3 years. Done with webdev? Maybe not, in the same capacity with the same approach as the masses, yea definitely with that. If I’m not really interested in it, I’m not doing it. I don’t care if it pays the big bucks or could lead to a killer job. If I’m not excited about something I’m not going to jump through hoops and dance.

I’m interested in performance optimization, lower level programming, making games, working on tools or products I use or would use. So this year outside of another potential 9-5 salary role or consulting gigs, I’m just gonna focus on all the tinkering and making that gets me excited. Not the next big thing, or xyz so I don’t get left behind and become unemployable

I also have had an idea for a “staying focused and intentional” based product that I’ve been sleeping on for like 3 years and really want to get out the door.

That said here’s the dev stuff mapped out.

Q1 (Jan-Mar)

Q2 (Apr-Jun)

Q3 (Jul-Sep)

Q4 (Oct-Dec)

Throughout the year:

Goal: Ship 1 product + 2 games in 2026. One focus per quarter. Reassess direction in Q4 based on what actually excited me.

Everything Else

No order just random things I hope to do or work on this year, some of them are more of a “nice to have” or “if time allows”.

That’s it, thanks for reading!🤙

#coding #books #life #hobbies #game dev #small living #training #bjj

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