New year, new blog mission

I’ve never been one for ’new year’s resolutions’. But suddenly, I feel inspired.

This blog has largely been ignored for a long time. I’ve been focusing on other non-blog things and outside of keeping the lights on and things patched in my CMS, it’s been zero features delivered for a few years now.

The feature image for this blog is of a house we inspected in 2025 which we rather liked a lot. However, it was very much in need of lots of TLC as you can see from the giant cracks in the walls. But totally worth saving as it had fantatic Federation style features to restore and make good again in the very charming suburb of Summer Hill 2130. And those hand-painted patterned walls - wow. Reminded me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and I have to say, they were equally striking and calming at the same time.

Anyways, I’m going to get back on the saddle and start writing blogs like never before.

The plan is to do one a week. While a weekly blog doesn’t give me nearly as much time to procrastinate and research as years gone by, perhaps, occasionally, they will be something to be proud of. But otherwise they’ll at least be regular and varied in topic.

52 topics is A LOT for me to think and write about, so I hope that I won’t disappear into the forest of incoherent ramble too many times throughout the year. You can be the judge of that.

Let’s see how I go and how long this lasts. I know full well that I haven’t blogged on this site for almost 3 years, so this is really a rather drastic change to publication frequency.

There’s really nothing standing in my way except for motivation. I say that like it’s an easy mountain to climb to the top of, but there is something distinctly sweet about thinking about doing something and then immediately being distracted by all the other life things that means good intentions fall short.

For this experiment, I’m going to restrict myself to avoid use of AI to write the blogs. The one expection is I might write about AI and therefore will need some material to use for that specific topic. I’m exploring a few different tools at this moment and having a lot of joy in learning by doing with the likes of Claude Code and Github Copilot. I’ve graduated beyond “Hey ChatGPT, write a haiku about spreadsheets / ceiling fans / (insert boring topic here)”, although it was a lot of fun while it lasted. If you haven’t given it a try, you really should.

Just this week I wrote a handover email, completely by hand, without AI, and in a time when email is really not the ‘done thing’ anymore. It felt fine and maybe email isn’t so bad after all, when it’s not abused. Like all things.

As New Year’s Day this year was on a Thursday, I’ll stick to publishing a new blog every Thursday as a regular cadence.

So here’s to a great 2026! For me, it will be the year of the blog. I’m fully expecting this idea to last a month and then dissipate back to the usual wasteland of inactivity this site is known for.

I do feel inspired when I read things on Hacker News around the history of Markdown or various other exploits of other keen engineers in the software industry to hear about what they’ve been cooking up either at work, or in their spare time.

It doesn’t matter if I’m the only one reading these blogs. The joy will be in that moment when I can look back many years from now and read about what was occupying my attention in 2026!

Let’s fix those cracks in the wall!

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