2026 New Year Reflections
As many others have done, I’m going to write a blog post reflecting on the last year and looking forward to the new year. While I’ve been really concerned with where the world is headed, 2025 was a better year for me personally in terms of my mental health and overall balance.This year I hope to build on that and be a lot more intentional about how I plan for the future.
Looking Back on 2025
2025 was a year of reflection on where I am and where I want to go in the future. My career didn’t quite take the path that I wanted. This led to a lot of angst and unhappiness so 2025 has served as a course correction.
Career Break
I left my job at Google at the end of 2024 and immediately felt much better. I initially didn’t think that I would take off quite so long but it turns out that I needed some extra time. I really struggled mentally when working at Google as there was really just no future for me there. My experience working there contrasted greatly with my expectations.
I still look with a bit of envy at folks who lead large teams but I’ve mostly made peace with the fact that people don’t really see me as a leader. I think I’m also happier just quietly writing code and not having a lot of attention on me. These days my career ambitions are a lot smaller and I’m choosing to focus more on my personal life and balance.
New Job
I’m a little bit happier doing engineering work. I started a new job in November and I’ll be doing a lot more work with Kubernetes again. This time it will be actually building infrastructure for machine learning rather than just promoting it. It’s nice to go back and work on a technology that I enjoyed in the past while also working with technology of the future. It’s been many years since I’ve worked with Kubernetes, but the technology is mostly the same as it always was so I think that I am quickly coming up to speed. I may go into this more in a later post.
ADD Struggles
I’ve slowly come to realize that I really have a problem with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and self-organization. In contrast with most people who have ADD, I’ve really struggled more with it as I age rather than less. While I knew that I had a problem, I don’t think I understood the full scope of the problem. Until recently, I had always addressed the issue on an as-needed basis rather than getting ahead of it.
I’ve come to realize that it really requires constant daily attention and effort in order to overcome it. I’ve been much more intentional about curating my environment so as to remove distractions and triggers for behaviors that I want to avoid. It means my life is a lot less “fun”, but is more balanced.
Life Challenges
In 2025, in addition to personal health problems, We needed to step up more as caregivers to family members. Our dog Jin, had another hernia and can no longer stand or walk on his own. This has created major challenges for his daily care. Other family members have also required care in 2025 and are likely to need more in 2026.
Looking Ahead to 2026
I’ve been tracking my goals as personal OKRs for the last few years. This year, I’m planning to be a bit more strict with my goals. I have a lot more of them and I want to make sure that I measure my progress. While I won’t go into all the details about what I plan to do, I will go over my high level goals for this year.
1. Improve Overall Mental & Physical Health
My first goal is an evergreen goal. Improving my mental and physical health will be a goal of mine pretty much every year. My aim is to improve my sleep quality, exercise regularly, and include some movement each day.
2. Gain New Skills and Certifications
In my new job I’m using Kubernetes a lot more so I’d like to refresh my skills by obtaining the three major (non-associate) CNCF certifications this year. I also want to maintain my programming skills for future job searches by regularly practicing.
3. Grow My Network and Reach
I am taking a step back with regard to speaking at events in recent years so I’d like to get back into doing that more. I also want to become a better writer and write more.
4. Read More, Scroll Less
This is a goal that I took from James Van Dyne’s post. I also want to read more long-form content and use social media less. I’ll be tracking my progress on reading as well as measuring my screen time on social media this year.
5. Improve My Japanese Skills
Last year I took the J.TEST standardized test and achieved a score of 715. I’d like to improve on that score this year and improve on my Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) N1 score from 2013. I have quite a large backlog of flashcards in Anki so I want to greatly reduce that this year. I’d also like to expand my study and do more reading in Japanese this year.
6. Contribute to Open Source
In 2025 I worked on and released several personal projects. I released todos
v0.14.0, lexparse
v0.2.0, runeio
v1.1.1, go-stardict
v0.2.0, my
qmk-keymap
v1.0.0,
fx.ianlewis.org and more in the last year and I’d
like to continue working on them. Though, perhaps a little less. This year, I’d
like to have the opportunity to collaborate more with other open source
developers on a larger project that has more impact.
7. Deeper Social Relationships
I want to improve relationships with family and friends. Spending mealtime together consistently, and attending more social events are goals for this year. In recent years we haven’t done much traveling for pleasure so I’d like to do that this year, if possible. Circumstances may prevent that however.
8. Manage finances effectively
I’ve been slowly improving the management of personal finances over the last couple of years. I want to continue to do that this year and hopefully get them to a place where they don’t require so much of my time. I want to do a bit more budgeting and planning for the future. I’m not too far away from retirement so I want to make sure that I’m preparing properly.
9. Improve my living environment
This year I want to improve my living environment. This will include things like replacing some appliances around the house that are getting old. I plan to redo my office as well with new furniture and artwork.
I also want to create a new home lab this year. My home lab in the past has been lacking so I’d like to set up something that’s fairly easy to manage and can provide network services that I can access over Tailscale.
A Challenging Year
I fully expect this year to be a challenging year. The world overall seems to be becoming more unstable so there will be headwinds against staying mentally balanced. I expect family members will need more care this year as well. I feel like this year will require a significant amount of effort just to tread water but I hope I can put in place systems and maintain strong, consistent habits to meet the challenges this year.