A First For January First

We did it!! 🥳

We had a January 1st that wasn’t plagued with downtime and massive slowdowns. 🥹 🎉

A huge part of this was moving back to our original database infrastructure, but with a bunch of learnings and optimisations from our time running on a distributed database.

Massive shoutout to Rob who monitored and managed the infrastructure during this time to ensure everything stayed up and running.

And we had our biggest January yet:

This shows a 33% increase in pageviews, 27% increase in total visits, and a 12% increase in unique visitors compared to January 1st last year.

Honestly, we were hoping for more growth than that, and for a higher record of concurrent users, which maxed out at 14.7k.

At least we are still growing!! 💪🏾

2026 Q1 Roadmap

Here’s how I’m splitting up the first quarter of this year:

“2025 Roundup” means finishing up all of the UI, UX, and Performance stuff I wanted to complete last year, but couldn’t. (More on why I’ve given it two 4-week blocks right off the bat in a later issue!)

For now my current routine involves aiming for at least three hours of focused coding per day and spending the first hour on bugs.

This approach, especially with the focal point, has been working so well so far. It makes decisions and prioritisation a lot easier and assessing my progress each month will be more straightforward.

One of my goals with Giveaways is to officially launch the platform in February! 🤞🏾 (It’s been in beta for three years and four months!)

What I Read in December

I managed to complete my Pages Goal before December 31st! (Thanks Feature Freeze.) 🥳

To find out the 14 books I crammed in to make this possible, you can watch my December reading roundup on YouTube now:

It includes my quick thoughts on Middlemarch! 👀

Nads’s Downtime: TV & Film Edition

I took myself on a solo cinema date last night! I looove a solo cinema date: offline, in the dark, cradling my large bag of salted popcorn…

I went to see Marty Supreme. I knew nothing about it beyond the sport it featured — a favourite of mine to play — and the fact that Chalamet declared his performance his “best yet” (even though I learned afterwards that this was likely part of a bit/an extension of his character).

Anyhooo, I had a great time! What a ride the film was. I recommend it for sure!

And of course I’ve been Faithful to my fave:

I wasn’t sure about the extra twists and turns they’re adding to Season 4, but so far it’s been another excellent one! 🙌🏾

What I'm Reading

I’ve decided to finally give The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — a famous 12-week course to unlock higher creativity — a go:

Given the way the book is written, I’m surprised at how much I’m buying into it. For those in the know: I’m already a week into Morning Pages (including waking up an hour early to do them on a day I had a call at 6.30am) and I’ve planned my Artist Date for this week. ☺️

Have a great one,

Nadia