Happy (early) new year!

Something you learn when having a kid is they start off really boring. Complete potato-mode. Somewhere around six months they start to develop some awareness and they get a bit more fun, but around 9-12 months that change becomes exponential.

2025 was the year Serena started these changes and it has been so much fun. She started the year as a bald smiling blob getting her first teeth and ended it as someone running around the house singing and dancing. For all of the challenging times throughout the year, so far Serena has been an easy kid and definitely the highlight of life to date. I’m excited for number two in a couple of months.

Most of my time this year was spent trying to establish some sort of routine for how to spend my time. As Serena developed capabilities, her ability to sit and chill waned, meaning we spent more time with her in active ways. As soon as daycare started though, life became a bit more consistent. I was able to set up a routine in the mornings and evenings (kind of) for how I wanted to spend my time. I’ll keep my baby-talk to a minimum but I spend far more time scrolling through photos of Serena than I originally expected. It’s a weird thing where I both can’t wait for nap time and then miss her immediately.

As with every year, I wish I wrote more. I only published 6 (!) posts on my website and 5 newsletters. This felt like some of the lowest output lately and something I want to turn around. I applied for a potential writing gig (long shot) and joined a writing group to help with accountability. Most of this was written during that time! I have a series of things I plan to write about, but often struggle because the topics require me to learn about them first. Most of my previous writing was an output of just experience & thinking, and now that I need to learn more about the world first my output has slowed.

This year I wrote about:

1. Exploring Latent space with AI. This was a bit more metaphorical than literal, but I wanted to understand if we could just brute-force generate all potential solutions to a design problem once we understood the variables at play. And based on my thinking about it (zero proof/validation), it seems like we can.
2. A blog post about one of the apps I released this year: Numerical. It’s a number puzzle game where you need to find numbers that create the targets. It’s a spiritual successor to Destructomath and a foray into level design. As much as I’m enamored by the skill and ability of designing puzzles and levels, I find it insanely difficult and challenging. I appreciate the output far more than I enjoy the work required on the inputs.
3. Why food safety is so hard — I was originally inspired by a post from Zach Kanter about EDI and decided to apply the same notion to my current work focus: food safety. It’s an overly complicated industry that doesn’t necessarily need to be. This was my summary of what I had learned after a few months at Provision.
4. Thoughtfulness makes for great design. This is likely as relevant as ever with the whole discourse around taste with AI. I wanted to explore where I see myself fitting into the design process a bit more concretely.
5. In the last week I published two shorts post about what i learned in espresso class and reading other people’s notebooks.

I’ll aim to publish at least 12 things in 2026, one a month on average. If the last week has shown me anything, it’s that with the right energy I can write quickly. I say this as I try to drag a piece that I’ve been working on for 3-4 months, kicking and screaming, to the finish line.

I was a bit more intentional this year about reading and exceeded my 20-book goal with a final count of 26. Some highlights:

• I re-read 4 past books and a bunch of Murakami.
• I had a pretty even split of fiction & non-fiction
• I’ve been on a bit of a science kick. I really enjoyed The Creation by Peter Atkins who describes the emergence of life and intelligence starting at the big bang.
• When We Cease to Understand the World was one of my favourites — a fictional history of some real mathematicians and physicists. I’m not sure how to describe the genre since it’s about real people, but fictional stories that feel real.

Right now I’m reading:

• These Memories Do Not Belong To Us by Yiming Ma (a former classmate!)
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

And lastly my fitness fell off a cliff. I don’t really have an excuse here but I didn’t run, lift, or ride as much as planned. I stuck (mostly) with swimming 1-2x a week, but that was it.

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The three (productive) goals I have for:

• Write more. However that makes sense. I’ll write about what I’m reading, what I’m building, what I’m learning.
• Commit to deep dives. This will make more sense (hopefully) in the new year when I finish my first one, but these are more learning-focused writing projects that I want to pursue.
• 15h of exercise a month. Straightforward enough.

My true priority will be supporting Liz and the growing family, but in the space in-between I aim to be a bit more intentional.

Gratuitous Photo

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What was the highlight of 2025 for you?