What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

- Do the splits!

- Climb a V8 at my local climbing gym! I presently project V5's, and I think the scale is super-linear (but personally it doesn't feel logarithmic to me). So that would be a significant increase, probably near the edge of what I could really achieve in a year.

- Get our business (mydragonskin.com) to a point where it pays us standard engineer salaries. So far we've been extracting significantly less than our market value.

- Acquire (romantic) partner that I believe will be my person; find "The One"

I started learning Latin in 2025, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I can read intermediate level pedagogical texts -- mostly adapted Greek and Roman myths. In 2026 I want to get my proficiency up to the point where I can comfortably read the first book of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. This is doable, many of the texts I'm reading now were designed to teach the vocabulary and grammar so High School students could slog through it.

To expand my knowledge of product management and JavaScript enough to build a strong prototype of app/business i have in mind with the help of Lovable and other ai tools.

Already, I know enough to know that just prompting without a solid foundation is going to be unpleasant in so many ways.

And then, once I’ve proven it out hire real coders.

I want to learn driving.

I live in a city with well-connected public transport (Singapore) so I don't feel the need to learn. However, this year I travelled to some rural areas in Japan and started to feel the pain of relying solely on public transport which is either extremely sparse, or sometimes non-existent which limits the places I want to visit. That's why I felt like if I obtain this skill, I can explore more places in my travels

I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.

I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.

I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.

I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.

Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.

I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year: learn full-stack, practice vibe coding, basics of graphics programming (update to the latest ways)

I understand that means master of none, but this is a play around year for me. In theory AI should make it easier to try new things, we shall see about how it works in practice.

I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.

Learn to make money.

Quite the adage but I have come to realise that I only ever learned to work, not to make money. I make a good living from consulting. But selling your time only gets you so far.

So I'll probably hire. And probably find out all my previous bosses weren't so wrong with their complaints after all.

I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.

Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.

Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.

Become conversational in Ukrainian.

* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* Learn complex analysis!

* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!

For the past year, I've been learning a lot more about electronics, and in particular, designing PCBs, getting them manufactured, and assembled. I've come a long way from where I started, making little LED flashers shaped like trees for Christmas last year (everyone has to start somewhere!) where I'm now making small products with some of the super cheap ATTiny chips and writing code for them.

I really want to get more into microcontrollers, and design some more technical projects. I've been wanting to make a portable point-and-shoot camera for a couple years, though I've never been knowledgeable in that area to do it very well. Though, I'm finally getting to that point.

On a non-electronic-designing front, I'd love to learn more about networking and radios. I'm working on my homelab right now, and just got a nice switch to connect some free 15-year-old office PCs I also have. I'd love to get into AREDN, which is a 802.11 mesh network that can run on amateur radio frequencies.

I also want to write more about my projects on my website (https://radi8.dev,) where hopefully I can share what I work on more often than I currently do.

I’m working to improve my ability to switch between manager and maker since I am both at work. It’s been challenging and I’ve improved this year but still have a long way to go.

I’m excited to get my NAS setup and start running my own services. It’s been a long time coming ha.

I want to build the AGI god in order to bring abundance, wealth, and prosperity to all of humanity.

Aside from that, I'd like to shore up the cracks or gaps in my mathematical foundations, and learn more advanced mathematics.

I'm still really confused about thermodynamics so that's another topic that I would like to revisit. I've never neen able to convince myself that our current understanding is correct.

Honestly, I want to read and study more college level textbooks about every single subject.

GenAI security. I work in the security space as an engineering manager but need to be more versed in LLM focused attack vectors.

Outside of work, I’m really into Roman history so I’ll keep learning about that.

Technical:

Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a deep dive into Rust as well, but I'm focusing on C++ first, as the vast majority of audio programming is still done in C++ and likely will be for the foreseeable future, and I think learning Rust will be more valuable once I've run into many of the pain points that it addresses.

Non-technical:

Improve my archery. I started this year and love it.

I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.

I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again.

I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too.

Any tips are welcome.

I want be able to play music on the piano. I got a nice keyboard earlier this year, and have only really been inspired to dig into it since I got myself a circle of fifths decoder in the last couple of months. I'm confident now that I have the tools to learn and make concrete progress.

I want to get better at speaking to people. I love conversing with people who have a lot to say, but I feel like lately I struggle with coming up with things to say myself. Especially if it's someone I'm not very familiar with. It's not even necessarily a shyness thing or something like that, I've just got a bad habit of carrying an internal monologue that I don't share even when it'd be appropriate, because I don't feel like it's necessary. But communication shouldn't be limited to what is necessary.

Technical skills:

- Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027.

- I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for.

- Do more coding with AI.

- Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no plans to change jobs. This year my rustiness and lack of interview readiness has cost me "dream jobs" (from my POV)

Non-technical skills:

- The usual. Lose weight, eat mindfully, gain strength, learn the language of my country.

I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc.

So, 2026 is going to be the year I'm going to run this experiment on myself and see what I can accomplish with this way of working.

I want to be much more publicly unhinged and in general do a lot more art without worrying too much about why or what I'm trying to say. I've found a lot of beauty in shitposts this year and I want to develop my skills to really meaningfully contribute to the corpus.

Learn more saxophone, learn more jazz piano. Get better at ear training.

Technically, apply myself more to projects at my job, learn how to fit in our flow better. I've been using AI to program some goofy projects, and I've found a good medium between vibe-coding and auto-complete, where I make it draw up a plan for every commit, and then I ask it to implement it, and if the generated code is wrong I undo the changes and revise the plan to be more precise. It's relatively easy to verify the plan, not as easy to verify the code, but it's still easy to debug the code and figure out what's wrong.

The burden shifts more to creating small modules with stable interfaces.

How to build and deploy web apps. I worked as a developer for many years (before becoming a product manager), but always in desktop apps. I still code for fun, but I never made the jump to web apps. Now with AI that's easier than ever, so I'm going to do it.

Python. I played around with it three years ago, and did about 30 Project Euler problems with it, but I've let that lapse. I'll work to pick that up.

I bought my wife a learn-to-draw kit for Christmas, but it's really a gift for both of us.

I need to improve my facility with Python and math and geometry sufficiently to finish up my current project, a previewer for G-code which allows creating design files programmatically.

Really need to get back to practicing archery on a regular basis as well (really need the exercise).

Hopefully I can also find more time for woodworking, and hopefully I can figure out how to calibrate my 3D printers so that I can print PETG and PETG-GF as readily as PLA.

(Non-technical skill) To live with ambition.

Depression is a strange thing. In my case, the causes are plainly visible to me or any passer-by: I don't have much in the way of connections, assets, or responsibilities. Surely, it wasn't (and isn't) bound-to-be: my upbringing and environment lack little, and when I've had some of any of the three, I've done better for myself.

I want these things, but I abase myself such that I can barely act at all. Maybe it's a tyranny of being a social animal where the humiliated keep themselves low out-of-sight through some natural pack instinct.

As a higher animal, surely there's a way out of it. And of course there is. But it's a tangle: how can you connect to anyone when you feel completely humiliated? When the act of any connection makes you feel ill and behave strangely? How do you build assets and security when you're sickened by responsibility? And why can your instincts –designed to guide and protect you– screw you over so badly? When a bright, sunny day surrounded by loved ones seems like a trip to hell, how do you even start to work through that?

I have a lot of goals, but there seems to be this bottleneck that prevents moving meaningfully on any of them. The thing is: I know to get out the other side, I need connections, responsibility, work, etc. But I seem to be getting worse at it, not better, and the years are just flying by.

Does being "emotionally strong" is a skill to improve?

Develop a calistenics practice. Ive been to the gym more on than off over the past few years and feel like I’ve plateaued. I also had a minor thing that I’ve gone to the physio for recently and I prefer the routine of doing those exercises (which would be similar to a calistenics practice in a lot of ways) to going to the gym. Kettlebell and pull up bar to be ordered when I’m back from India

I recently bought a stainless steel pot set which already seems like such a game changer in terms of cooking due to how much better sauces come out due to better fonds. So I want to see what else I can do to push things forward again and generally level up my cooking

Also want to do better with skincare. Partially to age gracefully but I’ve always had dryness here and there off and on on my face. I’ve been in India all month and it got worse, but, got better when I bought some coconut oil. I think the oil acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from escaping.

Also would like to play with some mlops tooling. I do a lot of infra / DevOps stuff, which I can do in my sleep at this point. So I haven’t really been growing in a specific vertical much aside from just generally getting better at software engineering (communication / prioritization / clean and simple architectures).

Also would like to learn linear algebra. Reading a book on how that works with ML and it’s been actually super satisfying seeing how all the math connects. The book is called why machines learn

Write an operating system in Forth.

I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.

Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE

I want to learn how to be bored again.

I also want to learn how to ask better questions.

Use transformers to predict prime numbers.

My main ones are career focused:

- Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field.

- Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a very desired skill for any new career opportunities.

- Learn how to manage a small SaaS company and the product. I'm in the finishing stages of a platform that I have been developing by myself(while my cofounder is the industry expert). Neither of us has knowledge on what it takes to launch and sell this product, for which we know there is demand in the industry.

- Finally; create practical real life ML workflows. I have only theoretical experience since I never had the need or opportunity to work with a more real scenario. This is both from personal interest and for career growth.

Some non-technical:

- Force myself into more social situations, especially with absolutely non-tech people.

- Just started treating ADHD, so hopefully wrangle that.

I have had to put programming aside in 2025, probably for the rest of my life, so 2026 will be the year I reskill and reinvent myself.

But most importantly, I want to finally become as kind, patient, and charitable as I have always wanted to be.

Scheduled for Fire 1 (basic Fire academy) in 2026. Looking forward to developing basic fire fighting skills and strengthen my knowledge in this new volunteer undertaking I started in mid 2025.

As for tech skills in 2026, I’d love to develop a photogrammetry pipeline mixing shoulder mounted SLAM scanner, DSLR terrestrial photography, and aerial LiDAR data sets. I’m lucky to have access to these data sets, just gotta put the pieces together.

I’m already familiar with UAS (unmanned aerial systems) photogrammetry and mixing that with terrestrial photos for high detail models. Aerial Lidar and SLAM datasets are something new I’ve been working with over the past 6 months.

Tech:

1. Rust, I quite like it but I still need AI assistance.

2. Desktop app dev, I'm making one in Tauri and love it, now I want to "go native."

3. Lower-level AI stuff, so far everything has been with APIs, and while that's great it feels a little too abstract.

4. Leetcode pattern matching. (Grumble grumble, but when job-hunting in Rome...)

Differently tech:

5. City driving. Thanks @kenrick95 for reminding me!

6. Color grading, and video editing in general.

7. The Thai language (speaking and reading).

8. Writing for the public.

I want to go full into indie hacking and learn atleast a new language this year

Lastly I must say with the help of AI i can now finally develop good frontends

I got a headset and wanted to do vr apps but found the medium to addicting and now I just play with no desire to create.

My #1 goal for the next year is to find a job that would re-ignite my passion for engineering.

I just can’t longer spend my life doing stupid corporate nonsense work contributing to widespread enshittification of the world.

Tech:

1. Releasing a solo product. 2. Writing more about code and the intersections of the field in history and world events. 3. Trying to do more talks.

Not-tech:

1. PR like there's no tomorrow. 2. Run two half marathons. 3. Move out of Florida.

I hope to explore AI on edge devices and see how far it can get me.

New models like functiongemma are promising and I think we may be at a point where consistent tool calling is all we need.

I want to draw again.

I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.

Reverse engineering. I cannot stand that every product I buy requires an app (that will break with the next upgrade/or lack thereof). I realise this is a problem possibly better suited to be solved on a policy level, but I rather learn some more reverse engineering skills (which can be both very rewarding as well as frustrating) than go into politics.

Good luck to everyone in achieving their goals and exploring new paths!

To me it's deep learning compilers since mid 2025. I am a person who can't learn just from reading books, so 80% of time I learn by doing (contribute to PyTorch) and 20% of time I read books (now: Engineering a Compiler from Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon) and talk to LLMs to fill gaps in my understanding.

My main quest now is to build a bridge [0] between PyTorch and universal GPU computing world - which I believe WebGPU might become. What it requires is to build is 1) a runtime for executing PyTorch ATen operations on WebGPU by running WGSL shaders and 2) a compiler, so you can use full PyTorch power with @torch.compile

[0] - https://github.com/jmaczan/torch-webgpu

I would like to learn more about Web development and related knowledge (networking, security). Currently my programming knowledge is primarily system languages+python. I'm thinking of building a few websites / apps from scratch, and perhaps hosting my own server. Recommendations for frameworks or do's/don'ts are very welcome.

Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job. One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.

I want to give away my tools for free and take on more ambitious projects, like building more capable browsers and local LLMs to get rid of corporate chokeholds. But that would probably never come true, because I would be tied up making money just to survive, rather than being able to give things away or take on more ambitious projects.

I'm good at coding so hate using LLMs for coding.

but the other things such as writing, just can't do it without LLMs's help. Looking up things, I defaulted to LLMs.

So in 2026, I just want to stop relying on LLMs.

Lol but I do like building LLMs (training from scratch, pre-training, fine-tuning, etc.). as a matter of fact, I'm pre-training a 1b model for last 2 days.

I'm still good at what I do, so I'm looking forward to better models to help me atrophy and shrivel my remaining skills :)

Technical: release a simple, focused product. AI makes it easy to spam things out that look good. I would be psyched if something catches just a little bit of attention. I feel like my main limit is creativity now. Mine has been stifled by 15 years of rote web dev.

Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)

Marketing so I can show the stuff I’ve been making off

I want to learn how to sit, stare at the wall, do nothing, and be happy about it.

I probably need to learn Go.

My wife and I quit our tech jobs and moved from the US to a European country last year to learn/grow/explore. The plan is to renew the visa and continue our exploration.

For 2026, other than more traveling, I have just started a course at the local tech university on solar power, and asset management/O&M of solar installations. The hope is to gain basic domain knowledge for potentially transitioning my career into this field in a year or two, taking advantage of my SWE, data analytics, and PM experience.

I'm also planning to take my host country's driving exam. That means I first need to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission, after 30+ years driving in the US.

Technical: - Just anything more programming-specific stuff at work. When I get to do something, it's a stress-relief, because the typical day involves dealing with meetings, people, etc. and I can't have that much anymore, now with my health. Even when I can just focus, I want to shake the worry of other people's issues. The programming I do mostly is handling precise reporting requests, but since that is going to be offshored, I can move to something else at least. I am hoping that I can take on anything outside of Java or .NET. I work at a consultancy and those projects do pop up.

- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!

- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)

Non-technical: - I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.

- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.

- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.

I want to get better at Systems Thinking. I'm fairly certain that while AI is going to get better and better at most things, it's only ever going to be able to look as far ahead as the prompt it's given and the context available. Architecting a system that can be won't grind to a halt after years of prompt-based additions is going to be a key skill, and the foundation of that is building high quality systems on top of simple foundational systems. That is going to necessitate being good at Systems Thinking.

Also, 'systems' doesn't mean code here. It could be business processes, people processes, ways of working, etc. AI is eventually going to impact all of it (it has already really), and that means being able to think about how to build systems that work well, and especially how to describe systems so that AI can help improve them.

I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.

- Woodworking. Bit of a cliché for an engineer, I know ;) I renovated my own house from the ground up over the past 2 years but I found the woodworking part always incredibly rewarding. At this point I have quite a good selection of tools and will setup a dedicated workshop in my basement.

- Contributing to Homeassistant community by integrating non-standard zigbee devices. A lot of lighting devices in my house are zigbee. There are some companies that deviate from the standard protocol though to force you to use their hub or software.

I'd like to learn a little bit about electronics and hardware. At the moment, I have a child's mental model like you plug something into the wall and then it "powers on". I couldn't really tell you what properties make something a conductor or not, and I also couldn't tell you various components like capacitors do. It's actually quite fun in that I have a pretty clear plan for learning about this stuff but because I've never done it, it's all very new and novel with lots of "Aha!" moments for why things are the way they are.

SW:

- Architecting larger scale applications

- A project which is related to fundamentals (like compilers, OS) rather than run of the mill web development.

Not SW:

- Motorcycle internals and general repair skills

- Ancient sanskrit grammar

I want to learn how to swim. I never took lessons as a kid, and, while I can get from one edge of the pool to the other, I want to feel completely comfortable.

Even if I don't pick up swimming as a workout, I like that it will open up new activities through different watersports.

Off the top of my head:

— Learn Rust. I'm halfway through the Rustlings exercises and I'll continue with more challenges. Advice is welcome. I might also ask LLMs to pose as teachers and create exercises for me and check them.

- Cooking. This has been something I neglected all my life and I really want to get better at it. It's so fundamental to quality of life.

- Persian language. Studied it for six months, I can read and write the script and I understand basic sentences, but I want to get better at it. If there are any Persian folks reading this, ping me. It's a beautiful language and culture.

I want to learn proper programming. Maybe Go, then C(++).

I have never had a proper formal IT education, just learned everything on the go. I can write essentially everything in Python or Bash using AI. I know most (data)concepts and what data to move where in what fashion, I just don't have the hours in it to be able to do it from the top of my head.

I feel the AI is great, but it's also holding me back. Like how driving a automatic transmission is nice, but you'll never learn to drive stick from it.

Also Docker / k8s ecosystem seems to be mostly Go based. And it looks cool, the syntax.

If anyone has any courses that are interactive and can keep an ADHD mind invested in it I'm all ears.

Might be a bit of a tame goal for hckrnews but yeah.

Wife and I started a 3d printing business. We just started a couple of months ago and have put our items in a few retail stores. Our goal is not to do this super fast but more like supplemental income. Also its fun to print stuff for ourselves. I already designed a finger mini golf game and may start to build my own board games out of 3d printed parts.

So I want to build up 3d modeling skills.

I am not surprised but its much much slower to get a physical product business going than just writing some code and launching.

Sales - especially B2B. I've got a strong technical background (PhD in Physics) and have been writing code for almost 15 years (most domains, with ML more recently). I'm also comfortable with public speaking (talking a conferences, pitching etc). I feel sales is the last piece of the puzzle I'm missing

I've just started managing a team and would like to develop my EQ and think more before I speak.

Get better at Spanish. Reading and writing, I’m hovering around an A2 with decent vocabulary.

https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...

I want to be able to speak and listen at at least a B1 by the end of next year. We will be spending a bit over a month in Costa Rica next year and I want to get as immersed as possible.

Work related get better at pre-sales. Currently, I’m a staff architect at a cloud consulting company leading post sales implementations. While there is some ambiguity when it gets to me, for the most part I know the shape of the business problem they want to solve, working in pre-sales has a higher level of ambiguity. They can’t outsource pre sales since it involves travel

I was lost not sure of my career and I put too much focus on it, since now things are more stable, I want to: - Work on projects that actually interest me, not just to fill the CV. - Learn CS fundamentals but I know web development but not how computers work under the hood.

I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.

Pandas, Polars, Airflow, Duckdb, and whatever else shiny object along the way which distracts me from actually doing something productive towards my goals.

learn spanish and schematic design with pcb I'm self taught programmer blessed to be working in the embedded space this year and I want to take my love for low level further and learn to build hardware from scratc

By 2026, I plan to stop writing code myself and go all-in on AI coding tools like Claude. My focus will shift entirely to marketing, building products, and scaling my own company. AI is changing the game—soon, one person will be able to build a billion-dollar company with AI doing the heavy lifting.

[delayed]

I want to learn to launch and grow a paid app, I‘ve built a few SaaS and installed apps up to a point of „80% ready to launch“, but did not go all the way. I don’t quite know what‘s holding me back but I realized that this is what’s most important for me to learn when it comes to my software side endeavor.

Tech skills:

* Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChain?)

Non-tech:

* Sales - from feedback it seems like I’m not actually that bad of a salesman/people person but I would like to formalize that skill, maybe getting an entry-level technical sales/solutions engineer position and grow from there.

Personal:

* Letting go of projects and prioritizing: I’ve always had a ton of tech projects going at once which leads to my free time being spread thin across all of them and ultimately wasted as no meaningful progress is made. While it’s been an amazing learning experience when I started it’s since stopped paying off on that front once I mastered the tech involved. I need to let go for good and just delete the unfinished code once and for all so I’m never tempted to get back to it.

I am going to get good at TIG welding. This is mostly because there's a lot of subprojects of my car that would really benefit from me doing TIG - stainless, aluminium, etc (I already got pretty good at MIG for mild steel).

But also, AI. Previously my worry was "AI is not going to be good enough to replace me, but the people who make the decisions might think it is". After actually using a code assistant myself lately that turned into "AI is going to replace me". No, it's not that good _yet_ (it still needs lots of nudging and shepherding) but I don't think the odds are good of my job title existing in a decade.

LLMs can't wield a TIG torch yet and the work pays well. Being good at it is a good hedge against this industry being eaten by AI.

Pro: After 10 year I feel that I am becoming a specialist of the software I work on rather than a software specialist. Needing to work in different domains where I am not the expert.

Other: Better time management and micro napping. After a working day sucking mind and kids energy, the brain stops working for anything but doom scrolling or TV.

The Running Man. It's really the foundation action in a good shuffle dance and it really has to flow naturally and consistently.

I want to improve my Nase fishing skills and finally catch 50cm one (46cm atm).

I'm going to learn to ship things. I can build a full SaaS in 5 days using Claude so there is no excuse for me not to ship.

I've been out of work 2 years, had to do a GoFundMe just to survive the winter, and I raised 5k which gave me a runway to get off Uber and Lyft and focus on finding clients to build for add with chatGPT I think I'm in the verge of figuring this freelance thing out ..

other things to learn: I want to get AWS certified and work on other certifications like Service Now... or sales force...

I'm wanting a digital agency but need to figure out the sales aspect.

I want to develop another game and release it on Switch or Steam. It used to be a hobby...

i wanna learn to play the kora. I've been listening to a ton of asake and it really sticks out as a defining sound

Also it'd be nice if a bunch of data centers burned down but... odds are against this

Kotlin and Golang. I know it6not advisable to learn 2 languages at the same time but I want Kotlin for android apps and Go for backend. Been working alot with python and I want to shift to a different stack and hopefully get a change of careers from Test Automation/ QA to a more coding focused role(backend, android)

Work solidly at work for 8 hours and then go home, instead of sitting behind a computer for 12 hours and wasting a lot of time.

- "expand my social circle" same here, try to make real world connection not just technical connections but with people i can hang out with, friday night parties, trips, etc. apart from work i don't have any connections. opportunities are lacking and idk how to increase my chance.

if anyone in Bengaluru, India having meetups invite me, duckydude20 at gmail.com

I should work on getting better at selling myself. I'm doing alright at scoring longer projects (mostly in the Java/Fintech sphere), but I'd like to take on some smaller projects as well. Things like self-promotion and networking don't come easily to me.

I want to learn to relax and stop worrying and overthinking.

Will start with the 2 minutes breathing on Apple Watch and try to increase by time.

1. Sight read (focusing on treble clef) at a decent level

2. Being more effective at using LLMs

3. Being able to improve in multiple areas of my level simultaneously

- MANDATORY: Re-learn focus. I will not self-diagnose but I exhibit ADHD symptoms and I started actively fighting them back (they mostly come from the phone). I am not going to just deny myself access to apps on schedule -- my brain never clicked schedule, not even once in my life -- but through a persistent and sustainable self-change from deep within. It's slow but it's beginning to work.

- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.

- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.

- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.

In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.

I want to learn it all...

But what will happen is that I use my working days writing code/producing software, evenings to make dinner and be with family, and nights gaming with friends.

Weekends are for recharging.

And that is completely OK.

It is a healthy balance between getting stuff done, recovery, and enjoying life.

To avoid burnout again, I take a day or two off whenever I feel like I need some time off.

Find out how to stay employed with AI floods

Here are mine:

- Build something boring that makes money. Excitement is optional; users are not.

- Use AI less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure, background processes that think while I sleep.

- Go back to fundamentals that compound, graphics, systems, taste.

- Experiment selectively; curiosity without commitment.

- Invest in people, not “networking.” Fewer pings, more real conversations.

- Protect focus like equity.

Here's mine: 0. Build the habit of taking notes ruthlessly to build a comprehensive second brain. 1. I transitioned to the penhold grip in Table Tennis in Nov 2025 and it has been a fun exploration. My goal for 2026 is to learn to play all the strokes comfortably with the penhold grip, and start competing at the district level. 2. Go from novice-intermediate to upper-intermediate in piano playing. Learn, memorize, and perform flawlessly 30 advanced piano pieces (minimum Henle 7–9) end-to-end, recorded on video, within the next 12 months. 3. Learn to speak Kannada. Been living in Bangalore past 9 years and it's almost embarrassing to not know a single complete Kannada sentence.

1. Build AI voice agents for telephony, for personal use and maybe build for one other person

2. Make one cool toy from scratch with my kid using esp32

3. Reduce snacking and junk food to 1 day a week

4. Learn to tumble turn in swimming

I want to get good at "taste"

I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].

If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.

I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.

[1]: https://jjude.com/substack-for-apps/

I’ve played guitar for 20 years, but I’ve decided to do something different and just got some drums. I need to spend some time away from work lest I suffer from burnout again…

Relearning and reconnecting..

Buy the cassette 4-track I had in ‘93 and reconnect with my teenage self - record whole songs on it, not worrying about sound quality and knob tweaking. It is what it is.

I really need to get better at READING code. I know it has always been true but with vibe coding, it is more important than ever of a skill.

- Learn how to design custom PCBs instead of soldering freehand

- Lean into vibecoding. Day job is in finance, and enthusiastic hobbyist coder so despite the happy path nature of it I suspect it may be worthwhile getting good at this from a job market future proofing angle. Whatever comes being able to describe to machines what you want seems like it'll be useful

- Improve non-vibe Rust coding

- Improve homelab. The internet enshittification continues so keen to build out more personal infra. In short term focus is on pipeline to package & deploy. Think docker build -> k8s deploy. If that pipleline is frictionless that'll be good for vibe coded personal tools

It's not a skill in particular but I want to decouple the way I think from todays economics. I want to learn skills that give me confidence and well being instead of training me to be a better cog in the machinery, so that I can impress other people or put a price tag next to the value of me as a human. Just enough to be average, but not more to end up living to work to fuel delusions.

I also don't want to be derailed from hyped up technologies that ultimately sell me on a quick path to reach a delusional goal. I want steady and consistent growth and understand the makings deeply.

proper software marketing I guess.

- Art of Bonsai:

We are inheriting about 50-100 bonsai plants from father. All my life I’ve been wondering how he’s been caring for them, but never gave a chance to actually learn from him.

He is not doing well and we don’t know how many years he has left.

That’s why 2026 will be the year of finally learning the craft from him, taking time to acquire his techniques and in general just spend more time with him.

Explicitly nothing. The overwhelming majority of New Year’s resolutions and goals fail, then people feel bad, then repeat it the year after that. There’s no reason to make such a decision now; make it when it’s relevant in your life and don’t beat yourself over it.

I also find this relentless pursuit of more more more, especially in what relates to productivity, increasingly maddening and (ironically? paradoxically?) counter-productive. We are always doing more in a worse manner with less attention. And what do we do with the extra time we “gain”? More of the same shit we were doing before. To get more time to… do more of it? It’s insane, bordering on societal mass hysteria.

We’re all going to die, and all you did will mean nothing. So stop and smell the roses. Be kind to your fellow human being. Stop trying to get ahead and lift others with you instead.

I’m interested in a subject that, I guess, could best be described as Jane Houston’s work, see

https://www.amazon.com/Possible-Human-Enhancing-Physical-Abi...

but involves martial arts, eastern religion, character acting, Ericksonian hypnosis, and all sorts of things. In my case it I use to express myself-as-a-fox [1] but outwardly as social artistry that functions as a form of ‘witnessing’. I will certainly not advocate that others to do what I do as a whole but I can offer people little useful things out of a large toolbox.

I’ve been working on this for a long time, felt I received an invitation to Kitsune-tsuki 2 years ago but it came together late this year when I got my motivation right and began to see it as a form of activism and service.

[1] a creature of the forest instead of a creature of the engineering school

I want to explore the space of audio encoding and GPT like understanding of audio. I'm so highly interested in how a simple 1d signal must go through so much processing to be understood by language models, and am curious what tradeoffs occur. Would also be fun to make a TTS Library and understand it.

Technical:

- Understand how to deploy teams of agents effectively to accomplish significant goals

- Learn ECS/Dots in Unity to scale a system to hundreds of thousands of actors

Non Technical:

- Improve people management skills for leading technical teams with a target of helping each person grow in 2026 and level up the team

- Automate more of my personal finances to gain leverage from systems instead of hoping I make good decisions consistently

I want to:

- Hone my motorcycle riding skills. Curves, breaking and the rest.

- Learn and manage to do some basic home renovation stuff by myself.

- Learn the basics for keeping a garden.

- Start playing table tennis

Tech:

- Complete Agile Project Management course and apply this new knowledge to my Scrumban team - Learn Go and Linux in greater detail - Experiment with other frontend frameworks like Remix and Astro.js

Non-tech:

- Make new friends with similar interest and develop my social life a bit (if you're in London, hit me up) - Learn how to promote my side projects - building them is fun but I can't seem to get even 1 user to sign up and use them - Read more Warhammer 40k books

Back to the basics, relearn linear algebra.

Sometimes we only need concentration (and free time).

Bible study

Embroidery!

I'd love to develop an art/tech practice and make custom embroidery pieces, maybe even daily - ie make up some words for a new t-shirt or hat every day?

Speaking of, I also learned during my initial research into this world that a lot of embroidery software seems... expensive/not competitive/a bit arcane? So I'm wondering if I'll get into all of this and start writing & releasing open source software..? Time will tell!

If anyone has played around with entry-level (or pro) machines, and has tips/tricks, I'd be super grateful! Thanks. I'm considering an entry level Brother SE700.

I want to learn two languages in 2026:

* CW (also known as Morse code) - I'm not able to have an amateur radio station at home, so I have to work portable/QRP. Given current band conditions, CW is one easy option to make contacts

* Learn a "low level" programming language, likely C - I never had any kind of formal CS education and kind of fell into the field, initially doing web development and then data engineering. Most of my career has been dominated by Python with a smattering of Java and Scala. Maybe this year will be the year I learn something a little lower down the stack!

Touch-typing. In some countries it's common to learn this at school as a teenager but that's not true of all countries. With LLMs this skill has become significantly more important to programmers.

My list:

- General knowledge: by intentionally curating the information I consume

- Chess: by practicing tactics, watching videos, and learning new openings

- Salsa: by dancing a lot

- SEO: by building a side project and trying to get it to rank well on Google

I find myself making this same list every year. About being more healthy, changing this or that bad habits, and embracing some kind of tech and making a side gig etc.

It all kind of adds to the background clutter of my life, by promising I'll "finally" do the "basic" things I need to do to somehow transform my life into a better version of itself, but those things get added to the list of things I feel like I should do every day.

I think I'm done with that. I don't know what I'm doing next year but we will find out in five days.

I used to DJ in the 90's with vinyl on 1210s decks. A lot has changed in the industry and I'd like to spin at home for fun since I'm still a "househead".

Anyone knows a good YT channel that explains my options? Money is tight these days so I'm unable to buy the latest and greatest but I'm curious of the new technology used.

Work: 1. Learning about manufacturing processes for high-throughput electroplating. 2. Learn pymatgen and other tools for building a self-driving lab for materials discovery and testing.

Non-work: 1. Improving my writing skills and start my blog with a few technical and non-technical posts.

Technical/Non-technical skills: * Off-grid energy production (Solar, etc.) * Food production on a small scale * Homesteading * 3D printing * And all interfaces of that with technology

Gardening, mostly. I am (slowly) trying to make the second largest rose garden in New Hampshire.

Plastering (walls, ceilings, etc).

Releasing side projects at a faster pace. This gets harder with more children alas. But they're starting to help with the gardening.

In order of importance: - chinese: been traveling to china for a few years now, super enjoyable and just joined a company that is half chinese. Comes in handy - get experience in scaling products, especially on the backend side. I feel super comfortable on the frontend and now want to learn more the other side too - learn go and build a full product with it: ive been learning go in my free time and remaking an active telegram bot i have from ts to go. Wanna take it a step further and do something more complex and satisfying. Very happy for how my learning journey has been going so far

I want to finally work through sicp as a means to go back to basics of computing.

Also want to read Designing Data-Intensive Applications as I have worked with things like Kafka and Spark for many years on and off but have never dove into more details that I assume the book could help with.

I got an entry level job doing IT admin and MS Dynamics customizations so I really want to master the stack we use at work: C# for plugins, Python and Powershell for IT admin and JS for frontend. I also want to read the canon of good software engineering books that you get recommended all the time, like SICP, DDIA, CSAPP, etc.

My post is very contrary to the most here but maybe there is someone else in a similar situation so i think it may be worth writing it.

Background: I've spend the bigger part of the past 20 years of my life continously extending and enhancing my technical knowledge and skills, mostly in IT/Coding but also in some other fields. Meanwhile i kinda let my social life completely degrade and also always care more about solving others problems than my actual own problems.

Therefor the "skills" i want to improve and develop in 2026:

- Learn to take care of myself instead of always putting others first (its not my job to safe the world)

- Don't try to got 150% all of the time and rather slow down

- Care for my health

- Get back into social life

- Actually try to not spend 95% of my free time in front of a screen and go outside (touch grass)

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While i accumulated alot of knowledge over the past two decades, if i don't start to care for myself more ill probably won't have much benefit of it other than having accumulated it. Health (biological and mental) are important, neglecting it maybe works shortterm but will kick your ass longterm.

Learn to control procrastination.

Non-technical skills: Meet more women, lose my fear of flirting with women, being able to have a relationship, lose my psychosis for a single women.