I will admit I am surprised how little I went through from my goals as written at the start of the year. I guess it goes to show how things change over time. At the beginning of the year, I was very concerned with learning more about Elixir, reading about financial technology and learning about systems. As the year went on, I instead took an interest in history, in particular Islamic history as I had a trip to the Hedjaz (the western region of Saudi Arabia containing Mecca and Medina) to prepare for.
Trying to make the most of that trip, understanding the historical context, understanding the spiritual context of it. It took much more out of my life than expected. That being said, it was absolutely worth it! If only, because it was due to that, that I read Conference of the Birds. An absolutely beautiful work of poetry that is intended as a means of teaching Sufi mysticism.
I think looking back on this year, reading that book and taking my first steps in learning Sufi mysticism more than any efforts along my career has truly helped me grow. That being said, the other big change that's happened this year which derailed my earlier ambitions is the rise of Claude Code and agentic programming tools.
I used to take a lot of interest in AI back in 2023 but the models at the time disappointed me and were insufficient for what I wanted. In hindsight, I underestimated how things could change. Claude Code is an absolutely fantastic tool and using it has restored some of the interest in software engineering that I'd lost over the past decade or so.
It's strange using something that I never expected to see in my lifetime. An AI that can write code with very little effort and if you give it a way to verify its work, you can get truly impressive results. On top of that, the newer models such as Opus 4.5 really do feel like AGI. They're not perfect by any means but neither are humans.
Being exposed to this has made me think more about the parallels between our world and the world of the 19th and early 20th centuries when the industrial revolution gave birth to many of the trappings of modernity. The notion of the importance of timeliness, the veneration of efficiency, and the constant urgency. That all comes from that revolution.
It feels like there's a new one now but to understand the change that is coming, it is useful to understand how the last set of changes filtered into society at large. I began some reading on this topic but I would like to continue my reading of the world in the lead-up to World War 1.
There's a few rough ideas, I'd like to explore this year:
I will admit that I would still like to learn about other things I've expressed interest in such as databases and distributed systems but it's so hard to squeeze in everything that I would love to learn. I think to address these goals, I plan on doing the following:
Taking this further, I struggle a lot with side projects because typically I think about them as something I would like to disseminate to people but doing that is quite the hassle since thinking about distribution and about how to get quality to a level that I'm comfortable with requires a lot of time, effort, and stress. I realize now that it's better to do these things (at least for me) as a purely personal matter. What I mean by that is that one thing that's special about tools like Claude is that I can envision a world of more bespoke software. I want to understand what that means in practice and that means leveraging tools like Claude Code to bring that future here.
To that end, problems in my life that I would like to try solving this year using this idea of bespoke software:
I know some of that will sound trite but I'm trying to give myself a pretty wide berth on this. These problems are not necessarily ones which are well-suited to be addressed with technology but part of the goal here is to be creative about how I can apply the technological changes that have come into our world. Opportunities have arisen, I'd like to make the most out of that.
I find reading to be the way I typically learn and promising to do courses or problem sets has generally been less likely to return results, so I'll cut myself some slack this year and only promise myself that I will read books. Specifically, the following:
I would love to add more such as Payments in the US or the Masnavi by Rumi but to be honest, I'm doubtful I'll get to those (although I would like to read those as well).
I would love to address the problems I've mentioned above by the end of the year. This may warrant technology and writing programs of some sort or another but it may not! From my perspective, that is fine. Not everything needs a piece of software. One addition though is that I would like to get into the habit of writing more. I've been thinking about what prevents me from writing to the degree that I would like and my latest theory is that I would benefit from more structure; hence, I hope to write a review of my progress on these goals every month. Even if that review amounts to "I made no progress", I think it's valuable to at least build the habit. To that extent, I've come to realize that this blog's poor distribution (in the sense that there's no newsletter nor Substack and I care too little to use Twitter) is a strength! In the sense that while it's true that this is public and folks may read this, it is also true that it's tough to find this and that reduces the pressure on me to write anything particularly poignant.