It’s the last day of 2025, which felt like a darker year than usual:

• The fires in Los Angeles were awful, including for my brother Pete, who’s home barely managed to survive the Palisades fire. Traveling with him to see it just a few days after the fires subsided will stay a core memory for me. I hate that it happened to him and his family, but I’m glad I was able to be there for it. And thanks to the Brentwood Police Department for not arresting us when we looked like looters with Patagonia duffels full of his work suits and kids’ clothes.
• Panda had a super scary episode of vestibular disease (“old dog syndrome”), which felt like a stroke at the time. It’s been really hard to see her dealing with all sorts of little problems, but not so deep down, she’s still the puppy I first met back in 2012. According to her vets, her appetite is top-tier, though, so I think/hope she might want to be around for a while.
• I’ve tried to separate myself from the news over the years, but everything about the clownshow in Washington D.C. is too horrible to ignore. The situation with ICE in particular was really distressing to see, especially given how much of it happened in LA. Fuck those people.

That being said, good things happened too:

• We bought a house, so it’s nice to settle in and become committed Californians. The house has had tons of problems (should probably belong in the “dark” column), but it’s a sunny place with great neighbors, and Panda seems to enjoy one yard or the other, depending on the time of day. Also, our neighbor’s tree is raining lemons into our garden. Bad for the (failed) radishes, good for guacamole preparation. I’m planning to attempt some lemon bars later today.
• I gained a lot of visibility at work this year, thanks to working on a much higher profile project, and being a leader in terms of “adopting” and “showcasing” “AI” as a designer. Now that it’s acceptable for designers to code (🫠), Cursor is my default design tool, so I’ve been able to show much richer work that’s helped me connect and communicate with many more customers and higher-level executives than I have in the past.
• Revenue from my side projects have slowly ticked up. It’s still not enough to cover a single trip to Erewhon, but there’s a tangible progression and enough feedback to make it clear how things could grow significantly. In the process, I built my first iOS app, launched it on the App Store, and now finding myself orienting toward thinking marketing- and distribution first. It helps that the “joy” of building feels less obvious thanks to stuff like Cursor, but at this point in my life, I think the real growth will come from evolving into a more “commercial” thinker. That sounds annoyingly capitalist, but I’ve realized that my creative interests have been too focused on my own needs, so I’d like to see myself think better about what I can actually do to help and make others happy. Doing that “at scale” would make me feel even more satisfied.
• Ruchika and I had a really fun time watching the Dodgers win the World Series at Tony’s Darts. We are absolutely not bandwagon fans, though. Definitely not.
• Athletically, our new house has been a big improvement on previous setups: I can easily go mountain biking or running in Griffith Park, and I’m slowly building a home gym that makes it easy to stumble out and get a little healthier. I also ran the Santa Barbara Half (super fun race), and climbed most of Mt. Shasta with friends in May. We (mostly I) had to turn around at ~12k out of pure exhaustion (we started at the bottom, rather than camping midway at Lake Helen), but given that it was almost my first time doing real skinning, the turns on the way down were Top 5 most epic of my life.
• Our much anticipated trip to India was a blast. I even brushed my teeth with tap water, and only got a little sick.

Anyway, there were tons of other small and not-so-small good moments, bad moments, just living moments. I’ll spare you the details. But here are some goals I have for 2026:

1. Write 25 blog posts (less than 600 words each) by EOY: this feels small and indulgent, but given how much “AI” is a thing now (at least at work), in 2025 I had more than an occasional crisis about just how much I actually think for myself, and how shallow it feels when I actually do it. Most of my critical thinking over the last 5-10 years has gone into basic design work and writing code, and in retrospect it all just feels very mechanical and uninteresting, especially now that I can see machines crank out “slop” better than my own in a fraction of the time. Not to be totally dismissive of what I’ve been u to: I think I’ve wrangled it in helpful and valuable ways at work, but beyond that, I don’t think I contribute meaningfully to higher-level work discussions and deeper personal conversations at the levels you’d expect for someone who’s almost 40. So this is all my attempt to get better. (A major requirement of those 20 posts is that they will be much, much shorter than anything I’ve written so far, like this.)
2. Post Designs to Mobbin by March 1: In terms of my side projects, I’ll probably continue to struggle with the decision to keep doubling down on “finicky” consumers vs. focusing on more corporate business problems. There is a market for what I’m working on, and all sorts of paths and levers to make it grow, but the quality bar is high. Rather than run away from that, I’d rather lean in and make (and market) everything to the best of my abilities. At the very least, if it doesn’t register with users, than at least I’ll have something to be truly proud of. It’s a bad sign that I’m still hesitant to show other people what I’ve been working on: I’m not holding myself to the best standards. My hope is that a higher quality experience (and marketing) will lead to $1K MRR by the end of the year.
3. Go to bed by 9pm: This is a boring one, but if there’s one obvious fallacy in my life, it’s a lack of true consistency. At point, I feared nothing more than the monotony of doing the same thing every day of my life (mostly I distinctly remember seeing robots people line up for their morning commute on the MetroNorth in Westchester, standing exactly where the doors would open when the train came to a stop). But now I realize that consistency is the key to doing everything well and building on previous success. If I go to bed at 9pm, I should wake up by 4:30am. That’s about 2.5 hours of solid, protected time for myself.
4. Spend 4 evening hours per week on advocacy: I have a few strongly held positions, like how horrible cars can make our lives, and how nice public transportation and trains can be for people, the environment. Rather than toiling in my own thoughts (see shallow thinking above), I will dedicate fixed time to making sure I really understand the problem, what other people have done (and are doing), and find a tangible way to contribute to beneficial outcomes myself.
5. Go Biking 2x per week: With Panda getting older, I’m only getting more hesitant to spend too much time away from her. I’d love to go skiing and camping and traveling together as much as we used to, but she definitely likes relaxing at home these days, and her bowel movements are now a little too unpredictable for hotels and tents. Biking, though, always feels like an adventure. I love mountain biking in the Verdugos, but it would also be fun to get out on the road more often - it seems like almost all of my friends and family in LA are much more pavement-friendly. If this goal is just an excuse to buy another bike, then consider the mission accomplished.
6. Finish all the books in my Kindle before buying anything else: I went on a total book binge last year when I realized that borrowing from Libby just wasn’t encouraging me to read consistently. By buying books, I finished more last year than I had in the last few years combined. But I may have taken it too far: I have a serious number of books that I bought on a whim that looked interesting. Sure, I’ll give up on the ones that just don’t click, but I think there’s enough good content to keep me and my book budget happy for 2026.
7. Attend a tech conference: Although I’ve worked in tech for a while now, I’ve never really felt like a “tech” person. Given how close we live to SF (and that LA has it’s own tech scene), it would be fun to embrace that culture more (don’t think I’m at risk of drinking any Kool-aid). If I continue to push myself on the AI stuff at work, maybe I can even apply for some sort of presenting opportunity. FigJam is the obvious choice, but perhaps the Vercel conference (or a Cursor get-together, if it happens) would be even better.

A lot of these goals are absolutely motivated by my desire to really maximize my income and wealth over the next few years, and mature into someone who’s nearing the brink of turning 40. I can only control so much, though, so hopefully, a by-product of accomplishing any of these is that I’m just more thoughtful, more engaged, making the most of my life, and, at the end-of-the-day, closer to my friends and family.