New Year's Resolutions for 2026 (and scoring 2025 resolutions)

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Happy 2026! Here is my self-assessment on last year's goals and my goals for this year (2026).

Review of 2025 goals

Good news: all goals were met 🙌. In detail:

  1. Do amazing work at Valence.
    • Assessment: pass
    • Comment: overall I'm happy with the work I did.
  2. More writing. Want to average 1 blog post every 2 weeks (= total of 26 blog
    • Assessment: exceeded
    • Comment: 35 total posts 🥳
  3. Use LLMs more for my own learning.
    • Assessment: pass
    • Comment: at work I've made decent use of the Gemini and ChatGPT subscriptions that we are provided and learned a lot from them. Outside of work I've used my personal Claude subscription to learn about a huge number of topics (everything from history to using the Nikola package properly to build this website).
  4. Read 6 books unrelated to work (mix of fiction and non-fiction).
    • Assessment: exceeded
    • Comment: I read 7 books (or 10 if you count each "Years of Lyndon Johnson" book separately). They were: Anna Karenina, The Diamond Age, The Dispossessed, Katabasis, Seeing like a State, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (books 1-4), A Brief History of Intelligence.
  5. Learning for drug discovery.
    • Assessment: pass
    • Comment: I learned a lot by talking to people within Recursion, through my projects at work, and about biology via reading a textbook on cellular biology (I will write a summary of what I learned in a future post).

More ambitious goals for 2026

Since I met all my goals last year, this year I need to be more ambitious! My 2026 goals are:

  1. Continue blog writing: at least 26 posts (1 every 2 weeks), and at least 5 "great" posts: ones that are polished and reasonably high effort, that I think are truly original and unique content on the internet.
  2. LLM proficiency: I need to go beyond chat and use LLMs programmatically / via APIs. This includes A) onboarding onto Claude code B) trying out cursor's more advanced "agent" features C) doing at least 1 project that involves using LLMs programmatically.1
  3. Reading: read at least 12 books (1 per month). I want to spend more time reading.
  4. Nature: do at least 1 good multi-day trip into nature (hiking in the Alps??)
  5. Learning: finish at least 2 textbooks as part of my professional growth.

  1. Good chance this will happen via my work anyway. ↩