Hello, 2026: Shipping Hope in Small Commits

Happy New Year. I have always liked New Year more than most calendar events, mostly because it is the one socially acceptable time of year to sit down and rethink your defaults in public. There is something quietly freeing about the fact that no one expects a ticket, a sprint plan, or a roadmap from a New Year reflection — what is asked for, at most, is a little honesty.

What actually ran

A year, in the end, does not care very much about intent. What it does pay attention to is what actually ran. You can mean well for months on end and still ship nothing of real value, and you can equally well ship one small thing each week and find, by the time December comes around, that you have quietly built up a pile of evidence you did not realise you were accumulating.

My goal for 2026, then, is not reinvention. I am old enough now to mistrust grand reinventions, which I have rarely seen survive contact with February. What I want instead is evidence — a steady, unspectacular sequence of small, honest commits, in code and in everything else.

What I am optimizing for

What I do not want, on the other hand, is a year that looks impressive from a distance and feels hollow up close. I have had years like that before, and they leave very little behind that is worth keeping. What I want instead is a year in which the work is sturdy, the learning is deliberate, the writing is honest, and my attention — increasingly the scarcest resource of all — is mine to direct, rather than something rented out to whatever happens to be loud at the moment.

I would rather end the year with fewer open loops and more finished sentences than the other way around.

Building, without worshipping the build

Engineers, I have noticed, tend to confuse motion for progress. Activity feels like virtue, busy easily passes for important, and the small thrill of being needed in several places at once does a remarkably good job of disguising itself as actual work. I have been guilty of this often enough to recognise it the moment it begins to happen.

This year I want more stillness around the work — less frantic context-switching, and more of the kind of deep, uninterrupted time in which an idea actually becomes real. Real, after all, is the only feature that users can actually use, and it is a feature that almost never emerges from a calendar full of fifteen-minute fragments.

A small promise to myself

A few specific commitments, in plain English. I want to read on purpose this year, rather than leaving it to the algorithm to decide what I think about. I want my learning to have a map, however rough — a sense of where I am going and why I am going there — and I want to keep writing even on the days when the mood for it has gone elsewhere, because craft, in my experience, is what is left over after motivation has left the room.

I also want to treat health as a prerequisite for all of the above, rather than as something I will get to once the work calms down. Work, I have learned the hard way, never calms down on its own; it has to be either kept in proportion deliberately, or accepted on its own terms.

I want to be ambitious without being brittle, which is to say I want to aim for the kind of progress that survives a bad day, a bad week, and the occasional bad month, rather than the kind of progress that depends on everything going well to even register.

And, on a more concrete note, I want to finally ship Consumption Backlog this year — and an iOS version of it, too, if I can find the time.

Closing thoughts

If you are reading this, my hope for you is that 2026 brings you, in some combination, three things: something to learn that changes how you see the world, someone to love who makes the days a little lighter, and something to build that makes you quietly proud when no one in particular is watching. Those are the three I have come to think matter most, in roughly that order, though the order has a way of shuffling depending on the year.

Happy New Year. To whatever extent one of those three is within reach today, that is probably the right place to start, and small is probably the right size to start at.