the laundry

I'm a hypocrite. Despite my skepticism towards New Year's resolutions, and after a few years of not having any, I decided to make some for 2026. Since this blog was partially born because of that, it makes sense for the first post to elaborate on the topic.

Why are you like this?

My main gripe with New Year's resolutions relates to things that aren't doing the thing. Too often do I see people (myself included) circle around ideas endlessly; researching, pondering, procrastinating (“I'm gonna get to it next week”, “I just need to finish this other thing first, then I can get started”). Waiting for the New Year is the ultimate form of that. It always feels like it wraps procrastination in a nice, arbitrary package. After all, what's stopping you (or me, or anybody else) from starting right away? Many things, naturally. Anxiety, depression, fear, perfectionism, the list is endless, but once we distill it, it seems like there aren't any solid arguments left. The (few) projects that I've finished, the habits that I've built and broken, they have one thing in common – I had an idea, and I started working on it.

The other issue is the scale. When I was younger and desperately trying to fix my problems, I would often try to use the New Year as a catalyst for some massive changes. I'm gonna go to the gym every day, I'm gonna program every day, I'm gonna read one book every month, you get the idea. While I'm sure some people have found success with this method, I think that for most it works for a few days, and then they burn out and go back into their slump. The sour truth is that major changes often cannot be made multiple at a time. One needs to start small, and that's harder to do when we wait for the New Year since the default seems to be big date = big changes.

The hypocrisy

Why does this blog spring to life at the beginning of the year then? There are two main reasons.

Firstly, I'm aware of the issues I've explained above to the point where I can articulate them in a blog post. This means I can try to avoid making the same mistakes I did in the past. Most importantly, there's nothing completely new or major to my resolutions. They are things that I've either started last year or have been thinking about (remember “things that aren't doing the thing”?) for a while now.

Secondly, I'm a simple man. My friend has created a channel in his Discord server for people to share their goals for 2026 and I got jealous of everybody's participation. I really like that community, so I couldn't help but interact.

My resolutions

The one that I probably value the most and one that's already partially fulfilled, is this blog. Ever since I started hanging out (digitally) in spaces filled with computer hobbyists, personal blogs have been my favorite form of entertainment and knowledge gathering. As I expanded my palate from just writings on technology to other topics, I stumbled upon the IndieWeb initiative. The itch to have a space of my own started then and it grew over the following weeks, until finally the start of Manuel Moreale's Dealgorithmed was the catalyst that led me to bite the bullet and set up the laundry. I might take part in the IndieWeb Carnival and I might try to do a lighter version of 100 Days To Offload (perhaps 25 Days?), but these aren't what I'd call resolutions. As I said, no sudden, heavy changes – just putting myself out there and writing down my silly thoughts from time to time is enough for now. Hopefully this space helps me organize my thoughts and get closer to my feelings on various matters, with some programming-related fun to boot.

Next on the list would be reading books. No vague goals like reading a book every month here. I picked two (admittedly quite heavy-duty) works I'd like to go through this year – Alex Petrov's Database Internals and the venerable Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel. I think myself quite a decent engineer, but I also tend to call myself DAF (Dumb As Fuck). I'm sure there's some self-deprecation to it, but I say it mostly to acknowledge that my expertise is very narrow and I genuinely don't know much about most things. The first book seems like a perfect remedy for that given how low-level it goes in explaining database internals, and I've heard the second one straight up changing the way people view programming, hence they became my picks.

Last one I'd like to talk a bit more about, projects. Despite mentioning things that aren't doing the thing two times (well, three times now), I also often don't do the thing. As I'm sure many programmers can relate, I tend to start or think about many different gizmos, but actually finish very few of them. Since a broad goal like “more projects” would be tricky to tick off and get that sweet dopamine, I also decided on two must-haves here. The first one is an assembler and an emulator for the Uxn/Varvara ecosystem that I started last year but never finished. The second one is a game – this is still quite vague, but in my head I have a rough idea as to how big/complex it's ought to be to “count” for this resolution.

Conclusion

There is a few more resolutions that I made, but they're either lower on my priority list or more vague which would make me seem even more of a hypocrite than I already am.

Other than that, it was very tempting to keep including various reminders in this post – that it's just my opinions and my experiences, that I'm not qualified to give advice on pretty much anything, etc., but I felt like that would bloat the writing too much. After all, I think people reading personal blogs realize that they're just that, personal. While I try to keep my words coherent and interesting on the off-chance that someone reads them, a lot of all this is “for me, by me”. But now I'm starting to ramble and overthink, and the last sentence almost feels mean, so let's wrap it up with: I hope you enjoyed the post at least a little and here's hoping that more is to come.