It’s finally 2026! The New Year is upon us, and like many of you, I have a bunch of personal and professional goals I’d like to achieve this year.
New Years resolutions have always been a bit of a fad to me. I’ve seen a lot of people start with good intentions and set some ambitious goals, only to drop off into old habits, and that’s just from looking in the mirror.
The older I’m getting (my knees are starting to ache, so yes, I am getting old), the more adaptable I’m trying to be when setting goals. I try and keep goals SMART, but I also set goals that I’ll achieve while anticipating roadblocks along the way. Some of you may look upon that as an excuse, but it’s realistic. I have shit to take care off. I need to put food on the table, I have a family to look after. I get tired from work, sometimes I get sick. Sometimes I just want to play video games.
Things happen in life, and for me, I’ve been far more successful when I’ve been adaptable to the inevitable challenges that life throws our way.
Reflecting on 2025
For many, 2025 seemed like a slow crawl over a bed of lava with nails stuck in your back. For me, I can’t really complain. I didn’t travel as much as I’d like, but I got to visit Seattle for the first time ever, attended MVP Summit in-person for the first time, saw my first NHL game (Go Krakens!), I rejoined Microsoft, getting hired into the Industry Solutions Engineering team as a Senior Software Engineer, got back into skateboarding, build my own custom deck, and I managed to get through most of the year without suffering any major health setback.
Despite how busy I was, I got to speak at a couple of conferences (NDC Melbourne, Cloud Con Sydney, APIDays Melbourne), as well as some meetups around Melbourne which I’m grateful for. It’s always a blessing to be able to speak to people about what I’m tinkering on.
But most importantly, I got married to the love of my life (and incidentally becoming an expert in B2B sales).
Planning a wedding is not for the weak. It takes up a lot of time and energy, which can be stressful! However, looking back on the wedding day, and seeing how beautiful the day was, how well organized the venue staff were, how my family were able to travel from the UK for the wedding, how we were joined by 80 of our closest friends, and how beautiful my wife looked walking down the aisle, it was all worth it.
Overall, 2025 was a good year me. I got a new job, I moved up in my career, I improved my health, and I got the women of my dreams to marry me. Success 🏆
There are also a few things I didn’t achieve too. I didn’t crack 20,000 subscribers on YouTube. To be fair, I didn’t have a lot of ideas for content, and if I did, I wouldn’t have reached 20K anyway 😅
I also didn’t squat 140kg for reps either. Taking up skateboarding again exposed a lot of weakness in my legs (there’s a few muscles that you use in skateboarding that you wouldn’t normally use). I did manage to bench 120kg, but it wouldn’t call it a clean attempt. I did run a 5km race, but I didn’t run in the Melbourne marathon 5km.
Some wins, some misses, but overall, a great year 👍
Looking to the future
So, what are the goals for 2026? Improving my physical and mental health has always been top-of-mind for me, particularly after the COVID pandemic. I’ve always strived to improve my skills as a Software Engineer, and sharing my knowledge and experience is something that I’ve always enjoyed.
Now that I’m married, I must think beyond just myself. I have a wife now 🙂 That comes with a lot of responsibility. I need to (at least!) put food on the table. We’re both working, but we’d like to start a family in the not-to-distant future. We need to be prepared for that.
I also want to continue to enjoy life (we’re only here once), learn new things, and get better at existing hobbies.
See the other side of 95kg
I need to drop the Christmas pounds 😅 I was making good progress in the lead up to the wedding. Buying a custom suit with precise measurements is a pretty good motivator for keeping disciplined with your weight. But there was no way I wasn’t going to let loose for the Christmas holidays.
On Instagram, there’s a trend going around saying it doesn’t matter what you do between Christmas and New Year, it matters what you do between New Years and Christmas. That’s given me some comfort but now we’re here it’s time to get back into a good routine of staying healthy.
To start with, I’d like to be on the other side of 95kg (about 14st 13lbs, or 209 lbs). I jumped on the scale this morning sitting at around 102kg (16st, or 224 lbs).
So that’s 224 - 209 = 15 lbs to lose. Consensus is that healthy weight loss sits at around 1-2 lbs a week, so say we’re ambitious and want to lose 2 lbs a week, that’s 7 weeks to see 95kg. A conservative goal would be 1 lb a week, which increases the timeline to 15 weeks. I want to sit on the more ambitious side but knowing that life does and will get in the way, I’ll be conservative about this.
I’m heading on a trip overseas for a week soon, so a realistic target would be to achieve this by Easter, which falls on Sunday 5th April. That’s 93 days (or 13 weeks and 2 days, 25% of the year) to achieve this target.
To achieve this, I’ll go to the gym at least 4 times a week to cover my exercise requirements. I’ve always been able to wake up early, so that’s not an issue. I’ve changed the way I train to focus more on functionality, mobility, and endurance.
The big challenge will be the diet (love a sweet treat). Giving up diet fizzy drinks and beer will be the immediate focus. I’m not a fan of regular Coca-Cola, so drinks like Coke Zero and Pepsi Max have helped to satisfy my sweet tooth. This will be a challenge. Beer I can live without. Chocolates I can live without too. Australia doesn’t have good chocolate, not as bad as America, but still not great, so that should be easy.
One of the many benefits of marrying a Sicilian woman is the somewhat unlimited supply of Cannoli in your life. If you don’t know what that is, Cannoli[a] are Sicilian pastries consisting of a tube-shaped shell of fried pastry dough, filled with a sweet and creamy filling containing ricotta cheese.
One of my local Cannoli shops (we have a LOT of them in Melbourne) sells a Biscoff flavoured version, which at that point is just pure gluttony. There’s also numerous other Italian-based food that’s not exactly diet-friendly, so avoid these foods will be more challenging.
Measuring progress towards this goal should be straightforward. I have a Fitbit scale, and one of the local gyms has a body composition scale that I can use if I want more granular details. I’ve set up an alarm every Friday to jump on the scales. I use a Fitbit Aria 2 which syncs nicely with my other Fitbit data.
Getting nerdy for a second, I’m still working on a project with my Fitbit data. I’m currently trying to hack on a UI for my data, once that’s done, I’ll try and build an MCP server for my data, and see how I can throw some agentic workflows into the project.
Learn how to Ollie
About 4 months ago, I decided to get back into skateboarding. I’ve progressed to the stage where I can cruise to and forth from the gym easily (about a mile each way). I can also ride fakie down a ramp (going backwards from your usual stance), do a 180 pivot on the ramp, and perform some basic kick turns in the bowl.
For those who don’t know, an Ollie is a fundamental trick of jumping into the air with the board, without using your hands, by “popping” the tail down and sliding your front foot up to level the board out in mid-air before landing back on it, allowing skaters to get over obstacles or onto ledges.
The idea of jumping on a wooden board held together by nuts and bolts scares the shit out of me. I also ride “goofy”, so that will require popping the tail with my left foot, and jumping up with my right foot. I’m naturally right-footed, so that feels back-to-front for me.
This will take time and practice. I’m also in my mid-thirties, quite tall, and a little heavier than the average skateboarder. So I’m going to give myself the target of December 31st to achieve this.
I took up skateboarding just to have a hobby away from the keyboard, so I’m not going to put myself under any real pressure here. It’s just for fun after all, why be serious about it.
Grow my skills as a Software Engineer
<rant>
There’s no denying that what we do as software engineers is rapidly changing thanks to GenAI. Some of it is fairly good, and the work that we’re doing in my team is shaping that.
But just because GenAI is writing a lot of code for us, it doesn’t mean that the bar for being a software engineer is being lowered. Writing code is just a part of what we do, and I don’t think that the role is requiring us to become less technical.
If you think you can just vibe code (I fucking hate that term) an application, and deploy it to prod without understanding it, be my guest. But without actually understanding what the code does, how to debug issues in the code (yes it will happen), and how to evolve the codebase as time goes by, you’re going to have a tough time. Yes AI will write code for you, but if you don’t understand it, hallucinations will introduce bugs you won’t be able to diagnose, your apps will crash, you will look stupid, and I will laugh at you (then help you for a small consultancy fee to fix it. I’m not heartless 😄)
</rant>
During my second stint at Microsoft, I was lucky enough to work in the Fast Track for Azure team as part of Azure CXP. I worked alongside some brilliant technical minds who taught me how to assess different architectural patterns, understand trade-offs between short and long term options, and how the technical choices we make as software engineers impact the human beings that use and benefit from the code we write.
I will concede that GenAI has changed our industry rapidly, but the ability to think beyond the code we write is just as important now as it was when I started out almost 10 years ago.
Over the coming year, I want to be better at the stuff I don’t know, and sharpen the skills that I do have. I’d like to become more proficient in security. Towards the end of last year, I managed to scratch the surface with some security work, so I’ll be more intentional about the work I do this year so that I can develop these skills.
Because this goal is enduring, I won’t stick a timeline on it, but it will feed into the next goal for 2026.
Contribute to the community
I love contributing back to the community when I can. I’ve missed it, especially as planning for the wedding ramped up, and I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked to speaking at conferences/meetups, writing blog posts, contributing to open source, and creating YouTube videos.
I often find this goal difficult to quantify. Should I focus on speaking at x number of conferences, x number of meetups, write y number of blog posts, create z number of YouTube videos etc. etc.
On the one hand, quantifying that goal makes it seem artificial, because to me, you end up just chasing a number, rather than focusing on impact. On the other, do I just turn up to one meetup, write a couple of blog posts, and pat myself on the back on a job well done? That seems lazy.
Life does get in the way. There will be days where work is challenging, deadlines are tough, and there’ll be days where I don’t feel like writing a technical blog post, or spending time creating and editing a video.
So reluctantly, I will have to quantify this goal. Speaking at conferences is a privilege, and even after doing it now for 7 years at a variety of different conferences, entry isn’t guaranteed (as it should be). As an example, I’m speaking at DDD Melbourne this year. I’ve been trying for 7 years to speak at that conference and I’ve failed every single time to be selected until this year. If that’s the only conference I’ll speak at this year, I’ll still be happy.
YouTube videos are fun to do, but they take time to perfect. My editing skills are basic, and my production values could use some work. If I can make 5 YouTube videos this year, that would be a good baseline to achieve. What topics I will cover, I haven’t decided. Something Azure related, but I’ll need some time to flesh some ideas out.
Blog posts are also something I should get back into the habit of writing. One of the more rewarding parts of my community work is that I will get the odd engineer ping me on Teams from time-to-time asking me about articles I’ve written. It’s been a good way to meet people from various parts of the world.
Be a great husband
This seems like a good goal to set 😄
Pursue happiness
Plans are fragile things, and life often dashes expectations to the ground. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set goals, it just means that when you must adapt your plans, be gentle with yourself and view progress as a process, not just the end state.
It’s quite likely that I’ll fail trying to achieve these goals. Failure is just a part of life. I’m a lot easier going with myself than I used to be when it comes to failing, as I’ve tried to adopt the attitude of viewing failure as an opportunity to learn. It hasn’t always worked, I still get pissed off when I fail, but it does help manage failing.
So, this, even if I fail everything else, I’m going to strive to be happy. I’m grateful to be alive. I’m grateful to have the career that I have, I’m grateful to be in reasonable health, and I’m grateful for my family. I have lots of reasons to be and stay happy. So, striving to stay happy and be positive in the face of all of life’s challenges is a good goal to have.
Wishing you a happy new year
I doubt anyone will read this, but if you’ve made it this far thanks 😄 I’m hopeful that with these goals in mind, 2026 will be one of the happier years I’ve spent on this Earth.
Regardless of what happens this year, I hope you all have a happy new year, manage to spend time with the people you care about, achieve your goals, and be in good health.
Happy coding! ☕💻