So in preparation of first blog entry for the year, I took a peek at the timestamp of the last one.
Ouch.
September 2024 was my last post, and here we are in January 2026.
If you're a developer, you probably know the feeling: we spend all day building things for clients, for work, for everyone else, and our own projects? Those always seem to be last on the list.
For me, blogging wasn't the only thing that fell by the wayside.
The Year That Ate Everything
2025 was... a lot. Home and personal projects that should have taken a few weeks stretched into months. Extended family obligations made it feel like I was running two households instead of one. There was also a mountain of legal challenges and paperwork required if I wanted to finally close some difficult chapters and get to a point of stability.
I had a hard realization about my career, too: Some decisions just aren't mine to make. Fighting battles I couldn't win was draining the focus and attention I needed for the things I truly care about. I can say my piece, I can do my job as best I can with what I have, but pouring energy into things completely outside my control is wasted effort I should be directing into my life and family.
And as if that wasn't enough, my creative outlets suffered the worst and almost evaporated as a result.
I officially signed and released two songs in 2024 and wanted to carry that momentum into 2025. Instead I released exactly zero. My "7 tracks" DJ mix series is still sitting at four episodes, gathering dust. I also love to practice magic, but haven't picked up a deck of cards in over two years.
Gaming held on by a thread thanks to my Lenovo Legion Go letting me remote play into my Xbox every now and then, but my actual game room sat empty most of the year.
Blogging was just another casualty of last year. I had things I wanted to write about, solutions I wanted to share, ideas I wanted to explore. But there was always something more urgent demanding attention.
When Everything Converged
Here's the thing though: sometimes life gives you a break. As 2025 closed out, a bunch of those distractions and obligations reached natural endpoints all at once. Projects wrapped up and were finally behind me (including a complete refresh of this site!), family conflicts were resolved, and the legal paperwork was filed.
It was like someone hit a reset button right as the calendar flipped.
And then there's Dry January. My wife Yvonne and I do this every year, but it's usually a bit contentious because, well, when life is hard you kind of want a drink to take the edge off, you know? But this time around, life actually got quiet,j almost dull, if you can believe it. I found myself with actual TIME, for the first time, in years!
But I didn't know what to do with it. In the past, iwhenever this happened (IF it happened!), I'd usually just end up starting up a random personal project and hacking away at it with no real plan or focus.
The 3:30am Solution
This all changed a few nights ago while trying to catch up on some sleep, when most of my ideas always seem to bombard me and keep me up. Late-night Copilot chats have become a regular thing for me to sort through these kinds of moments and this was no different. But after mulling it over, I suddenly realized and came to terms with the fact that I can't be a developer, a musician, a blogger, and a gamer every single day. I need to take turns.
So I asked Copilot about this concept: help me built a system to rotate my focus across projects instead of just bouncing around randomly. We went late into the night discussing it, shaping it, refining it, and defining what it could look like.
Kept me up until 3:30am, but it was worth it, because the next day I hit the ground running and started actually using it.
The core idea is simple: a structured, rotational plan that forces me to take turns on my projects, focusing the entire week on two at a time: one for developing an application, and the other for creating content (and never the same projects so they don't interfere!). Instead of trying to do everything at once (and burning out), or picking whatever feels urgent (and losing the things that matter), I rotate focus deliberately. Each project gets its turn, nothing gets neglected, and I don't drown.
I originally planned to use Trello to track and manage this, but quickly hit the limits of the free tier, and didn't feel like this use case justified a full subscription, especially since even as a paid user, the tooling didn't quite align with my desired workflow.
Fortunately, I quickly discovered a tool called Superthread that was lined up almost perfectly with the way I saw this in my head! The subscription price was also much more reasonable than Trello's, so I decided to give it a shot and so far it's working out GREAT!
I'm still in the early stages of wiring this all up, but I'm already seeing a massive return on the investment, both financially but especially in time!
I'd love to do a deep dive on my whole setup and thought process once it matures. The workflow I created along with why Superthread clicked when other tools didn't is something I think is worth sharing.
If anyone's interested drop me a line via email or social media and let me know!
Wrapping Up and Next Steps
Now that I got this reboot post out of the way, I already have my first real post ready to go: a database problem I ran into a while back (and never got around to writing about!). I'll share the problem, the solution I built, and the scripts I used to fix it. Technical, practical, and hopefully useful!
Beyond that? I'm committing to a steady stream of content: things I'm learning, solutions I'm finding, explorations I'm doing. This blog has always been about learning in public, helping others when I can, and solidifying my own understanding by explaining it (if you can teach it, you know it, right?).
I do love learning, and I love sharing what I learn. Recording my progress, my growth, and maybe helping someone else along the way? That has always been the goal, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to do it once again!
Thanks for Being Here
I'm genuinely excited to get back to this. It's one of many things I love doing, and I'm excited to have a system that can hopefully help make it sustainable this time.
If you want to follow along, you can catch me on LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Threads, or sign up for my email list to get updates as they are published.
Thanks for giving me another shot at this. Here's to making time for the things that matter.
And as always, thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful!