Year in Review: Getting Back to Building

It’s hard to believe it’s the last day of the year. This year has definitely flown by. Looking back, it ended up being a year of pretty big shifts for me, both personally and in how I work as a developer.

Dev Wins

This year marked some big shifts in my career and development work. A lot of my focus was on getting back to building, learning faster, and spending time on things I actually care about.

Transitioned back to IC: I started the year in management. I’d wanted to transition out of that role for a while and finally got the opportunity this year. With AI, it’s been an interesting time to switch back into a dev role. Overall, I’m much happier where I’m at now. A big takeaway for me was realizing that management just isn’t for me.

That shift naturally pushed me to rethink how I work day to day, which led me to spend a lot more time with AI.

Learned more about AI: At the beginning of the year, I was barely using AI at all. I’ve taken the time this year to really dig in and understand it. I’m generating most of my code now with AI, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can get it to produce fairly good-quality code with me having to fix a few things to make it production ready. It’s changed how I approach building things in a pretty fundamental way.

With that new workflow in place, I was able to spend more time actually shipping.

Launched AT Explore out of beta: I started working on AT Explore about a year ago, and I think I first posted about it during the holidays last year. It launched in beta and was still kinda buggy. This year, reliability was a big focus, along with expanding functionality. I could probably write a whole separate post just on this project.

Launched MCP in beta: While working on AT Explore, I experimented with a few AI-related ideas. MCP came out of wanting a better way for models to understand real protocol data and context. It ended up directly helping me build custom lexicon support in AT Explore.

Started a new project: In November, I started working on a new AT Protocol project. It’s still early, but it’s pushed me into mobile app development, which is a new realm for me. I’ve always wanted to work on native apps, but most of my experience has been on the web.

Personal Wins

I don’t usually talk much about personal things on here, but this year had a few wins I’m genuinely proud of. A lot of it came down to getting back to basics and taking better care of myself.

I quit drinking: Drinking was never a major problem for me, but it consistently added more negatives to my life than positives. I last drank in March and honestly haven’t missed it.

I got back to the gym: This one was tough. I used to go regularly but fell out of the habit during COVID. I made it a goal to get back into it, even though I didn’t really follow through until closer to the end of the year. I’m looking forward to building on that momentum next year.

Eating better: Still very much a work in progress, but part of the same push toward taking my health more seriously.

Health was a clear theme for me this year. I’m not getting any younger, and taking care of myself has become a real priority — one I plan to double down on next year.

Looking forward

Looking back made it pretty clear what I want to carry forward into next year. Health will continue to be a major focus, and there are a few goals I’d like to hit there.

On the project side, I’m hoping to launch my new AT Protocol project in the first quarter of the year. I also have a lot planned for AT Explore: ActivityPub functionality, opening up my APIs publicly, and continuing to expand lexicon support. I want to get MCP out of beta and keep pushing its capabilities further.

AI will continue to be a big focus for me as well. I’m experimenting with new AI-driven features across my projects and continuing to work it deeper into my workflow so I can ship faster and spend more time on the parts of building I actually enjoy.

Happy New Year, everyone — here’s to 2026 🥂