Wrapping Up January and February 2026 (Not Really a Retro)

2025 was a sabbatical year for me. The month-long trip to Italy in April, right after I left the company, was a real comfort to someone who had worked without a break (and to Ellie, who had quietly stayed beside me through all of it). Venice glittering as the rain lifted. The view of Florence and its sunsets. The starlit nights along the southern Amalfi coast. With no business debts hounding me anymore, no office to return to, those moments were enough on their own. We stayed faithful to the trip all the way through: through the loud, smoggy streets of Naples, through the tourist crush of Rome that wore us out by the time we flew home.

After we got back from Italy, the rest of 2025 went by fast. I fought with Ellie a lot now that we were together around the clock, and we made up, and we held each other. We laughed, cried, fell asleep. Got lazy, beat ourselves up, then got up again and went outside. Days like that on repeat.

Honestly, the early months back with Ellie were harder than I expected. I had grown into the authority and routine of being a CTO, and the version of me at work and the version of me at home had been somewhat separate people. Two of me were colliding, and it threw me off. The leader-antipatterns I used to hate had quietly soaked into me. Ellie was not my employee, she was my partner, and I struggled to align with her and move things forward together. I caught myself acting out the exact model I despised most.

The cycles of self-pity and self-loathing I carried out of the previous company kept replaying until I finally put them on the page in How Organizations That Cannot Win Fall Apart. They tormented me long enough that even a season meant for rest got eaten up by them. I would sink into my own darkness, thrashing around in it, and on those days I said things to Ellie that hurt her. She always took me back in anyway, and so to repay her, today again I cook a meal and fold towels and sort the recycling. (Though her share of the housework is still overwhelmingly larger than mine.)

Looking back at how quickly that time slipped past, I get small flashes of “I should have done this, I should have done that,” but a body and mind that broke right after leaving a job probably needed exactly that much time to mend on their own.

I had originally planned to write a proper retro: what I worked on, what I made, how hard I’d been living (allegedly). But honestly, I’m not sure what use a retro like that is when I write it. It’s not the kind of essay where I’m thinking about the era; it’s a deeply personal one. Writing works as its own form of therapy for me, so even if this post only achieves that, that’s enough. So I just started writing.

In November I registered as a sole proprietor, and worked-stopped-worked-stopped through the fall. From December I got back to it in earnest. In January and February, I tried to stop obsessing over routines, stop blaming the lazy version of myself, and just enjoy the moment, do what I wanted to do, and let the days carry me.

The year before last I kept training hard despite an injury, trying to push through, and that ended up turning into multiple injuries through the second half of 2024 that did not heal cleanly. I came into 2026 having barely worked out for almost a year and not properly recovered, but starting in January I’ve been training again at a level my body can handle.

From December into January and February, I wrote a lot. The only readers are Ellie and a few close friends, but I finally started writing the novel I had wanted to write for so long. I have to keep serializing to live up to those readers’ expectations, and the more I write the harder it gets. I also wrote more blog posts than I ever have before. I tried to weave the emotions and ideas I had been stacking up inside me into actual prose. One of them ended up bringing a flood of visitors to a blog nobody used to visit. (Their presence forces me to polish the raw drafts a little, which I guess can’t be helped.) Ellie also keeps reminding me to keep my words and behavior straight. Writing made me want to put the phone down and read more books, so I went so far as to buy an Onyx Palma to read on, and I’ve finished three or four books this year so far.

The project I started in December is in alpha testing, and I’m thinking about when and how to ship while continuing to harden it. Thanks to how fast AI coding agents have evolved, my hours have actually gone up, not down. Ellie’s complaint that I won’t play with her because I’m busy messaging Jarvis (my AI assistant) on Telegram isn’t entirely a cute joke; outside of reading time, I am basically glued to the phone all day. That said, the more the project matures, the more it needs human hands, piece by piece. (Whatever your project is, if AI seems to be doing all of it for you, flip the question around. You might be building something everyone else can build too. — Nine Survival Skills for the Agentic Engineering Era)

Last summer was the hottest one of my life and this winter was the coldest one of my life. Having spent my twenties and most of my career heads-down in business and work, the seasons hitting me head-on for the first time. It was more dramatic than I expected. (Into my early thirties I used to wear shorts at home in summer or winter alike, and now I bundle into long pants and fleece socks, which Ellie of course teases me about.)

My heart feels better than I would have expected to just let this stretch slide by, and at the same time there isn’t enough finished work to call it a real retro yet. So I’m holding onto this passing time, briefly, by writing it down for the future me who will look back at it.

I’m steadier than I was through last year, when even the rest itself was tangled up with the thoughts that tormented me, and now I’m spending each day with focus again. The value I’m chasing comes down to one thing. Whatever work I’m doing, if I can stay in this present moment, I’ll pay whatever it costs to stay there. I want to live a life where I’m not wasting time regretting the past or worrying about the future, where I’m doing my best at what I want to do, and where I can stay right here in this moment. With that small wish, I’ll close out this strange retro(?) of mine.