I have not forgotten you (if anyone is actually even reading this). Writing blog posts definitely went out of fashion when microblogging in form of social media took over. But anyway, here comes the 2026 update.

The Song

Middletown Dreams is one of my favourite Rush songs. It’s a great 1980s pop song driven by a groovy bass line, a wall of synthesizers, massive guitar sound, and Neil Peart’s perfect drumming ticking like clockwork. As someone who grew up in a small town, I can relate to the theme of this song – following your dreams and leaving the boring but safe small town life behind.

I would very much want to see Rush live again, but they have never played in Australia and are unlikely to come to this side of the world. I don’t want to travel to North America or Europe just to see them perform. Tickets are really expensive and the shows are mostly sold out anyway.

Work

I’m still in the same job. I got a new role though. The title stayed the same, I’m still officially a Senior Software Engineer, but my responsibilities have changed and I’m now also a Squad Tech Lead. I have a small team to look after as their technical lead, but for now, I’m not their line manager.

AI has changed everything very quickly and we’re adjusting to the new tools as fast as we can. I don’t think I’ve written any code manually in almost a year. It’s all AI generated now. I’m also heavily using AI for planning my work, and reviewing work from other engineers (and their AI agents). It is so much better with detecting issues in pull requests than humans could ever be. Sometimes it might miss something but usually it can pick up things pretty damn well.

Nothing in this post is written by AI though. It’s all written by me.

Family

My son keeps growing. He just turned four last month and he is going through a massive development leap. He talks a lot, and his imagination has really taken off. He is telling stories that make no sense to me, and he also picked up his toy guitar and started pressing the buttons, experimenting with different sounds. On last Saturday, I wanted to focus on tidying up and cleaning up the kitchen, so I asked him if he wants to watch some cartoons. He said no, which is quite unusual. He was more keen to build a garage out of cardboard boxes for his monster trucks. I like this version of him better!

We also finally settled down and bought our own property. We tried getting back to Sydney but it’s just so unaffordable that it’s not a great option. Thus, we swapped the nitty gritty Brunswick to more middle class Moonee Ponds. There’s hardly any graffiti on this side of the Citylink and the demographics are quite different. I think we should have left Brunswick a long time ago but better late than never.

The Engine Room

I did small updates to this blog. I upgraded Hugo to the latest version, handled all vulnerabilities in npm modules and modified the fonts and headings. I swapped Lato to Hanken Grotesk and Quattrocento to Alkantra. Slightly different feeling and I love Alkantra a lot. I also moved away from Google Fonts to Bunny Fonts. There’s no analytics so I have no idea if anyone is reading my posts. Let me know if you are!