Here it is folks, my first "now". One of my goals for 2026 is to write more, and I have been - in short little daily notes in Obsidian. This has been a good start, but I wanted to start writing something more reflective, in summary - sort of like a digest of what's been happening, what I've enjoyed, general thoughts. I've been inspired by Tom MacWright's "Recently" posts (which I've been reading for a few years), and more recently, I stumbled on this post, The happiest I've ever been which captured this sort of reflection I've been thinking about. So, here it goes. And, by the way, this is not for you. This is for me, but I'm posting it publicly in the rare case you find something interesting that sets you off into a rabbit hole of enthusiasm.
Ok, first part of 2026.
Our daughter,
Anna
, is 3.5 years old and holy moly is this age insanely
cute. She's developing humor, an attitude, and a
personality. She's learning languages (Portuguese,
and now English) and she's correcting my bad
Portuguese. Side note: the way a child learns a language
is insane. They learn conjugations and gender without
anyone explaining it to them. They just soak it up and
understand it. She's starting a new school and
making friends. Big strides of independence and I
don't want to blink.
Running continues, as always. I try to run with the run group as much as possible. The schedule has shifted a bit with Anna's new school, so sometimes I arrive at the run club later than usual and do the workout solo. That still works, but I find I don't push myself as hard when running alone. The training for the Rio Marathon starts next week and I'm looking forward to the training. This year, the course is back to the older version, which I've run before. I think it's actually a lot better - less circles in Centro - just a straight shot from Recreio to Flamengo. I ran this with Gabi in 2015.
Good music and dancing recently.
We went to the first night of the
Bomba Festival
at the
Museum of Tomorrow
as our "big night out" for Carnival. It was a
great time and we stayed until sunrise - unreal. They
built a dance floor over the large pool (you
couldn't see it at night, but we were dancing next
to that
star-looking sculpture, which is surrounded by
water
). We took a taxi home and got caught in heavy traffic
as we passed the
Sambodrome
. It was a mixture of the night's parties coming to
a close, the revelers heading out for the early morning
blocos, and the flow of sober workers with their
headphones in commuting. It was pretty surreal - a
convergence of worlds. I looked out the window and saw a
train of colorful head statues from the parade getting
queued for the next day's parade. We also had a
great night out in Botafogo at
Quartinho bar
(bar playlist) and a few other spots nearby. Botafogo is always a
great time (and specifically cited in the crowning of
Rio as the
"Best City for Nightlife"
in 2024 by Timeout Magazine - using their objective
nightlife quality metrics). I also spent a week solely
listening
Viagra Boys
and also enjoyed listening to this
Joanna Newsom album on YouTube
after stumbling on it in
Henrik Karlsson's Substack
(also, that's a good post if you haven't read
Henrik Karlsson before).
Lastly, software stuff.
I think it's a pretty remarkable time for software
engineers at the moment. The core work of our profession
has changed and the tools we use are evolving weekly.
Almost every engineer I know is using AI coding tools
and is seeing a
massive jump in output. It's changing how we work - how we think about
code, features, workflows, planning, QAing - everything
really. There's probably a little bit of hype, but
that's natural. Stuff has fundamentally changed and
it's exciting. It's moving so quickly and I
think everyone is experimenting and learning daily. So,
just for a mark in time, here's my current dev
workflow (which will probably change tomorrow morning):
I tend to initiate tasks using the
Claude Code
iOS app (or web app). This is where I describe a feature
or paste in logs or a
Sentry
issue description. I sometimes start from the ChatGPT
desktop app for the largest ideas / architecture plans.
I iterate a few times until I have a general
architecture and then send off a prompt to build the
main portion of the change. Once that's complete, I
review the code diff and then iterate a few more times.
Once I'm happy with the general solution, I'll
file a PR which will kick off CI (tests +
Vercel Agent Review). From there (on my computer), I checkout the feature
branch in one of three locally cloned instances of the
repo (I find 3 is the max number of tasks I can have
running locally in parallel before I lose control). I
have each repo opened in a split pane in
cmux
(
views
): the left side is running the dev server; the right
side is running
Claude Code
or
Codex
(let's use CC/C for short). Each instance
runs the app(s) on unique ports so I can manually verify
across three instances locally. From there, I continue
the iteration and test using CC/C locally. I view the
diffs and manage the branches using
Sourcetree. I also have
Zed
open to review the code and make small manual edits.
Note: I've been trying to use
self evaluation more. Basically, this
means giving the agent a way to test itself. I
haven't cracked browser testing yet, but I have
found value in building out a CLI for the app and asking
the agent to use that CLI to verify changes. So,
I'll say something like: "Please build X
(which involves building X API routes), and confirm it
works by using the CLI to check the work (expand the CLI
if needed)". The agent builds the feature, updates
the CLI with new commands, and then runs a bunch of CLI
checks. This has increased the quality of the output and
it also leaves you with an ever-improving tool for your
own direct testing.
Ok, first now complete.