Every January I compile a list of things and experiences that impressed me during the past year. See the 2024 here.

House

After years of preparations, the paperwork has been approved. We promptly tore down the old house to make a place for the new one:

The first floor of the new house in that same exact spot:

Extending the old construction was out of the question, and extremely painful to maintain. Building a new building in its place was the smartest choice, but seeing the old one demolished was a very moving experience.

It is very hard to build, very easy to tear down.

*As a sidenote, one of the weirdest hurdles I had to deal with is the Notary who prepared my paperwork deciding to poison her business partner. Yes, you are reading that right. *

RV

RV is the gift that keeps on giving, especially with kids. Learning from last year experiences, we coordinated with other families and it was awesome.

Sweden

Our friends from kids’ preschool were going to Sweden on an RV trip and of course – we had to seize that opportunity. The children had great fun together, we all swam in plenty of lakes, visited Astrid Lindgren’s World (highly recommended with kids) and checked out my University in Kristianstad where I studied for half a year.

Sweden is super easy in an RV – there is plenty of space and you don’t have to book anything. The south is missing mountains, but it’s getting beautiful closer to Norway.

Austria & Garda

Its almost a tradition that every year we try venture into the southern Europe but we get held up in Austria and Lake Garda, and this year it was the case too. However this year – it was on purpose. We met up with friends (and inspiring strangers) from Travelling Village. You should check out what they are up to.

Thanks to AI coding agents I was able to do quite a bit of work while enjoying life – I would spend my focus time outlining the tasks to agents, spin up 3 or 4 of them in tmux sessions and go hike or spend time with kids. It was stressful, but doable.

In the Ötztal valley, you can find Oztal birds of Prey park where giant birds (including Hedwig apparently) are flying over your head

Lucha Libre

Lucha Libre is like American Wrestling, but you know, a little less classy and a little bit more over-the-top. It embraced the cringe and kitsch fully and turned it all into great fun. Compared to other “experiences” this year, I enjoyed it more than Broadway and a Michelin 2-star restaurant (Pujol) we visited with colleagues.

I am trying to find culturally appropriate way to say that you know stuff is serious when the midgets step in and I am failing. Clearly, in Mexico they don’t care.

AI Coding

AI coding is a thing now. I started the year using tab completion and delegating tasks to AI with very mixed success, and now I am ship entire features in giant repositories without typing a single line of code by hand.

This dramatic workflow change is mostly due warp speed improvements in model capabilities and tooling, but it’s also a muscle that you have to train. Some articles that helped me the most are:

• PMing With O1 Pro, V0, and DeepSeek-R1 by Sahil Lavingia
• My LLM Codegen Workflow Atm by Harper Reed

These are probably a bit outdated (10 months is forever in AI time), but introduced me to a new way of working.

Self hosting

AI takes the tedious of self-hosting. Previously I was reluctant to deal with debugging docker build parameters, certificates, toolchains and figuring out new fresh hell on my free afternoon.

Now, I can just drop the error message to ChatGPT and get step-by-step instructions to get the tool running, or even better – I can run claude code locally to fix stuff for me. AI is lowering the barrier to entry not only for code, but for devops too!

Here is the new stuff I am self-hosting on my QNAP NAS:

n8n

N8N is an Open-Source version of Zapier. It connects all your services and serves as “glue” between them. Here, for example is my tweet scheduler that will post anything I put in a special Evernote notebook (as a sidenote, I had to implement Evernote N8N Node for this):

In Why do you have so many bots? I described some of my personal infrastructure that I am currently porting to n8n. Self-hosting n8n allows me Claude Code to write new nodes for missing functionality, all the API keys are stored on a machine in my closet.

Plex

Plex is a media center manager akin to a private Netflix. It syncs playback state across different devices and makes it easy to manage your media library.

I resisted this one for a long time, because I don’t want to make it easier to watch movies, but I treat it as private Netflix for the kids. Both Youtube kids and Netflix are pushing absolute garbage despite parental settings, so I locked down a curated experience with a few quality options.

And for me, it makes it much easier to stream movies to Oculus since official Netflix app has 480p resolution (backstory).

MCP

MCP is a protocol for providing context to AI models, promising interoperability between AI clients and services you use. It enjoyed tremendous popularity in the middle of the year, which resulted in widespread adoption – WordPress.com released an MCP server too, and new ChatGPT Apps protocol is based on MCP.

It is genuinely useful in connecting consumer products, but now there are other options for dev tooling – particularly Skills and CLI tools.

I am drafting a post about analogies between MCP and WEB3.

Voice Mode

Voice input is finally good and has been for a while. The trick we were missing all these years is voice recognition (like whisper model) combined with post processing with an LLM or a multimodal model. The bigger blocker seems to be “ick factor” of talking to a computer like a crazyman mumbling to himself.

I don’t find voice input particularly useful in writing – I am thinking at roughly my typing speed.

Where voice input shines is dumping context:

• Describing task to an AI coding agent via voice makes it super fast and ALSO makes you share more context – win-win. Plus typos don’t matter because AI is gonna process it anyway.
• It is solving my particular pain point on Slack on the go: Most of my timezone overlap with colleagues happens during my evenings when I’m at the gym of dealing with kids. Being able to brain dump into a phone while sounding semi-coherent is super useful
• I am able to talk much much faster when there is no human on the other end.

On my mac I am using superwhisper, although it’s expensive and subscription does not make sense. I will find other solution (sotto?) when my cycle is up. On my iPhone I have this DIY iOS shortcut.

I think there are a lot of cool applications of voice input/output that we haven’t yet seen in products.