Category Archives: Personal

2026 4DX: Third Discipline

This is the third post in series of how I am implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] for 2026 towards one goal each in my business, fitness, and personal life. I discussed the first [1st DX] and second [2nd DX] disciplines in previous posts.

Business: [1st DX] Make Amazon Ads for my book break even. [2nd DX] Find readers, ask for reviews.
Fitness: [1st DX] Improve 5 lifts by TBD. [2nd DX] Lift 3x/week.
Personal Growth: [1st DX] Get to CEFR level TBD in Spanish. [2nd DX] Focussed and repeat listening to beginner Spanish podcasts.

In the third discipline, we design scoreboards to tell us if we are winning. The idea here to make it impossible to not know where the leading indicators are. The ideal is like a sports scoreboard—easy to glance and focussed on the one thing we are trying to do (score points).

My leading indicators for my business goal are the count of known readers and a count of known reviewers. Behind that I will have the list of names, but the scoreboard should just show the count. I will also make a goal that I can track against.

I already have the scoreboard for my fitness goal, which is just a spreadsheet tracking my lifts. I only need to track my last rep count and weight.

For the Spanish goal, I need to pick some number of repetitions that I think it will take to be able to listen to a podcast with full comprehension. I will have to just try over the next couple of weeks. Once I have that, I just need to track that number each week.

The fourth discipline is to build in some accountability. This is easier for the book’s intended use, which is for teams. The 4th DX is just to have a dedicated meeting where they make sure that the leading indicators are moving and that they seem to be resulting in the WIG. I will need some time to think about this, so I’ll probably take a detour in future posts and get back to it in a week.

2026 4DX: Second Discipline

Yesterday, I wrote about the first discipline from The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate]. In that post I set up three ideas for Wildly Important Goals for 2026.

By the end of the year:

Business: Get my book to a stage where Amazon ads are break-even.
Fitness: Improve 5 lifts by X pounds (TBD), while maintaining my body weight.
Personal: Get to CEFR level (TBD) in Spanish.

All of these goals are easy to assess, but they aren’t a plan. In the 2nd discipline we try to define a leading indicator that we can work on at any time.

To accomplish my business goal, I need to improve my Amazon listing and find the right price such that it’s breaks even with the ad cost. To start, I will need to do a small ad spend just to see what my conversion rate is.

The easiest way to improve my listing is to get more reviews (aside: if you bought my book, please review it on Amazon). The best way to get a review is to ask readers directly, and to do that, I need to know who my readers are. So, the action I need to do is to write personal emails or LinkedIn DMs to people that have told me they bought the book and ask them to review the book. I will also use all my other marketing channels (e.g. this blog, my mailing list, Linked In, networking) to try to find my readers.

My fitness goal is just to follow Radically Simple Strength [affiliate]. I am doing the beginner plan and I have some time before this stops working. The leading indicator is my current max weight for 5 reps at a lift. I am doing the 3x/week plan, which cycles through the lifts. I should also make a nutrition plan to go along with this, but generally I have tried to eat cleaner and enough to support muscle growth.

For my personal goal, I need to just spend more time studying. I do DuoLingo, Fluent Forever, Mango, and my own Anki deck at various frequencies. But, I think that the main thing I could do to improve immediately is to listen to long-form beginner Spanish audio (like Dreaming Spanish) more seriously. I think my leading indicator would be to listen to one of these several times per week (the same one), at first with a transcript, and then over and over. The first few listens need to be focussed and undistracted (getting 100% comprehension), but later listens could be on walks, during errands, while lifting, etc.

Tomorrow, I will use these leading indicators in the 3rd discipline, which is to build a compelling scoreboard that tells you if you’re winning.

2026 4DX: First Discipline

This is the first post in a four post series that will show how I implement The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] (4DX) for my aspirational goals.

The first discipline is to identify your Wildly Important Goal (WIG). In the book, the authors make a distinction between the “whirlwind” of activity that you must do to keep the lights on and a WIG that will in some way transform your business (or life, or whatever). I use their method to set a WIG in three segregated parts of my life: business, personal, and fitness. To find this goal, I use the suggestion of The ONE Thing [affiliate], which has you identify the ONE goal that makes all other goals easy or unnecessary.

A WIG is similar to a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) or an OKR (Objective and Key Result). It should be easy to assess if you have achieved them. For a sports team, a WIG is winning the championship, which is a binary outcome on a specific date, but not a plan. For a battalion, it might be blowing up a bridge. We might change plans all year to achieve these goals, but hopefully, the goal is stable.

For the past month, and until the end of the year, I am doing experiments that will help me finalize them. Here are my ideas so far.

For my business, I want my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, to have reached its next stage of growth. Right now, I am not concerned with maximizing profit, because the book is in the seed marketing stage, where my goal is to get readers that will be future recommenders (following the techniques in Write Useful Books [affiliate]). My 2026 WIG is to have left the seed marketing stage and to move into a stage where ads are break-even.

For fitness, my WIG will be based around strength. I started a training program in November and it seems to be working, but that’s normal for untrained people—early gains are easy. I will finalize the exact goal at the end of the year, but it’s something like X pounds of gain on five lifts (Bench, Press, Row, Pull Down, Squat) while maintaining my body weight.

For personal growth, I have a lifelong plan to learn Spanish. I haven’t settled on a WIG. The easiest thing would be to pick a CEFR level and then find an assessment. DuoLingo uses this, but I’d like to find a different source to assess myself.

Tomorrow, I’ll go through the 2nd discipline which has you find a leading indicator that you can work on each day and will build up to your WIG.

Experiments for 2026

Near the end of the year, I start thinking of some aspirational goals for the next year. Rather than wait for January, I usually just start working on them now. I start experiments to see if I really want to do them.

For fitness, I’ve decided to really try to do a strength program. I found Radically Simple Strength [affiliate] by Paul Horn and read it on a flight. I started doing his beginner plan in November, and so far it’s going great. He has a simple way to measure progress—small increments of weight. It’s the perfect leading indicator (in the 4DX sense). My lagging indicator is my body fat percentage, which I measured with a DEXA scan and will check in on in 6 months or so. I think I’ll be able to just see the effect, though. I am also monitoring my weight. My goal is to be able to lift more weight, but weigh the same.

For my business, my goal is to sell copies of Swimming in Tech Debt, and my plan is to do one book marketing action each day. If I can’t keep a good enough selling pace, I will have to change that plan. In November, my experiment was to blog every day, which helps me reach my RSS subscribers. It also generates LinkedIn Post, substack, and email marketing ideas. So far, it’s been good enough to keep doing this in December.

For my personal improvement, I am embarking on a multi-year plan to become fluent in Spanish. I started six months ago with DuoLingo and my own flashcards. I do some studying every day, but in 2026, this will have to become more serious. This month, I will have to try to develop that plan, probably from looking through Fluent Forever.

2025 Retrospective

It’s not the end of 2025, but I usually spend December on setting next year’s goals and getting rest. So I’m not going to get much more done on my yearly goals. Before I think about 2026, though, it’s time to reflect on the past year. As usual, I picked a business, personal, and fitness goal to work on.

My business goal for 2025 was to finish my book, which I did. I had a successful launch and am halfway through my total sales goal. For 2026, I’ll concentrate on a process goal (4DX style). For example, to support the launch, I appeared on some podcasts, spoke at a conference, sent email to my list, and was lucky to have my Show HN do well on Hacker News. I’ll continue marketing the book in 2026 in this slow and steady way.

My fitness goals are a mixed bag. I have no problem doing regular exercise, but my fitness level feels stagnant (or put more positively: stable). In 2026, I am going to try something new.

I didn’t make much progress on my personal goal of building developer tools. In a way, my book’s spreadsheet is a developer tool, and that is now public (sign up here to get it). I have started building a tool based on it.

This progress is fine with me because these are aspirational goals. They are in addition to what I have to do. The book is meant to grow my business, not be profitable right away. I wanted to improve my fitness, and tried, but holding steady is ok too. Next year’s goals will be chosen because I seem to have some intrinsic desire to do them.

November 2025 Blog Roundup

I decided to try to blog every day in November in a tribute to NaNoWriMo. One trick I learned from Art and Fear, was to try not to have ideas for a blog post, but instead, have ideas for a series of posts. So, in the beginning of the month, I started with a ten-part series covering my new dev stack.

It starts with: Changing my Dev Stack (2025), Part I: Simplify, Simplify, and continues on to discuss Linux, Django, HTMX, VSCode and Copilot, Bulma, Sqlite, uv, other tooling, and networking. I also documented how my setup and philosophy helps me be more resistant to supply chain attacks.

I wrote about how I interleave reading, what I am currently reading, and what’s in my antilibrary (books I own, but have yet to read).

The rest of the posts were drawn from my current work. I wrote more about HTMX. I wrote about how fuzzy logic inference might be a better fit than LLMs for my project.

I’m not sure that I will keep doing this in December, but I do think I will write more here.

Thankful for Randomness

This Thanksgiving, I’m thinking about the random events in my childhood and teen years that led to my career as a software developer.

In middle school, I was lucky to have teachers like Mr. Abbey and Mr. Penner who got me into my first programming class, and Mrs. Cohen, who taught me to type.

My mom, who got me my first computer at Radio Shack.

My Aunt Grace, who got me a summer job in her office where a random programmer there took me aside and taught me SQL and where they had me make all of the spreadsheets in Lotus.

To the random guy at Barnes and Noble, who saw me in the programming book area and hired me to help him with a program he needed for his business.

Very thankful to the Randomness, the Great Creator.

My Current (late 2025) Interleaved Reading List

Yesterday, I wrote about Interleaved Reading (reading multiple books at once) and how it gives me a chance to reflect and retain a book’s contents. I try to pick very different books so that I have one to pick back up to match my energy.

I started Hypermedia Systems [affiliate] to give me a foundation on HTMX for a new project. A couple of chapters in, I decided to just try it. Now that I have something working, I went back to read the more advanced chapters. I like learning new tech this way rather than just reading because the building reinforces what I read. I also don’t want to just build because books like this are also about mindset, architectural patterns, and theory. Now that I have something working, I’ll just read the book through and should be done soon.

Earlier this year, I went to Germany and I wanted to be able to speak a little German while I was there. I had three months, so I crammed with DuoLingo and picked up Fluent Forever [affiliate] (here’s my review of it and the Fluent Forever app). There was no way I could implement that whole book in three months, but it did really help.

When I got back from my trip, I decided to switch to Spanish. I’ve been doing that for about six months and I’m ready to resume the book for more tips. This is a book I am reading just enough to implement the technique and then putting down. It might take months to finish.

I decided to pick up The Inferno [affiliate] by Dante (Cialdi translation) because I heard that there were references to it in Severance. I technically started it by reading the front matter and the first chapter (Canto), but I haven’t been able to get it into my routine. I have a small trip soon with flights back and forth. I should be able to finish it then.

I got Thinking in Systems [affliliate] by Donella Meadows as research for Swimming in Tech Debt, but stuck to the chapters on feedback loops (which is why I was reading it). It was hard to put it down, but I had to, and now I’m finishing it.

Even though some books take a while to finish, I sometimes find a book that I just want to read and finish immediately. Mostly this is because there is some information in the book I need. For example, when I went to LA recently, I bought and read Radically Simple Strength [affiliate] by Paul Horn after hearing him on a podcast. I have been wanting to lift weights more seriously, but I always overdo it and then stop. Horn’s method sounded like what I needed, and I finished it on the flight. It’s been working so far.

Before I interleaved books, I might have not bought a new book or waited until I was finished with my current one. Now, it’s more natural for me to be juggling a few for different time periods, so I can always put them all down if I just want to finish one.

I don’t know why it took me so long to interleave my reading. I consume other media this way naturally (e.g. TV series, podcasts, blogs, music). It might have made more sense when I needed to physically have the book on me, but they are mostly in Kindle now (and so on every device I own), so I have them all with me and can switch whenever I want.

If you don’t do this, it might sound confusing, but since I am usually working to retain the knowledge in between reading, it’s actually easy to pick the book up again.

Interleaved Reading

After graduating college, my book choices have been self-determined, and for a long time, I read them serially. This is weird because up until then I was always reading more than one book at time (by necessity).

But, a few years ago, while researching learning methods and incorporating spaced-repetition (i.e. flash cards) into my life, I saw a recommendation to interleave reading. The idea is simple: You read more than one book at a time. This might be obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. It was liberating.

One problem of reading a book all the way through is that you don’t have time to consider a chapter before moving on. When you interleave books, you have time to ruminate on them in the background. Better than that, you can use spaced-repetition to build flash cards that you practice before moving on. Then, while you are reading, the older chapters are periodically shown to you, reinforcing the whole book as you read.

Another exercise is to write your own synthesis of the chapter, applying it to your personal interests. This kind of note can be a blog post or a page in your Digital Zettelkasten. Over time, these original thoughts might build up to something bigger. For me, it was my book.

Finally, I read a lot of books that are meant to be used, not just read. They offer their own exercises. For example, here’s a post about the way I use The Artist’s Way, a quintessentially useful book, which encourages you to read a chapter a week and then do some work.

Before I did this, retention was hard. Now, it’s effortless (a few minutes a day in Anki) or the effort is welcome (it generates a blog post). But, it does mean I put books down intentionally, and so I need a different one to read while I work on retaining the first one.

(I meant to write about what I’m currently reading today, but I thought it would be good to write about this first so I can reference it. I’ll get to my current reading list tomorrow)

My Antilibrary

I buy books as soon as I think I will read them (usually from a recommendation), but it might take time for me to get to them. I used to lament this, but then I read this take. In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable [affiliate], Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Here’s what’s menacing me now from my antilibrary and will probably read soon:

Write a Must-Read [affiliate] by AJ Harper: This was recommended in my writer’s accountability group as something to read before you write a book. It’s too late for that, but I have a general interest in the topic. I’ve only had this for a week.
Software Productivity [affiliate] by Harlan D. Mills. I found a reference to this book in a reread of Peopleware [affiliate] almost exactly a year ago. It’s out of print, but I found a cheap used copy and got it. It’s been on my desk almost since then.
Vibe Coding [affiliate] by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge. I got this when it went on presale a few months ago. I better read this soon, because it will age quickly.
The Real Play Revolution [affiliate] by Ash Perrin. Ash is a clown who travels worldwide to refugee camps to entertain children. I saw him speak at PINC in Sarasota two years ago and bought the book there (mostly to support his efforts). There’s another PINC coming in a few weeks (Dec 11-13), which I highly recommend if you are in the area.

I usually read multiple books at the same time, picking up the one I have energy for at any given time. I try to keep them different from each other, but they are usually all non-fiction. I’ll write about that tomorrow.