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Welcome to 2026

|4 min read
personalclaude-code

It's the start of a new year, which means we've all had ample time to reflect on 2025 and synthesize what habits we'd like to start in 2026. Well, here goes one of those new habits for me.

Let's clear the air - I have not been one to post or even interact on social forums over the past few years. Nothing on LinkedIn, and very little outside of my apologetic Atlanta Falcons fandom on X. I've existed in the background, passively consuming content but hardly interacting. It's a shame, because 2025 was one of the most transformative years I've had the pleasure to live through.

I'm establishing this up front because putting my inner monologue onto the internet doesn't come easily or naturally. It's a muscle I'm going to have to build throughout the year. Hopefully it helps me get the ideas that fly through my head out into the world - and hey, maybe one of those ideas helps you think about things in a different way.

So why was 2025 one of the most transformative years I've lived through? Well, the very website you're reading this on is a byproduct of it.

I've always branded myself internally as a "technical" person. I lead a People Analytics team, I'm obsessed with data about quite literally anything and everything, I enjoy tinkering with hardware and exploring new software, and I consume more tech content than I probably should. I've been dangerous enough with some SQL skills and knowing my way around an Excel sheet - and truthfully, that was enough for my role most of the time.

But I'd have these grand ideas. Automating my entire life. Building a custom app for my QB-only fantasy football league with my buddies from back home. I'd start Python courses on DataCamp, enroll in learning tracks on Udemy, watch hours of YouTube videos. The ideas were there, the execution never was.

Enter 2025. Within my first 48 hours of using Claude Code, I went from the free tier to the $100/month Max plan.

Claude Code unlocked the ability for me to build my ideas, and there's something profoundly beautiful about it. I've learned more about software engineering, Python for data science, building visualizations, and training machine learning models in the past two months than I had in years of trying to teach myself.

Before 2025, if I wanted to build a machine learning model to predict headcount for a specific position group, it would require weeks of learning just to get to the point where I could start applying it to my work. It wasn't realistic given my existing workload.

Now? That's an afternoon. I can brainstorm what datapoints to include, have Claude explain the technical tradeoffs of each approach, build a spec from in-depth interviews, and start getting actual models into production.

Don't get me wrong—there's still an investment in learning how agents work, configuring skills, connecting to MCP servers, and building an architecture that works for you. But taking this dive over the past 60 days has been the most fun and rewarding work I've had in my career. I legitimately cannot stop building things.

To end 2025, I was able to build:

The website you're reading this post on would not exist without these tools. I don't know TypeScript or CSS. All I knew is that I wanted a personal website to build a portfolio over time, and I have too many thoughts about the world to keep them in my head. Through weeks of iteration with Claude Code—multiple versions, good feedback sessions from my wife—I shipped it.

It's January 1st, 2026. Every single person, no matter their programming or technical background, now has the ability to create their ideas and share them with the world.

And because of this new superpower, I'll be writing and sharing here. See you soon.