Intro

It is finally time that I hold myself accountable for my learning. I love the tech industry and the pace it moves at with innovations but it’s also driving me insane with the amount of things we have to learn. I love meta-hopping from tech to tech but I feel like I don’t give technologies a fair shot. So I think I will split things up into three categories: Things I want to learn, Things I hope to get to, and Things I want to brush up on.

For things I want to learn, I want to dedicate the whole year to actively trying to improve my skills. Things I hope to get to, are nice haves I hope to get to but will probably not get to the outside of the tutorial. Last and finally, Things I want to brush up on are skills, tools, and technology I don’t get to use on a day-to-day basis.

Things I want to learn

Go

In the second half of last year, I started playing around with Go again because I missed programming. These days I only write scripts, declarative infrastructure code, or minor code and fixes for applications using a framework. Why Go of all choices? I just fell in love with the philosophy of Go and how it was created. It advocates simplicity and it promotes that you can do a lot more with less. Maybe I’ve grown wiser but both those things speak more to me these days. Also, the tooling around Go makes it a productive purpose programming language and C like syntax makes sense to my brain. Anyway, I highly recommend you read the original article by Rob Poke.

Proxmox / Homelab

I want to learn Proxmox because I want to set up a homelab for myself. The main motivation was caused due to accidentally screwing up my Ubuntu server running on an old laptop. Luckily I had everything back in GitHub but it was annoying reinstalling everything. So I might as well put these automation skills I’ve developed over the years to good use and create an environment where I can break and experiment with things. Plus, I want an HA k8s cluster running in an HA Proxmox cluster to play around with. I’m just waiting for a family member to hand me over their old unused laptops which happens to have really good specs.

Things I hope to get to

Elixir

Elixir is a programming language I hope to get to this year and if not then next year. The primary reason why I want to dig into this language is because the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM) is just fascinating to me. The idea of solving distributed computing in the 80s before it even became a problem to solve is just so cool. As to why Elixir and not Gleam or Erlang. Erlang was something I looked at briefly but the syntax wasn’t computing in my brain. Gleam’s syntax I liked a lot more than Elixir because it’s C like. I also like the fact that Gleam has errors as values and I’m a huge fan of errors as values because it forces you to handle those errors. The only reason why I didn’t choose Gleam was because of its maturity. But if I don’t get to Elixir this year, I may consider Gleam when choosing another programming language to learn in 2026.

Nix

I kind of want to try out Nix because creating a reproducible environment via this declarative language is pretty cool. Plus I want to get back to server management. I’ve always been an Ansible guy when it comes to configuration management but Nix is shiny and I want to try it.

Things I want to brush up on

Server Mangement

In the advent of containerization and Kubernetes, my server management skills are quite poor these days. I want to brush up on it because I miss managing servers. Plus, I’ve learned that tech eventually comes back full circle. I always use Trunk base development and Gitflow as an example. We went from merging to master being too unsafe to Gitflow. Then Gitflow was hard and disgusting to manage so we went back to merging back to master. Monoliths vs Microservices is another good example too. Anyways, back to good old Ansible.