This year has been a hard one.

This is largely owed to the current political climate in the US. There is so much I could say about this, but—in short—it has been soul-sucking to watch as some of the dumbest people in the history of this nation flagrantly violate the rule of law and take so much pleasure in inflicting pain and suffering on others.

It brings me great pain to think that many of the incredibly damaging actions performed by this administration are likely to not be healed within my lifetime.

To say that this put a damper on my year, as a whole, would be a woeful understatement.

In the face of this constant assault on my psyche, I tried my hardest to endure and find the moments of joy where I could.

Travel

I took two trips this year, both for work.

In April I spent a week in Boulder, CO with some other members of the Zed team. It was beautiful weather, and one day we took a hike up into the Flatirons:

Then in May I was in Utrecht for RustWeek. It was my first time visiting the Netherlands, but hopefully not the last.

Zed

Earlier this month I celebrated my two year anniversary at Zed. I can hardly believe it has been that long already! The time has really flown by.

At the start of the year, I was working on a new version of the Assistant in Zed, affectionately named "Assistant2". This would eventually become the Zed Agent that we have today. I built the early versions of tool use within Assistant2, which opened the doors to using it for full agentic coding loops.

In the later half of the year, I returned to my roots in web development, leading the efforts on building out the new version of Zed's web backend. I wrote about this a bit in "Head in the Zed Cloud".

It's been nice to do web development again. I didn't realize how much I missed it.

A large portion of my time at work this year was spent immersed in billing. This year we shipped, not one, but two different pricing schemes.

With the launch of the Zed Agent in May, we introduced prompt-based pricing, similar to what other products on the market were doing. I was never really a fan of this, as I think the incentives of these kinds of pricing models are misaligned.

We later walked this back and switched to token-based pricing in September, which I am quite happy with.

Aside from the bigger projects, I carved out some time for some smaller side-projects, like icon themes.

Stats

Code

This year was a very good year for coding.

My GitHub contribution graph is looking very healthy:

There are a couple days where I broke my coding streak, but for the most part I was writing some code every single day. Feels good!

My contributions in the Zed repo tapered off towards the end of the year:

This is, of course, because I was spending more of my time in the Cloud repo:

Writing

I wrote 4,640 words this year (not including this post).

This is lower than last year, despite my desire to want to bring up the amount of writing that I do. I want to do more here.

Despite the lackluster performance in my published writing, one practice I did try to improve on this year is being better at journaling. I logged 91 days of writing in my journal, so almost exactly 25% of the year.

In November I also revitalized the practice of keeping a daybook, where I jot down notes about what I'm currently working on. I was inspired by watching Adam Learn's Twitch streams and seeing how he takes notes while working.

I have 21 days logged in my daybook so far, and I'll be striving to keep up the practice going into 2026.

Reading

This year I wanted to start getting back into reading.

I reread the four books in The Inheritance Cycle, by Christopher Paolini. These were books that I read as a teenager, and it was a fun way to start easing myself back in to the habit.

Music

These are the albums I had on repeat this year:

1. Even In Arcadia - Sleep Token
2. Pantheon - Dance Gavin Dance
3. Isolation - Beautiful Death
4. A6 - Lights
5. By Still Waters - Beautiful Death
6. THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND - Bad Omens
7. Liminal_ - No Oath
8. Angel - Unprocessed
9. Sundowning - Sleep Token
10. Undying - Beautiful Death
11. In the Forest - Beautiful Death
12. I Love My Computer - Ninajirachi
13. Scorched Earth - Harakiri for the Sky
14. Blackbraid III - Blackbraid
15. Take Me Back to Eden - Sleep Token
16. skeleton - BLVCK CEILING
17. No Grave Can Hold Me - Beautiful Death
18. From The Past to The Future - Chikoi The Maid
19. VAMP - Magnolia Park
20. The Sky, The Earth & All Between - Architects

Beautiful Death had a strong showing, with five albums in my top 20.

(*Fin)

It's bitterly cold today, as it has been the past few days.

Despite my desire for nothing more than to engage with my usual New Year's Eve festivities of staying at home with a hot drink, tonight we will be out celebrating the arrival of the new year.

My youngest sister is getting married tonight, so we will brave the cold and biting winds to celebrate with her, her fiancé, and our family and friends.

It is emblematic, in a way, of how even in the coldest, darkest night, there is still the warm glow of a light that can be found.

Going into 2026, I am cautiously optimistic that things will get better.

Happy New Year!