I know that in the last couple of years, mainly 2025 was crazy, as we saw a lot of layoffs plus the big evolution of AI which supposedly will replace Software Developers in the next few years, and with that in mind I started to think about how I will keep myself in shape for the following years, and after some reflection I think I found the path.
Core
One of the most important things I will do this year and the following years is to keep revisiting basic concepts and get even more familiar with core tech, such as hardware. I have the feeling that most developers (mostly web devs) don’t know much about hardware, so this is something that I’m planning to get better.
My plan to achieve this goal will be pretty simple: I just need to play more with Arduino or an old PC which I can run experiments, and get more understanding about the file system, memory management, CPU management, etc.
Based on that, I will need to get better at languages that are closer to the hardware, such as C, C++, Rust and Go, and will run my experiments in such a way that I can feel I have full control over the machine.
Math
One myth I have heard in the past years is that we don’t need to be good at math, mostly because we don’t use math that often in our daily tasks, which is kinda true depending on the project you’re working on. But if we never get better at math, how do we pretend to understand AI at all? since it’s mostly math with some magic behind. So my plan is to revisit advanced math: Linear Algebra, Calculus, Probability, and Statistics.
Diving deep into AI
Since last year, I’ve already been using AI on my daily basis, which has been very helpful (of course, it’s not as good as it can replace any dev I know), but it helps with not much complex tasks.
My idea for this year is to understand more about how AI/LLMs truly work. We kinda already know in theory how it works from listening to a lot of talks from AI experts, but my goal is to actually get my hands dirty on AI core and demystify it as much as I can, not that I’m planning on building the next OpenAI, but mostly because I have the need to understanding what we’re doing and why we’re doing this.
Game development
I remember that when I started to learn how to code, one of the things that mostly wanted to do was to create my own video games just for fun (which I actually did), and recently I started to learn/remember game development again on my free time as a hobby just because it’s fun and I can put in practice a lot of great stuff such as physics and math. I don’t pretend to become a game developer, but I find it very interesting because in game we have a lot of different problems to solve than in web dev (which makes sense lol).
As of this moment, I’m getting back to where I stopped when I was learning game dev, which is Unity and C#. I plan to create a few small games during the year, and who knows, I may release a few of them.
Launch stuff
I don’t know you, but I’m a full-time developer, which means that I spend most of my free time learning and coding, because that’s what I like to do. The thing I have noticed the last few years is that I have done a lot of small side projects from start to finish, but I never released them online, just because I didn’t wanted to launch. For this year, I’m thinking a little bit differently. I’m planning on creating stuff and launching ASAP, not to get rich with it, but just to remember the old days when I used FTP to upload any new HTML I had written and was ready to show it to the world.
The first thing I’m launching is this blog, which will serve mostly as a reminder to myself and hopefully can help you as well.
Happy New Year, and let’s crack the AI core together.