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2026 Roadmap and Goals

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(Published: 2026-01-07)

2026 Roadmap and Goals

ā€œThe important thing is not your process, the important thing is your process for improving your process.ā€ ā€” Henrik Kniberg, on the continuous nature of self-improvement.

Happy new year to everyone around the world! I hope you too have had a lovely break from the whiny PMā€™s this past week or two, and enjoyed your holidays. A new year marks renewed excitement, hopes, and challenges. It is also a chance to reflect on the past 12 months and set concrete goals for self-improvement.

In that spirit, I want to take this opportunity to spell out some objectives I had in mind that I am aiming to achieve in this Year of the Horse. By doing so, I want to keep myself accountable so that I can revisit these objectives quarterly and do a final retrospective at the end of the year.

TL;DR (in no particular order):

šŸš§ Revamp website

(This is already in progress).

I first created and deployed this microblog site in late 2024 as an exercise for me to get into blogging, journalling, and sharing cool things Iā€™ve learned as a lens for my future self.

Iā€™m no web dev, so naturally I prioritized a simple, static, stupid design with monospace fonts and hilariously basic HTML/CSS tricks here and there. I even built tiny bash scripts: a pandoc wrapper for turning blog posts from markdown to HTML; an rssgen script to generate, update, and publish my RSS feed. All of the site code, of course, tracked with git on my remote VPS with a post-receive git hook to deploy it to /srv.

Itā€™s about time that I revisit this site and make it more presentable to people online. I think of it as my digital version of cleaning up my room, bucko (šŸø).

Some wishlist items on my agenda for tangible differences:

šŸ’¼ Career kaizen

Self-improvement is a foundational pillar in my life. Iā€™m allergic to feeling stale and behind, and am constantly looking for ways to improve my career trajectory. I enjoy it because Iā€™m genuinely passionate in this field. Learning things like DevOps and system design feels like gymming for my brain.

One of my favorite feelings is being able to apply skills and certification knowledge directly in my job as I have done for the past 4-5 years: DevSecOps, Cloud computing, AI (basic stuff), PowerBI, and more. Apart from the job clout it gives, this feedback loop is really fulfilling and gives meaning and purpose to my role as Solution Architect.

šŸ’° Chase the corporate bag

Iā€™ve been employed at my current job for about 4.5 years now (CV). I started out as a junior/trainee engineer (solutions architect role), and got promoted to ā€œSenior Engineerā€ in Feb 2023.

Since then, my role, impact, and scope as an engineer has grown vastly. This year alone, Iā€™ve achieved these milestones apart from growing organically as an engineer:

With this expanding role and ever-growing list of responsibilities (I consider myself as doing multiple job descriptions), as well as recent layoffs in our team (we are down to two engineers ā€“ yikes), I think itā€™s high time to negotiate a better compensation package.

Starting this year with a bang, Iā€™m demanding getting a better pay grade, otherwise Iā€™m looking elsewhere because this volume of work is not sustainable for what Iā€™m currently being paid in the long run ā€“ especially if you consider the additional workload weā€™re anticipating this year, my excellent performance last year, and my marital situation now.

šŸ³ Finally complete CKA certification

Last year I started my journey into learning Kubernetes. Like any other well-guided certification path, I aimed to get CKA certified to enrich my role as a GitLab DevSecOps lead engineer, and staying ahead of the curve as our infrastructure is moving more and more towards containerization (specifically with RedHat OpenShift).

Alas, life hit me in the face and I fell in love šŸ˜…. Marriage and its obligations made me re-structure my life and priorities. My better half, of course, took precedence. Fortunately, since things are settling down and I am getting back into my groove and routine, I have the opportunity to kickstart my learning journey back up and pursue this certification.

My goal is to get CKA certified by end of Q1 this year. To keep myself accountable, I will be blogging about the journey here.

šŸ¦€ Learn Rust

Last year I made a concentrated effort at learning Go. I built multiple tools specifically in Go such as o, the Obsidian CLI wrapper and pkm, my personal knowledge management tool. Even the backend for the app startup Iā€™m working on, KuwaitCare, is written in Go.

Iā€™ve gained a lot of skills and knowledge by focusing so much of my effort on learning the programming language through a mix of theory and project-driven practice with real-world applications that put that knowledge to the test:

Building on that momentum, I want to use that same project-driven learning methodology to the next programming language/framework that has been on my radar for a long time: Rust.

I wonā€™t jump into it blindly. I want to wait for project ideas to come to me first that I can use as an opportunity to learn and apply knowledge into Rust.

Ideas are welcome! Iā€™m mostly anticipating another CLI/TUI tool to implement. Perhaps something to do with homeserver management or similar.

šŸ‘Øā€šŸš€ Side hustles

This year I want to focus more of my free time on open-source projects I have and side projects I have going on. Some of my open source projects have gone stale over time and collected dust in the form of Issues and PRā€™s on GitHub. However, Iā€™ve made sure to clean those up recently over the past month or two and I have seen a significant uptick in their traffic, so it would be a shame not to capitalize on the moment to build something real and useful to the community.

ā­ Get notmuch.nvim to 100+ stars on GitHub

I wrote my Neovim plugin, notmuch.nvim, back in 2021 during COVID to turn my favorite text editor into a Mail User Agent (MUA) with basic features.

I left it stale this time last year with a very early release of v0.1.0 with humble and basic features for reading and sending email from within nvim. Over the past few months it accrued some issues and feature requests which I have recently tended to.

Now it is in a really promising position in its early stage where it can be built into a fully featured mail client with tons of nvim related features like inspecting, searching, tagging, sending with attachments, etc. and I am really excited to see it to its full potential.

I am already working on a v0.2.0 release with the following wishlist:

The main goal here for this year is to get this plugin up to 100+ ā­ stars on GitHub (itā€™s currently at 44 as of writing this blog post).

šŸ“ Roll out pkm first release

What better way to learn a programming language (in this case Go) than to implement yet another to-do list manager and notetaking system? I wrote pkm to make a ā€œchronological journallingā€ system where I can externalize my thoughts and view projects and their evolution over time through the axis of notes over time.

The time component is not to be understated at all. For knowledge workers like myself, our work environment demands that we adapt dynamically to rapidly changing requirements and decisions from every channel: meetings, one-on-ones, emails, informal conversations, overheard insights, etc.

For that reason, I sought to make this CLI (and TUI) app to better streamline the influx of information in the superhighway that is knowledge work. Its main idea is to allow you to ā€œviewā€ a project/topic/tag by displaying a list of notes (gathered information) over time to better track its evolution.

I wonā€™t go into too many details, or get too dramatically philosophical, so let me cut to the chase here: if you are familiar with Tiago Forteā€™s 4 Notetaking Styles, this app follows the ā€œArchitectā€ notetaking style.

Iā€™m planning on releasing a public version of this app soon that hopefully resonates with people with this idea of time-based knowledge organization.

šŸ“± Launch KuwaitCare app startup

This oneā€™s a slow burner. For a couple of years now Iā€™ve wanted to launch an app startup here in Kuwait to provide an app solution for healthcare/selfcare businesses and their customers. KuwaitCare is essentially a booking reservation system offered for self-care establishments (clinics, spas, barbershops, etc.).

Today these businesses rely on Instagram DMā€™s to handle reservations, bookings, questions, etc. This opens up the opportunity of bad faith business in many ways:

This app Iā€™m building is aimed at bridging this gap in the market to provide a comfortable and seamless experience for both customers and establishments in the self-care space, which is a booming market here.

I really want to get this thing to the finish line and complete a first MVP for it. So far Iā€™ve implemented many huge milestones (mainly on the backend) and I feel I need to focus much more on the look and feel this year to get this pushed out to store.

ā„ļø Nixify my homeserver

A year or two ago, I took one of my old gaming PCā€™s hostage, shoved it in my basement right next to the main home router, installed Ubuntu Linux, and turned this old PC into a glorified homelab/homeserver.

Currently I run a few really awesome self-hosted services on it:

I also use it as a convenient testbed for many projects that I work on. With Docker and Kubernetes installed on it, it doubles as a useful tinkering tool and cluster.

One of the things I want to learn this year is Nix, the declarative language, operating system, package manager, and system configurator.

As mentioned before, I learn the most through practical projects where I can get my hands dirty and apply my skills. This is no different.

So, I am planning to install NixOS on my homeserver to turn my messy homeserver into a reproducible, version controlled, declarative machine.

šŸ‘Øā€šŸ’» Blog more

This blog post takes the first step in doing so. I really enjoy the process of blogging and sharing my thoughts online, even though I donā€™t know (or care) who reads this.

I already have a backlog of things I would love to write about. But on top of that, Iā€™d like to use this microblog to document my journey ā€“ not just in progress updates for the above points, but also in sharing guides, issues and fixes, frustrations, general journalling/logbooking, capturing travel moments, and so much more.

A solid metric: I should keep a tangible goal of writing at least 1 blog post per month, as a goal to stick to this year.

šŸ’­ Final thoughts

If you reached this far, I really appreciate the time you took and hope I gave some cool insight into my life. Who knows, maybe this motivates you to start your own blog or personal roadmap to keep yourself accountable.

Hereā€™s to a beautiful new year filled with exciting moments!