Technology changes quickly. Tools, frameworks, languages, and platforms rise, mature, and fade with remarkable speed. What felt essential five years ago may now feel obsolete. Anyone who has spent time in technical work knows the quiet anxiety this can produce: am I keeping up? Against this backdrop, it is tempting to anchor our professional identity …
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Month:January 2026
What Am I Building My Work On?
Most of us spend our lives building something. We build careers, reputations, habits, relationships, routines. We build systems at work and patterns at home. Even when we feel stuck, something is being constructed beneath the surface. Time does not stand still, and neither do the structures that shape our lives. The question is not whether …
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Clean Code Is Not Just Style — It’s Responsibility
Clean code is often treated as a matter of taste. Tabs or spaces.Snake case or camel case.Long functions or many small ones. These debates can give the impression that “clean code” is largely aesthetic — a preference shaped by personal background or team culture. But this framing misses something crucial. At its heart, clean code …
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Vocation, Not Just Output
We live in a world that measures value by output. From an early age, we are trained to ask questions like What do you do? and What have you achieved? We track progress through metrics, milestones, reviews, and results. In professional life especially, worth is often inferred from productivity. To be busy is to be …
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What Are My Defaults as a Programmer?
Every programmer has defaults. Most of us just don’t notice them. Defaults are the decisions we make without consciously deciding. They are the habits that sit beneath our awareness: the libraries we reach for instinctively, the architectural patterns we reuse, the shortcuts we allow ourselves when time is tight. Defaults are shaped by experience, pressure, …
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Beginning Again: God’s Mercies in the New Year
The beginning of a new year carries a quiet emotional weight. Even when we try to ignore it, January still arrives with questions in its wake. Some of those questions are hopeful — what might this year become? Others are heavier — what didn’t I manage last year? Most of us hold both at once. …
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Foundations
Beginnings are strange things. They carry expectation, but also weight. Even for those of us who resist resolutions or roll our eyes at “new year, new you” rhetoric, the turning of the calendar still creates a pause. January presses questions upon us whether we invite them or not. What am I doing with my time?What …
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