Planing depends on deterministic view of the future. I used to plan (esp annual plans) until about 5 years. Now I scan for trends and prepare myself for different scenarios that can come in the future. Even if you get it approximately right, you stand apart.
For tech trends, I read Simon, Benedict Evans, Mary Meeker etc. Simon is in a better position make these predictions than anyone else having closely analyzed these trends over the last few years.
I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].
If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.
I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.
I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:
- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made
- I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing
- Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up.
- This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.
Benefits I've seen:
- I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization
- Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more
- People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.
Having a daily routine. It helps you start your day well. But to have this routine, you need to get a lot of other stuff well too (ex: if you want to get up fresh, you need to go to bed on time. If you have to go to bed on time, you need to finish your work at least 30 min prior and so on). I wrote about my morning routine here: https://www.jjude.com/morning-routine/
As Ed Throp says, there are offense & defense mechanism to longevity (which includes mental health). He says,
> The goal is to have a long life that’s also a healthy, productive one. As opposed to being in assisted living somewhere.
defense: minimize chances of bad outcomes which includes regular check-ups
offense: exercise + diet
Read the book Smartcuts and see if you can use one of the 9 ideas the author talks about to move to a new situation (review here: https://www.jjude.com/smartcuts/)
Since you have work experience in backend (doesn't matter java / c#), and AWS certifications, leverage them. I would advice against going to front-end at this moment. FE is comparatively a different beast.
Without knowing lot of your details (your domain, residence etc), here are some options that I could think of (some of which I have done in 30 years of experience).
- move to a company that uses the same tech but in a different domain (say logistics to finance) and then jump from there to a company that uses a modern tech (finance legacy tech to fintech company using rust or go)
- within the same domain can you create a portfolio of side projects which are all aligned in some way - say if you are in retail, can you create projects on teraform scripts to deploy .net projects to multi-cloud (gcp, aws, azure); or for supporting blue-green deployment; idea is to use your "modern" knowledge within legacy but creating public portfolio to showcase your "modern" knowledge.
- find a local leader that you admire (if you go to city-wide tech conferences or something like that you can find some like this), and ask them if you can help them with something as a side-hustle. They don't have to pay but they have to write a recommendation on LinkedIn for your work. Most tech leaders who talk have some projects going on and they struggle with their time. You can help while building a good portfolio
- combination of some of the above
Do a combination of content creation (git projects, video streaming of coding, writing on LinkedIn ...), building a network, and obtaining social proof (recommendations). This will help you get good jobs.
I am working on something similar but with a different view. I like to get random essay to read whenever I am bored or in-between tasks. So I developed this: https://read2reflect.com/
I have added only about 35 essays for now. Might pick up some from your list too.
That's pretty cool. I also have a "random article" button at the top right, which is very fun to use. I've discovered a lot of great content by clicking on that button.
Planing depends on deterministic view of the future. I used to plan (esp annual plans) until about 5 years. Now I scan for trends and prepare myself for different scenarios that can come in the future. Even if you get it approximately right, you stand apart.
For tech trends, I read Simon, Benedict Evans, Mary Meeker etc. Simon is in a better position make these predictions than anyone else having closely analyzed these trends over the last few years.
Here I wrote about my approach: https://www.jjude.com/shape-the-future/
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