Happy new year everyone! I hope you're ready to start an amazing year. I'm surely ready, as you'll see soon!

As usual I published my 2025 Year in Review thinking about the last year and how things went. Check it out to understand what worked and what didn't work.

I know that these posts are not the most popular on the site, but I'll keep on doing them. I'll do it because these posts force me to stop and think about how things went and what I can learn from them. There's nothing worse than repeating mistakes and not improving, but it happens if we don't stop to think.

I also want to keep up with my initial mission of writing things for my internal reference and hopefully help you as well, and having a public reference of what happened is quite useful to me.

So let's check what's new and next for 2026.

New site

As you may have noticed the site looks different. I tried to keep things close enough to the previous look and feel, but after 6 years I needed to modernize it a bit (or a lot).

For those who like technical details, I moved away from Wordpress. It served me well but it always felt limiting and I ended up fighting it to get basic features or installing huge plugins to do something simple.

Here are the main reasons I did this:

1. Wordpress Drama - Last year the CEO of the company that builds and maintains Wordpress made controversial decisions and started posting and attacking other companies. They did very nasty things that I didn't like, so I decided to move away from it.
2. Scalability - Wordpress is a huge beast that requires plugins for even the smallest of tasks. It all adds up and the site started to be quite big and slow. I wanted something faster so the only solution is to build something that only has what you need. If you allow me the analogy, instead of having a truck filled with gadgets I don't use, I need a scooter to deliver content to you fast.
3. Test new ideas - I have a few ideas that I want to test but it would be incredibly hard to do them in Wordpress. By having my own platform, I can integrate them and quickly prototype and deploy things.
4. Costs - With a smaller site and without a dependency of plugins I can keep the costs of licensing and hosting quite low.
5. Security - The issue is not Wordpress itself, but plugins. Each that I install brings a lot of dependencies that increase the possibility of something going wrong. Limiting this and better controlling them would make things easier.

I'm fully aware that doing everything by myself is a burden and will take away time that I could be writing, but I think the end result will be a lot better. It's also a great learning experience, so it's a win-win.

So what do you think? There are bugs and I'll fix them, but please reach out and let me know what you think.

More changes and experiments

Now that the first version of the site is ready, I'll start iterating faster in deploying things. You'll see new experiments showing up. Most of them probably won't work, but I'll give them a shot anyway. It's a good learning experience. I'll also use these end of the year reviews to write about what I learned, so even if they fail, we can get good information from them.

These experiments are my way of doing two things at the same time.

1. Put the tools that I use outside so that I can get new ideas and feedback. I use a lot of scripts and other tools that make my life easier so if it makes yours as well then let's use and improve together
2. Allow you to automate in other ways other than Power Automate since it doesn't cover a some things that we need daily.

Coding has always been something I enjoyed so if I can have a good excuse to do it even better.

New content and new sections

I've been working on more content for you, and some new sections that I think will be great. These are now possible because of the new website and how it's structured. I can now start deploying new content formats to you without spending a lot of time trying to get Wordpress to do things the "right way" (or at least how I want them to be).

I've been working on a backlog of articles so that you always have something new to read, but building it takes time and building the site was quite a lot of work, so if I miss a target don't be mad.

Smaller Posts?

Speaking of more content, I see a lot of websites posting smaller posts with quotes and links to other sites.

As anyone that has a website knows, with AI, it's been harder and harder to get people over to your website, so doing this will increase your SEO and also allow for more frequent posting. It never clicked for me. I always wanted to provide my view and "twist," if I may call it that, regarding an issue and my posts are never small, for good reason. Explaining complex things in a simple way takes time and I can't achieve it in a few sentences.

But as always I'm open to experiment. What do you think? Reach out and let me know.

Final Thoughts

So I wanted to start the year with a big release. The new site is here. More will follow, but let's hope that this is what people call "starting with the right foot" :).

Happy new year everyone!

Photo by Sushobhan Badhai on Unsplash