Happy 2026, everyone!
My partner and I had plans to go to a house party for this year’s new years celebrations, however, because of a positive COVID test, were force to stay at home. But we had a blast welcoming the new year anyway, with a beautiful dinner for two, obligatory Dinner for One and some dancing –* all from the comfort of our home.
And being forced to stay home had another benefit. I finally took the time to revive my personal website!
Already last year, I said to myself that it would be nice to start writing a bit more. Whenever I have to write I greatly enjoy it and I’m grateful I get to do it fairly regularly at my job at Datawrapper. But I’ve also wanted to write a bit more personally, about projects, learnings, or just random thoughts.
The only problem was my personal website had been stuck in the “Coming soon…” state for way too long and setting it up properly had just never bubbled to the top of my priority list with everything else that’s going on all the time.
But this year – with the power of Codex – I finally decided to give it a go. And man, it’s just amazing. In a matter of minutes, I (or rather Codex) had ported my website from Gatsby to SvelteKit (my now preferred stack) and had given life to the projects and publications pages. And it only took one prompt more to also set up this blog.
The experience of using coding agents like Codex is nothing short of mind-blowing. As someone who earns his livelihood by building software professionally, it’s daunting and exciting at the same time.
While I’d like to reflect on this revolution a bit more in the future, for now, I’m just happy that Codex took care of the boilerplate so that I could actually sit down and write this (not AI generated ;-)) blog post.
Let’s see if 2026 will be the year I actually start writing. At least, I won’t be able to use “technical hurdles” as an excuse for procrastination anymore.
Stay tuned!
*I've been a fan of em-dashes long before LLMs made them famous so I'm gonna keep using them.