Monthly Recap - 2026-06 June

After two very intense months of working overtime in April and May, June finally saw things gradually getting back to a more sustainable pace. I chose to take it easy and not use all of the newly available free time for personal work though, as I felt like I was very close to getting burnt out if I maintained the same rhythm. I hope that taking a few weeks now, mid way through the year, to rest and re-energize will allow me to have a very productive and purposeful second half of 2026. Here's a quick summary of what went on in June for me.

Achievements

Personal Studies Progress

My personal studies habit got quite messy over the last year, and I have not done a great job of describing what I have been doing in the last few monthly recaps, so I will take a short moment to put everything back on track here. At about the middle of last year (2025), it became clear that the software development ecosystem was finally locking in to embed AI in its core loop. While I had been exploring the field for about a couple of years already by then, I felt the need to build a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of the possibilities and implications of this shift - so, I picked up two books on the topic to study (AI Engineering and Beyond Vibe Coding).

At the time, I was already studying two other books. This, coupled with a transition to a new team (and organization) within my company, with a whole new tech stack, proved to be too much change in too compressed a timeframe, and so I went through a couple of not very productive months just struggling with too many things to do and progressing too little on each of them. Early this year, I organized myself to address this, and reduced the amount of books I was working through at a time. So, as I mentioned in previous recaps, I finished them one by one, the last one being AI Engineering.

In June I finally reached the stage in which I could move on to pick new books to study. The first one has been Nexus, by Yuval Harari - I have been a huge fan of his work for more than a decade now, having deeply enjoyed Sapiens and Homo Deus, so naturally I wanted to go through the rest of his work. So far, it has been totally worth it, and I will share more of my thoughts once I finish it.

Electron

While I have developed several tools and apps to be used on desktop environments in the past, they have always been restricted to one of three stacks: simple Python apps with TKinter (one of the first programming languages I learned, always feels very comfortable to go back to), Java apps leveraging Swing for the UI (Java being my main professional programming language for cloud and microservices systems, it was always tempting to accept an old and rusty visual presentation in order to do what I consider myself to be best at) or straight out web apps based on HTML and JavaScript running on localhost (made for better visual presentation while still allowing me to leverage over a decade of experience writing cloud systems, but was a very clunky distribution model).

After learning about the open source Pi coding agent, and seeing some creative usage of it embedded in applications through its TypeScript SDK, I got really interested in exploring its ability to embed AI agents within applications. So I used this as an opportunity to finally do something I've been meaning to for several years now: learn Electron. This will allow me to create desktop apps with agentic capabilities, something that gets me really excited. And also, by using Electron I believe I will be able to continue leveraging my knowledge of web frontend technologies while having a much better distribution model for desktop apps.

I went through Stephen Grider's Udemy Electron course to do this, and it was a really great short introduction. Throughout the years, I have taken several of his courses, and his style always resonated a lot with me. The combination of going very deep into the fundamentals of what is going on and getting that understanding, plus having a preference for code-along sessions instead of just showing the final result is an incredibly effective teaching style. Based on my previous experiences I expected this course to do the trick, and it definitely did.

Plans for next month

For July, the main things I expect to achieve are starting the next career-related book in my personal studies (the ideal number for me is 2, one for career and one for hobbies - currently I am working only on Nexus) and continue building personal applications that explore agentic capabilities woven into specific workflows. I am definitely focusing on Electron + Pi at the moment, but I will also try to build a few experiments with LangChain, as that seems to be the standard that the market is converging on for now.

Monthly Recap - 2026-05 May

May continued the intense overtime push of April, but having been operating in this manner for a while, I was able to get more things done even with little free time. Here is a quick summary.

Achievements

Finished AI Engineering book

After restarting AI Engineering, by Chip Huyen, in April, I was able to finish it this month. This is one of the most highly regarded books in this new field, and for good reason. It covers the full lifecycle of AI systems - from data engineering and model selection to deployment, monitoring, and responsible AI practices in production. While I already had some practical experience with several of these topics from building JenAI and other personal projects, the book helped me contextualize and structure that knowledge in a way I had not been able to before. I am glad I was able to finally complete it, and although it goes in depth on some areas that I normally do not touch (such as model training and fine tuning), I feel like this will be a reference I come back to often.

Started using opencode

This month I also started using opencode, an open-source AI-powered coding assistant. I intend to write a dedicated post about this, as I found the experience really intriguing. For now, it suffices to say that agentic coding assistants in general really feel like the next step for AI. Not the end state, but a significant (and positive) advancement in the capabilities that this technology bring to the table. I already used Claude Code to a good extent, but having an open source alternative, which has flexibility to work with several models from different providers, and comes out of the box with free options, democratizes the access to a whole new level. Really excited to explore the implications of this!

Started AI Engineering Track Udemy course

To complement the book studies, I also started the AI Engineering Track on Udemy. This is a more hands-on, practical course with a stronger emphasis on implementation and tooling. I have just started working through it, and my plan is to go through it systematically over the next few months.

Monthly Recap - 2026-04 April

April was a month with very little spare time for me. A huge rush to wrap up the work for the mid-year event of my company meant that every developer worked double shifts during this period. The bright part is that this time I was able to keep up my personal studies habit - although not much else. Here's a quick summary.

Achievements

Restarted AI Engineering

Last year I started studying AI Engineering, by Chip Huyen. This is one of the most highly regarded book in this new field, with some of the most prominent people in software engineering giving it high praise. Due to the several competing priorities along the way, though, I had to stop studying it for several months. Having just finished Beyond Vibe Coding in March, this month I was finally able to restart it. Maintaining consistency with this habit has been a focus for me this year, and I am very glad I was able to stick with it this month, despite the challenges.

Downpoints

Overtime

As I mentioned before, April was a very difficult month with regards to work-life balance. Of course, having to put some extra effort at specific times when the company needs is part of being a professional, but I hope this does not become the new normal for us.

Monthly Recap - 2026-03 March

March was a month of wrapping up ongoing work and exploring new horizons. After a couple of months getting my feet wet with different AI productivity ideas, I was able to finish studying a book I picked up specifically about this topic, as well as presenting a hands-on session at an internal developer conference in my company. Here is a quick summary.

Achievements

InnerSource synergy with agentic AI presentation

This month I had the opportunity to present at an SAP's internal developer conference. It was my second time presenting at this event in a row. I talked about how the InnerSource philosophy and techniques can have a positive synergy with agentic AI software engineering. I think there is a lot of unexplored territory in terms of how we can engineer collaboration in a way that optimizes the value provided by AI and human agents. It was a great experience to share my thoughts and to connect with other developers within the company.

Finished studying Beyond Vibe Coding

I finished studying Beyond Vibe Coding, a book by Addy Osmani about the evolution of software development with generative AI. It goes way beyond the superficial "AI writes code for you" narrative and dives into practical strategies for integrating LLMs into the development workflow in a sustainable and effective way. It covers topics such as prompt engineering patterns, context management, and how to structure projects to leverage AI without losing control of the codebase. While I think it suffers a bit from the pragmatics of this format for the current context (AI tools evolve way too fast for a book cycle - books shine in consolidating the best practices about things that have been around for a while, but for AI it seems that articles are able to cope with the pace of change better), I found it to be a very practical read and will definitely apply some of its insights going forward.

Monthly Recap - 2026-02 February

February was a month for exploration. With the increasing work load at my day job, I used most of my free time to learn and try out a few new things. As expected, all of them related to AI. Here is a quick summary.

Achievements

Productivity tools

While I continue to use JenAI on a daily basis, it remains (by design) a very limited tool. In order to leverage the benefits of AI more widely, I started developing a few more personal productivity tools. The gaps from JenAI that these cover are a simplified persistence model, more intuitive UI and more sophisticated context management. I have also created a few automations to run AI tasks on schedule. As of now, I have no plans to make either of these open source, as they are more exploratory and specific to my work flow.

ComfyUI

Another area of AI that I had not touched for a long while is image generation. While I played around with Stable Diffusion in its early days, and covered image generation on Chargen, it is not something I do regularly. In February I took some time to update myself on newer tools for this, and did a few lessons about ComfyUI. It seemed to me to do a better job of offering enhanced capabilities around the raw image generation models than the other tools I know about, and I look forward to work more with it.

Finished Rich Dad Poor Dad

On a more personal level, I finished studying Rich Dad Poor Dad as part of my personal studies habit. This took longer that I expected, as I started the book roughly in the middle of 2025, but had to interrupt the studies several times along the way. As someone who had never invested before, I really enjoyed the book and found it to be an excellent introduction to the topic.

Monthly Recap - 2026-01 January

January is always a month for planning. This year, I have a really ambitious roadmap, with several times more goals than I take on average. It will be challenging to meet them, but I am very excited about the prospect of having a more active year!

Achievements

Started AI Projects

One of my goals this year is to start leveraging AI more widely in my work. While I have been studying it and building some projects around generative AI tools, I want to incorporate it more in my everyday activities.

Not only I plan to use AI to get more work done, I am also determined to create a lot more systems that use AI creatively. I do not want to share the details yet, but I will surely write about them as the year goes. I already started with some, and the results have been very inspiring!

Released JenAI v1.8.0

I have been building JenAI since 2024, and despite its simplicity it is still a tool that is very much present in my routine. This month, I released a new version (v1.8.0) adding database support for both Postgres and SQLite. JenAI always had an emphasis on local environments, and one aspect of this was its usage of the filesystem as the only persistence option - while I remain fully commited to keep it local-only, supporting the usage of a database (which still has to be local, anyway) allows for more easily integrating complex features, such as AI-initiated chats and embedding JenAI as the underlying engine for a broader AI system (a future project of mine).

Downpoints

Personal studies lacking

Having difficulties to find time for personal studies was a recurrent theme last year - unfortunately this year started in a similar way. I am not too concerned about this, because I had very good reasons to divert my time to other projects and I have a strong plan on how to get back to this soon, but it still was a negative aspect of the month.

Plans for next month

More AI Engineering studies

Last year I started studying AI Engineering books alongside the classic career and hobby studies I do. This did not end well, as I was overwhelmed with tasks and almost never got the time to do them all. So for February I plan to retake these studies, and come up with a better plan on how to address all the needs in a healthy and sustainable manner.

Year In Review - 2025

2025 was a very busy year, marked by constant changes and several ups-and-downs. While I have been writing monthly recap blog posts for quite some time now, my plans to write an yearly review were left behind last year - I intented the first one to be about 2024, but only now I am able to catch up and write a first attempt at summarizing the year. I will try to be consistent with this, and follow up with one for 2026, 2027, and so on.

Highlights

I will not go deep into the details of each achievement, as that would lead to a very long post and the content would likely be redundant with other posts I did during the year. So, I will just arpeggiate them with a brief description.

Here were the main highlights of the year for me, grouped by their relevant categories:

Personal studies

As a direct consequence of participating in several technical book clubs at work, I took on a personal habit of picking books to study by myself, with the same level of attention that I give when attending a book club. I have been doing this since 2021 (so about four and a half years by now), and it has been an amazing source of personal growth for me. I aim to put around 30 minutes every working day in studying either a career-related book, or a hobby-related book.

This year, however, I was very inconsistent with how much time I was able to put into this. A mixture of going back to working on-site most days of the week, applying and moving to a new team inside my company and buying and moving into a new home meant that I was most often not doing these studies than doing them. Nevertheless, I was still able to go through a few books, here they are:

Studied The Captain Class

Great book about leadership, I started it in late December of 2024 and was able to finish early this year. I saw a lot of the Scrum Master role reflected in the Captain role that the book talks about, and was able to take several lessons about how I could be a more effective Scrum Master. I read this as part of career studies.

Studied Building Successful Communities of Practice

Short but useful book, which I picked up because I wanted to start some groups inside my old team as a forum for bringing improvements to what is a very, very old and static mindset. I ended up getting a position in a different team before I was able to stablish too many things, but I did set up a Code Quality forum that as far as I know is still going strong, so it served its purpose. I read this as part of career studies.

Studied The Prompt Report

Paper about prompt engineering, useful because I have been steadily trying to get more involved with AI Engineering these past few years (yes, before the crazy push we have right now for everyone to become an AI Engineer). I read this as part of career studies.

Started studying Fundamentals Of Software Architecture

Longer book which is an introductory-level presentation of Software Architecture as a field, with its responsibilities, history and peculiarities. I started it roughly in the middle of the year, but was not able to finish yet. So far it has been interesting, although nothing ground-breaking and seems pretty biased at times. I read this as part of career studies.

Started studying Rich Dad Poor Dad

The only hobby studies book I picked this year. I started reading it around August, and wasn't able to finish within the year. However, that should count in favor of the book, because it led me to start investing for the first time, and for several months all my personal time was spent in studying about different types of investment and structuring my finances. This book was really life-changing for me. While I have read several criticism of the book, and I do not agree with everything said in it (in fact, my personal interests and investment profile is very different than that of the author, and I would never want to make the same investments that he does), I still found the content very inspiring and educational. You do not need to blindly follow everything a book says to get value out of it. I read this as part of hobby studies.

Started studying AI Engineering

While I usually separate my studies in either career or hobby, the accelerating pace of AI led me to try a new approach this year. I started adding a technical book as well into the mix, effectively making it three categories. This did not go as well as I expected, I ended up having way too many tasks with less free time, and started skipping the studies for weeks at a time. In 2026, I plan to restrict it to at most 2 categories again. Regardless, the first technical book I picked up was AI Engineering, which is a foundational book for the most hyped type of development of our current times. I have not yet finished it, and so far it has been instructive but not particularly engaging. I read this as part of technical studies.

Started studying Beyond Vibe Coding

The second technical studies book I picked up was Beyond Vibe Coding, which tries to give some guidance of how to effectively incorporate AI development tools into solid engineering practices. This has been more useful than the AI Engineering book I mentioned previously, but it does have the feel of an extended blog post. It is unclear if the content in it will still be relevant 2 or 3 years from now. Nevertheless, I intend to finish it in 2026. I read this as part of technical studies.

Portfolio projects

I like to keep a portfolio of representative projects in my Github profile. These are not only public and open source, but also display, as much as possible, the engineering practices that I value: automated tests, automated CI/CD pipeline, good documentation, etc.

Each year I try to develop at least 1 new project, but I also keep releasing new version of older ones when I have anything I want to add to them. Most of the new projects are focused on exploring how to incorporate LLMs and other generative AI tools into software systems as more than mere chatbots.

Here are the relevant developments of 2025:

Several new versions of JenAI

JenAI was my first portfolio project around generative AI tools, and is basically a terminal chatbot (I have written a blog post about it). I use it extensively for personal purposes, and have built quite a bit of tooling around it for myself. It is intended to be a personal tool, so I have no plans of putting effort into making it generally useful to a large audience, despite being very fond of the project.

In 2025, I released two patches for it: v1.7.2 and v1.7.3, both to improve the sanitization of strings so that it doesn't break when exotic characters are used in the conversation.

Developed LLP (Local Language Practice)

Local Language Practice (LLP) is a system to practice languages through a roleplay chat with LLMs (I have also written a blog post about this one). This was my main project for the year, and it is around a topic that I really want to explore further in the near to medium future: generative AI applied to education. It is a project I have used quite a bit for real learning, but not as much as I wanted because I have had very little time to invest in studying languages this year, unfortunately.

I released the first version in April of 2025 (v1.0.0), and two more versions later in the year (v1.1.0 and v1.1.1).

Developed LicLacMoe

LicLacMoe was more of a fun project, one in which you can play tic-tac-toe against an LLM (as per usual, I have a blog post about this one as well). I like to think of it as "the most useless application of LLMs you will likely ever see". Despite the obvious silliness, it was also an interesting study about how to use LLMs for specific tasks, instead of a generic chat interface. It also allowed to verify the (admittedly obvious) fact that reasoning models are better at playing games with logical rules than vanilla models.

I also released three versions of this one in 2025, all of them in May (v1.0.0, v1.0.1 and v1.1.0).

Finished 4 first steps into AI Engineering projects

Back in 2024 I had started a series of four projects I called "First Steps Into AI Engineering" (guess what? I also have a blog post about this). These consisted of JenAI, Chargen, LLP and LicLacMoe. In 2025 I was able to complete the last two, and wrap up the series. This series was very useful for me to learn how to build systems around generative AI tools (not only LLMs, but also image generation ones), something that is likely to become the baseline of contemporary software development.

Created programming language learning projects curriculum

Late in the year, after moving to a new team that was using Go as the primary programming language (and having no prior experience or knowledge about Go at all), I saw myself having to very quickly learn a new language and tech stack, with the all-too-helpful but way-too-helpful assistance of AI coding tools. While I was able to very quickly become productive, I felt like I didn't understand very well the code I was shipping, and that annoyed me. So I set out to create a curriculum of projects for myself that covers most of the basic concepts I have used in my career, the purpose of which being that if you implement all the projects it contains in a particular language, you should feel very comfortable developing software in that language. I am currently applying it to Go, and so far it has been proving itself as useful as I intended it to be. (Of course, I have a blog post about that).

Developed Catcher Server project

In the end of the year I also developed the Catcher Server project (and wrote a blog post about it). It is somewhat of a break with the large line of AI-related projects I have been implementing in the past two years, but I think it is a nice little tool that already proved useful to me a few times. I also used it as an opportunity to apply full vibe coding in building something a little more complex than simple scripts - applying this to a simple and low risk project was very good to build experience for more challenging ones in the future.

Professional

I also had a quite busy year at work, being involved in a series of initiatives, moving to a new position and winning a few prizes.

Open Source Champion

I have been an Open Source Champion within my company since late 2024. However, the first months were mostly onboarding and ramping up in the topic and the role. In 2025 I was finally able to really make some meaningful contributions in this role. Beyond just Open Source, I have also been heavily involved in the topic of Innersource (applying Open Source concepts and techniques in the context of a private company). As part of this role, I presented the topic at internal developer conferences of the company, organized hackathon-style events and delivered workshops as part of some of our internal development curriculums.

Innoweeks as Dev Lead and MVP

At my company we have a month-long event called Innoweeks, in which we get together with customers to build an MVP that solves a real business project in a burst of short iterations. I had participated in 2019 and 2024, and I did so again in 2025. This year, I was the dev lead for the team, and received the MVP prize for my team at the end of the event.

Won third place prize at Innovation in my location

I work at one of the biggest locations my company has - we have over 3000 full time employees here. Which means we get to do a lot of cool events and initiatives based here. In 2025, the location offered prizes to the people who got involved the most in boosting innovation at the company. The way it worked was that each participation in innovation events or activities would give the participant a certain number of points along the year, and the people who won the most points at the end of the year would win. I was very honored and happy to be in the podium for this, I was the third person who contributed the most among the 3000+ employees we have.

Moved to a new team

I rejoined my company in 2024, but I did so in a team that was really not a good fit for me - it was responsible for a very old monolithic system and still operated with waterfall methodology, both of which I am strongly opposed to. After I concluded the one year that the company demands you stay in a position before applying to another one, I applied to join a new team working in building the platform that the company runs on. While I am enjoying the current technology stack, and our technical scope, much more than the previous one, unfortunately the new team also has several leadership and organization issues that I am trying to improve, little by little. But overall I am much happier now than last year.

Learned Go programming language

With the move to the new team, I also had to pick up the technology stack the team was using. In this case, it was mostly the Go programming language, with Kubernetes as the runtime. I am already quite familiar with Kubernetes, but I had never worked with Go before. So that was an opportunity to learn the language, and add another tool to my toolkit.