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.
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