This is the sixth January covered by these monthly updates, and the start of the seventh calendar year of monthly updates. For the past two years, I’ve said something along the lines of:
This was definitely a busy one!
That also holds true for this month!
I spent a couple of days in Las Vegas for CES. This was my first-ever CES; I learned a lot, and it was a positive for the company. Las Vegas is definitely not for me, but CES itself was great — it was great to have the chance to meet folks working on exciting projects.
M and I took a few day trips in our local area: for example, popping down to Yorktown to take photos on a chilly walk around:
— Joe Woods (@joewoods.dev) January 3, 2026 at 10:21 PM
We spent the last week of the month basically locked inside. Though Richmond didn’t get that much snow, it quickly turned into a layer of ice, making it basically impossible to go outside.
Tiny Cool Things
Starting this month, I’ve been trying to do one “tiny cool thing” a day. (More about this here.)
Here are some highlights:
- a directory of cool places to chat in Richmond, VA
- visualizing the location of most of the photos I’ve ever taken
- spending hours trying to map my personal photos to historic photos mapped on yesterdays.maprva.org
Though it technically wasn’t my tiny cool thing for the day, posting about the new LibCal parser for calendar.city led to Boris Mann nerdsniping me into implementing ATProto support for calendar.city-announced events. Which is exactly what this “Tiny Cool Things” habit is for!
All-in-all, it’s hard to do big, exciting things in 20-minute chunks, but I’m happy with the iterative improvements I was able to get in this month. Phoning in some days of Tiny Cool Things means that calendar.city is now extremely well tested. 🤪
music
writing
Two blog posts this month:
- Cool technology-related places to chat for Richmond, VA (This has been superseded by the calendar.city page, and now redirects there.)
- The tiny cool things post linked above.
books
This month, I finished 2 books:
- Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager. I liked this way more than I thought it would, though it took me a long time to get through; I learned quite a lot.
- A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett: excellent, just like the first one.
photography
This month, I added 375 photos that I took to my photo library.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- “Vivoid” by Marcus Spiegel
- “Soon We Will All Be Satou” by Kat Joplin
- “The Aliens” by Yurii Tokar
stats
This month:
- I typed 828,918 keys and clicked 107,217 times.
- I listened to 1,381 songs.
