Writing for the week of January 9, 2026

Last week was a milestone launch week at work. It’s a little bittersweet because we were wanting to deploy at the end of the year, but decided we needed another week or two to complete the work and wrap up testing. So last week saw the launch. The QA process was super smooth. The team did some solid work and shipped more than what was expected. This was one of the first projects where we applied a new process. We spent a fair amount of time gathering requirements, planning, scoping, and defining what we were to build. We broke it up into iterations. The second iteration will ship very soon. Everything went really smoothly. That’s gratifying. We’re improving.

I also spent some time last week updating our ingest process. We load some data out of databricks. The process is written in Python. We’re testing Gemini since GitLab Duo doesn’t really cut it. So I’ve used Gemini for some of these edits. It’s been a good experience. It made some suggestions that I wasn’t thinking of. It can go in the wrong direction some and I’ve backed things out, but overall I’ve been impressed with Gemini. I’m comparing it to Claude Code in my personal projects.

Speaking of personal projects, I’ve open-sourced the Schemabook app I had built. It had been a little while since I had made any changes to it. I decided late last year to shut it down. It was missing some key features like AWS and Databricks integration. Maybe Dbt and Fivetran as well. It served its purpose, but was going to need a full-time staff behind it in order to foster adoption in the greater data ecosystem. I think there is still an opportunity in helping stakeholders collaborate, but it’s not a one-person job.

Some articles caught my attention this week. Most were around planning and resolutions. It’s that time of year. Links below.

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Links

Impact Filter - Published on the Six Feet Up blog, a great framework for keeping yourself and teams honest on whether an action results in an outcome.

Daniel Pink on setting yourself up for success in 2026 - another one of those first of the year posts, but I liked a number of items he mentions, like taking 15 minutes to do nothing, no screen, no tasks, just sit and think

Tailwind has to lay people off because of AI usage to reach documentation. I really like Tailwind and pay for the UI components. It sounds like Google is now adding a sponsorship. Hopefully things turn around.

Kaizen explained. During this period of the year where people are creating epic resolutions, an alternative of small improvements is a valid alternative to explore. I want to apply this to super specific topics, like my editor, my terminal, automations (including home automations), etc.

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Music

Nitzer Ebb remix - Murderous is one of those songs from my youth that will always represent the energy of my teenage years. I love it. This remix is great. Love the highlight of the metal bar sound.

Atomic Bomb - Fluke cover by Cyanotic out of Chicago has been an ear worm for me lately.

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com-where I also post these newsletters.