Nick's 2026 New Year's Resolutions

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Hey folks, it's New Year's Day. By the time you watch this, it's probably next week. Though, I figured we'd go through some New Year's resolution ideas that I'm thinking about for myself. And uh kind of invite you into the comments if you want to share what you're thinking about trying to do or focus on more this year. I realize too, like don't get me wrong, New Year's resolutions are kind of funny. like there's stats and stuff that show that most people drop off their New Year's resolutions like pretty damn fast. Um, and I'm not trying to pretend like I'm uh, you know, invulnerable to that, but uh, we'll see. Um I think like one of the really big things for me and it's probably not going to be surprise to a lot of you if you are uh you know uh familiar with the channel. I'm going to be really trying to focus on Brand Ghost a lot.

Um, we have a a team member that uh should be joining in a little bit. That should give us a little bit more capacity. Um, so I I suspect for myself like the beginning of this year is going to be pretty rough because I need to focus more on like sales, marketing, outreach, that kind of thing, which is stuff that I'm not good at, but I need to do it to get better. I've talked about this a ton in other videos. Um, so I'm trying to do more of this despite it being wildly uncomfortable, but at the same time, like I I need to build the software. Um, so I can't just do nothing. Uh, especially as we get more users and we need to support more and there's feature requests, right?

If I'm doing outreach and someone's like, "Hey, this seems cool." Um, and then they start exploring the features and they're like, "Hey, I would totally, you know, subscribe to this service if it had whatever." Like if that's going to be the thing that moves the needle, um, then like I have to go build it. Um, and it's I should mention this too. It's like a that's a bit of a trap. You got to be careful about that. Uh, and if you're if you're not totally familiar with this kind of stuff, like, you know, if you've never tried building things to to sell on your own or you haven't worked at like a startup, um, one of the traps you can fall into is like anyone that puts money in front of you, you just kind of jump around to go chase things down. And there's more to it because yes, of course, if someone's willing to pay, like that's probably something you at least want to entertain the thought of.

But the reality is that uh you don't want to end up in a position where you're sort of just like building whatever people ask for into the same thing and you don't have really have a cohesive uh product offering. So we're of course not at that point. It's not like we're sitting here and like there's a million people waving money at us going if there was only one more thing. But uh at the same time it's like something I'm trying to be aware of so that um as things ramp up more and more then we start to um see maybe a little bit more of that where we have to prioritize between different things or we have to think about hey we have you know x number of users asking for thing y and you know each variation is slightly different. what is the real problem that we're aiming to solve across this, right?

Like is there some some commonality, some overlap? Cuz otherwise what happens is you build like, you know, 10 things that are all kind of similarish or solve the problemish in 10 different ways and you could have done like, you know, one or two things really well uh instead of all of those, right? So just something I want to keep in mind as we're going. But uh definitely the beginning of this year I I really need to focus on um the sales and marketing stuff. So um I I spoke with the team already about how at least I'm thinking of doing that. And it's kind of interesting because a bunch of this I've been doing with my own social media for my personal brand, right? Like the fact that you're watching this video on YouTube, right? even if you're brand new here means if you're, you know, this far in the video, I've created some content that's caught your attention and you've listened this far in, which is great.

Um, and we need to be able to do that with our business, right? This this channel is a personal brand kind of thing, right? I do it because I enjoy it. Uh, again, I've told people this, like Code Commute does not pay the bills. code commute does not even pay for my uh toll road usage when I drive to work. So, um we're a long way off from uh Mr. Beast style success here, but um the reality is there's views, right? There's views, there's people that engage. Um and I need to be able to repeat something uh similar. And so I'm not, you know, I'm not an influencer. I, you know, I do content creation, but it's not a full-time thing. The fact that I'm code commute's my channel where I talk about this stuff literally in between doing things, right? That's the benefit of doing a commute style vlog is that I can I can take advantage of that otherwise downtime to make content.

So, I, you know, I'm not a full-time influencer, content creator, and that means that I have to be very um what's the word I want? Like, can't my brain's not turning on. I need to be um it's a simple word. I just want to say that like I need to be uh dedicating specific time to doing it. Uh, like I can't make brand ghost content driving in a car. It would be be weird. Like I could do, you know, content creation commute or something, but like I I don't know. I feel like that's not really it's not going to be the same type of thing. So, I need to be uh carving out dedicated time to make um content around content creation. And I do want it to be helpful.

I don't want to just make videos like I've done a couple of brand ghost videos where I'm walking through features of the product, but like that's not um I don't know if uh again depending on the audience you might not be familiar with this kind of stuff, but you can't just like uh imagine if every video I made on Code Commute was me being like, "Hey, buy my courses, buy my courses." You'd probably not be here, right? Um, so I want to make sure that I can provide helpful information for people that are creating content. And then, you know, on top of that, by the way, I'm creating software that helps with that. I have a platform to help with that. And so, even if people aren't interested in buying, that's totally fine. I want to be helpful and I want to make sure that if people are engaging with the content and they're, you know, I can listen to what challenges they're having and that kind of stuff.

But point is I need to um kind of create more brand ghost content. So I'm going to be trying to focus on that. The um the challenge with that is of course like I already said I need to be coding for brand ghost. So especially until our next team members coming on board. Um but I I don't want to drop the ball on my other content, right? Like I don't I'm not going to stop doing code commute. In fact, um I I have to go to the office uh three days a week. I think starting in February for Microsoft. That's Oh I'm in the wrong lane here. Oh no, I don't know. My brain's not working. Um yeah, I have to go three days a week. Uh which is one more day a week than I'm doing right now. And so, you know, code commute's not going away.

dev leader. I used to do three full length videos a week. I'm down to like two, one or two. Um, and that doesn't feel great. Like I don't I don't like slowing down on that. But at the same time, like I don't know. Like I I also can't ramp it up. So reality is I might have to go down to one video a week on Dev Leader and then I have time to make brand ghost content, right? Um, I'm trying to write a ton of blog posts for Brand Ghost and I I think depending on how many videos you've seen of mine, I've already told people like I haven't written a technical blog article since like 2024. And so that's a really hard thing for me because blogs take a long time to write, right?

AI helps with that, but like I don't want to just make a blog post that's like clearly like someone asked Chad GPT to write a blog and you're like why am I why didn't I just go to Chad GPT and ask about this? Um, so blogs take time and effort and blogs were the first thing that I dropped when I was doing more content creation. video to me is um feels much more valuable. So, it feels like I'm kind of taking a step back, but the reality is like we need we need more written content. Um, the beauty of all of this is that with the Brand Go system that we have in place, like you know, I can I can literally take the stuff that we're doing and repurpose it like and and basically use Brand Ghost itself to help with all of this. So, um, that's going to help.

But, uh, that's a lot of like the sort of outbound marketing, well, sorry, content creation to publish marketing material. um so that it's inbound and then I think I misspoke. It's on outbound marketing. The I need to do outbound uh you know connections with people and I don't know the the cold outreach to like random people. I I think one of the reasons obviously, you know, if I'm being honest, it's cuz I'm uncomfortable doing it, but I think one of the other reasons that I'm hesitant is like we don't charge a lot for our service. So, if I have to go spend like hours every day doing outreach to individuals like one at a time, it's like that's really really really ineffective. So, I'm not trying to make an excuse to to not do outreach, but I think that I think I need my outreach to be more targeted.

Um, so not just anyone who's creating content, but like basically people that would be um interested in partnering with us somehow. So, I need to prioritize doing it, but I need to be like strategic about it because uh that's a that's a heavy lift. It's a lot of time to do it. So, lot of content creation and marketing material. I have to do a lot of outreach. And so my, you know, primary focus for 2026 is like is making sure that I'm doing that because I've been, you know, constantly putting it on the back burner. And I would say over the last I mean I was in Mexico for vacation two weeks ago, but just prior to that and even this week I've been spending my time outside of work like doing a lot more of it, trying to build up the habit because I think that's the thing is like I need I need a habit to form.

Uh so you got to kind of push through the the sucky part and then you kind of realize like yeah like there's going to be days where that sucks to do it and that's just part of it. Um but if we do nothing like nothing happens. So I think that's one thing on the more technical side of stuff. Um I think I did I'm pretty happy with how I spent time like focusing on AI tooling last year. I know at the very beginning of the year I was pretty hesitant because it felt like writing code with AI tools was like pretty terrible. Uh I think over the course of 2025 things came a long long way. Um you know I write I do write most of my code if like almost all of it AI assisted now. Um a majority of it is like I've had co-pilot or claude or cursor go do most of the work in terms of like the actual code changes.

So, I'm I'm honestly glad that I spent time like trying to push through and so I could really at least for myself understand where the limitations are. Uh, and I say this not um not like, hey, now I'm an expert, but I I know that when I'm working with these tools, uh, I know there's things that like, hey, if I go to try doing this type of activity with co-pilot, like I'm probably going to be disappointed. So, like, maybe don't maybe don't do that. Right? I've had to practice and try to learn those things. And the reality is I think that I saw over the course of 2025 like that stuff changed and evolved a lot, right?

There's stuff that at the beginning of the year I would be like, "Yep, you know, co-pilot can't do that or Claude is really crappy at that." and it's flip-flopped and moved around like um there were times for you know periods of time where using co-pilot in Visual Studio I was like this is the worst and then claude felt really good. Um but it's like I'm running it out of a console and like I need I use Visual Studio to code. So that whole working experience was still kind of clumsy. And then like I don't know like even literally today or yesterday and today I was having Claude build some things and I'm looking at the output and I'm going like dude like co-pilot was absolutely crushing you in terms of the the accuracy that it was able to have just like you know it felt

like I was still 6 months behind with Claude and I'm not saying that because I think one of them is is uh you know universally better than the other in all scenarios. As for the task I was doing, I was like, "Holy crap, man." Like uh just to give you an example like Claude uh wasn't building my stuff. So it was producing all this code and not running like uh net build to compile it, which meant that like all of my static analysis rules and just literally like compilation errors and stuff like it wasn't catching them. So it produced all this stuff that was garbage. You can tidy it up, whatever. It's fine. So a lot of code that was like 70% of the way there, but like co-pilot has, you know, that I've been working with for the past few months has no issue with this kind of simple thing.

Um the tests that it was writing for me were terrible. Uh it's like it knew that it needed to write tests on the specific classes and functions, but the actual tests were like completely new patterns that don't exist in my codebase. Um just, you know, absolutely terrible. So, you know, I context switch over to co-pilot and like after I give up on on Claude and I'm like, "Hey, just like rewrite all of these tests and follow the patterns that we have in the codebase and it's like no problem and and does it." So, you know, I I all this to say it took a lot of practice and back and forth to kind of um to learn where to to kind of pivot with the tools and that's going to keep changing. So, I'm very happy that I stuck with it, kept trying different tools out uh instead of getting frustrated and giving up.

It was like, "Hey, let's try this one. Hey, let's go back to the other one and see how it's come along. Um, and so I I plan to continue to do that in 2026. Um, I'm just glad I have the rhythm of doing it. Um, you know, I mentioned this in recent videos. I'm doing more like building guard rails for uh the agents to go execute code. And so I want to continue to focus on that. But I think I'm having pretty decent results with that. Told people in videos I'll keep you up to date on how it's going. And for the most part, it's pretty good. Um I'm experimenting a little bit more now with not only guard rails, but like um leaving a few more breadcrumbs around. So for example, I keep seeing uh you know co-pilot get hung up on things like it goes to use a pattern.

It's like, oh, that, you know, is failing an analyzer rule or whatever else. It's not compiling. And then I I see it try to fix the pattern in a like the same way over and over across different runs and it's not the right way. So, it gets something running or like sets up my tests in a particular way and I'm like, "Yeah, but like that's not the convention in the code base." So what I'm trying to do is like when it screws up or when it's like oh I need to go use this uh you know this class that we're using for testing like one of these helpers I need to go use it and then it uses it the wrong way I'm trying to leave some breadcrumbs so that when it goes I need to use this there's context around that class uh like

in documentation comments uh you know if you're trying to to label how a class or method is used I'm trying to leave more breadcrumbs like that so that when it goes to use the method, there's just more around those things where it like has better insight for how to go leverage it. Um, and it's not just like documenting the method and saying like, you know, this parameter is a number between 1 and 10. It's like try to leave some code examples there too so that it can see how to use it, the style, the approach. Um because just because it compiles doesn't mean that it's like the um I don't know the intended patterns, I guess. So trying to do more of that. I'm going to lean more into that because uh really now it's like just uh optimizations like it's doing work. It's getting things done.

Uh so I'm very happy with that, but more to more to optimize. Um, yeah. Honestly, like I don't know if I have much that's like on like outside of brand goes. Honestly, that's like most of my attention is just going into that because I uh I really want to see that succeed. There's a lot of momentum currently and um I don't want to take my foot off the gas. So, would love to hear from you in the comments like what your focus areas are, what your goals are, how that's shaping up to be. But for now, I'm at CrossFit. I got to go deadlift a whole lot. I have to deadlift 325 lbs 40 times in 10 minutes. RIP. See you later.