What happened in 2025?#

Unironic mention of the year of the Linux desktop#

In my personal life, the year of the Linux desktop happened for me! That was a big change. This fall, I essentially cut myself off from Windows for my daily desktop driver and replaced it with Omarchy, which runs Arch under it. It’s a sick distribution overall, but I quickly started realizing that I want more customizations/stable updates/and less opinions.

I started running Fedora on my desktop/ an old laptop from college and as a VM on my Macbook M4 Pro (this was how I validated that Fedora was the way to go over my own custom Arch install). I did cut some corners and use Dank Linux (written in Go btw) to set up my tiling window manager, Niri. Which I think was a pleasant choice since it gave me a good balance between customization and productivity. I’m eager to focus on building projects rather than endlessly tweaking my environment.

Ergonomics#

Another interesting area was the world of ergo mechanical keyboards. I literally never would have guessed that I would be rocking one of these weird gadgets this year. However, after a really crazy end of the year where I spent 10+ hours a day at my desk, I really wanted to make sure that I could work comfortably and productively. So in combination to the usual standing desk and walking pad, I now mostly rely on keyboard shortcuts to move around my PC. This also is kinda great for my posture, I have broader shoulders and I noticed that I would hunch my back and pronate my arms awkwardly to type. I felt the early signs of RSI (repetitive strain injury), and didn’t feel like banging myself up more than I already did from years of football/rugby and grappling.

Vim#

This also led me down a rabbit hole surrounding VIM. I installed Neovim on all my machines including work and used that for the majority of my development work in the 2H of 2025. I love this jump into modal editing because it helped me be more productive with all the SSH’ing into machines on Linux or USS on z/OS (read: Linux on Z). I was doing a ton of work testing MLz on our parallel sysplex in IBM Customer Test, and editing/viewing/searching files via VIM or Neovim was much more quick than logging onto Zowe, which is z/OS Plugin on VSCode for interacting with datasets/file/USS/jobs/etc.

AI and testing @ IBM#

Then for the 4Q 2025 big deliverable of Watsonx Assistant for Z (WXA4Z), this became a huge area where I saw vim help me iterate quickly. I was dealing with dozens of YAML files for Helm deployments or OpenShift configuration and being able to use the diff editor of neovim made things so much more simple. I also started experimenting with terminal multiplexers like Zellij but I may try TMUX as well to be able to compare. I decided to start with Zellij because it was newer and also had a TMUX support.

Golang#

Last but not least, I’ve been having a lot of fun learning Go the past few months and really trying to get good with it. So now most of my day is writing applications/scripts/pipelines in Python/Go/Java/Groovy (Jenkins) and bits of bash.

Memorable moments#

Some bigger accomplishments for me this year that I’m pretty grateful for is creating my first inner source project which was a python wrapper around z Workload Scheduler and the following presentations to both other product teams and the IBM RTP opensource community. I also attended my first conference, ICLAD.AI where I met lots of awesome people at Stanford University who were passionate about using LLMs to automate difficult parts of hardware design and software engineering.

What do I want to happen in 2026?#

Personal Technical Projects#

The Gameframe (name tbd)#

I have a lot of plans, but I know the most ambitious one is what I’m calling The Gameframe. Yes, I know the name Gameframe has been used before for a previous IBM project, I’ll just need to think of a better name later! An idea I had way back to my first ever serious software job as an intern for z/TPF. The idea being, what happens when you try to run a multiplayer game on hybrid cloud architecture? This is all going to be enabled with a cheap but powerful Beelink mini PC running Rocky Linux.

The plan is, we’ll have OpenShift running on the mini PC that will have several containerized workloads running. One part, will be an emulated mainframe using MVS Turnkey 5. Now, this is not going to have the performance you’d see on an actual Z17 mainframe, but it’s just a cool PoC that encompasses a bunch of my different skills over the years ranging from cloud native k8s/OpenShift applications to z/OS administration. Now what I’m particularly excited about is that I’ve never worked on a clean installation of a z/OS. It’s always been system that’s existed with hundreds of different people who have interacted and customized it. This time, I’ll have something with nothing in it! Plus it will be all using free and open-source software. So there will certainly be a learning curve to this, but I think it would be neat. Another interesting component will be the fact that I need to work with an older version of z/OS, MVS.

Below, is a checklist of what I want to build throughout the year:

  • Ansible automation for quickly scaffolding Rocky Linux with its dependencies such as OpenShift.
  • Building performant Go services that fully leverage concurrency and event driven patterns.
  • CI/CD facilitated by ArgoCD.
  • Leverage the mainframe as the source of truth. So all the data is going to be managed with datasets such as VSAM. Any type of background or batch operation will also be managed with JCL.
  • Connect the two services with communication via MVS HTTPD.
  • Get introduced to OTEL (Open Telemetry) for tracing
  • Load test it with AI personas and players using SLM models.

I’m sure there will be plenty more here to do, but that’s the high level of it. I also plan on reading a ton of technical books, mainly on building distributed systems and learning more about the internals of Go past the basics. The Go education will likely get put to use a lot while at work, I want to use it to build more performant automation and maybe some agentic solutions. Plus I do have some ideas for open-source projects.

Essentially, keep learning more and more about z/OS and how to become more proficient at it! There is a ton of really cool AI and modernization projects that are about to kick off in 2026 so I’m sure I’ll be busy working, advising, and hopefully learning more projects in that space.

Non-technical Goals#

It would be really nice to go and compete again in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu! It’s been awhile for me to set aside the time and train with that intent. However, it just hasn’t been a high priority given all the work I’ve been doing to facilitate my technical skills.

I’ve also been learning Spanish pretty casually over the past two years so that I can better communicate with my girlfriend and her family from Mexico. Which has also been a lot of fun learning about their culture.

Conclusion#

I’m looking forward to a really interesting year! I have a lot planned, and I’m really hoping to build a lot of things especially outside my day to day job. It would also be great to finally start creating more content around tips / tricks/ gadgets/ etc. So my return to blogging is my way of getting that started.