Musings & Links for January 9, 2026
In which I proudly shill for my employer
Hi friends,
I’m getting this entry out at a later hour than planned (but still on Friday!). Work has been ramping up for an exciting start to the new year. We’re welcoming our first batch of 1,111 interns for 2026. And after some high profile outages in last couple months of 2025 (if you wondered why you couldn’t use Spotify for a few hours on November 18, that’s why), we’re kicking our resilience plans into gear.
This is a tech-heavy entry, probably because that’s largely where my head’s been at this week. I’ll get those out of the way first.
We’ve widely adopted Opencode at work, and my colleague Sunil wrote a cogent blog about what do-to-day engineering work looks like now. Although I don’t primarily write code for my job anymore, Opencode + Claude Opus 4.5 with MCP servers is already radically changing my workflow. It’s simultaneously enabling me to be more “stream of consciousness” in how I make decisions and be more organized as a result.
Internet censorship in the EU has been in and out of the news cycle over the last few months. It’s been fairly abstract until this week, when Italy chose to fine Cloudflare $17 million for not acquiescing to their demand that we not only deny services to customers on-demand without any due process, but that we censor any site on-demand from our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, not just for Italy, but globally. I’m grateful for our leadership taking a principled stand against this overreach. The open web and free speech go hand in hand.
Okay, still with me?
Brett McKay wrote a great list of things to give up in 2026. All of these are fantastic suggestions, and I’ll be trying to give up more than a few (except #16. Unlike Brett, I am not a teetotaler).
Joel Miller’s suggestions for reading more are very handy. I’m already reaping the fruits of #3, “switch formats”, but reading The Count of Monte Cristo on my phone’s Kindle app rather than falling into a scroll-vortext.
That’s it for this week. Have a restful weekend. Read a book. Go outside. Have a coupla beers. Take life seriously, not yourself.
-Robbie