Week 8, 2026: The Chillest Week So Far

2026 has been a very busy year for me, a bit all over the place. I felt I had more control over the start of 2025 compared to 2026. I usually aim to have blocks during the day to work on my personal projects and learnings, or just to have some fun. This is not happening all the time this year as I am juggling a couple of projects at work, so I am kind of falling back to some bad habits of working late. Also, the weather in Berlin is not helping at all! I am just going to say that we have seen the sun probably two or three times since last November.

However, last week was the “chillest” this year so far. I was visiting my uncle on the weekend and stayed over until Tuesday. I had some great Middle Eastern food and also had a great time playing cards with them, which brought back a lot of childhood memories because I used to do that with my friends. What also helped is that Monday was a public holiday in the US and Canada, so my Slack was calmer than any regular Monday.

Every Sunday, I sit down and try to do some little reflection on the previous week. I don’t know how useful this practice is, but it kind of helps me set some sort of closure for the past week.

✨ Highlights

Best Moments

I did an “8k time trial” as part of my Berlin half-marathon training plan at 4:20 per km pace. I was super happy to nail that session. Not gonna lie, I was planning to do 10k instead of 8k, but it was simply very tough. It was on a Wednesday evening after work, -4 C outside on slippery ground, so I will take this W. I remember doing a tempo session of 4km at 4:30 back in September before the 2025 Berlin Marathon and it was tough, so I am really happy with where my fitness is at right now.
As mentioned above, I ended up playing cards with my uncle and his family and I truly enjoyed it. It reminds me of home, which I miss a lot.

Wins

I finally set up my home lab Kubernetes cluster on a couple of Raspberry Pis using kubeadm. I am planning on writing a blog post about that.
I put my blog and website online and started writing some blog posts. Very excited about this as well.
Things are going well at work. A lot to do but overall I am happy with what I put in production last week. Two big migrations are out.

⚠️ Challenges

What felt heavy or draining?

For some reason, these days I am thinking a lot about the “future”. I am trying to figure out what the next version of me looks like. Do I want a family? Do I want to move outside Germany? What is the next step in my career? These types of questions. I usually go through these cycles many times and I think it is normal (and I would say healthy) to check with myself and assess where I am right now in life.

Also one of the things I have been thinking about lately is AI. I am trying to see what my role and career are going to look like with AI. I’d like to learn more about it and how I should integrate it more into my life.

What didn’t go as planned?

I went back to using my phone first thing in the morning and I don’t like that! In January, I did a great job of not doing that and it made me feel much better. However, this bad habit came back the last two weeks.
I didn’t really respect my personal blocks on my calendar and was working quite late to do some deploys and rollouts. This honestly bothers me the most.
I did read this week but not more than 100 pages, which is not bad, but I should read more. I’m enjoying the Harry Potter books a lot lately!

🧠 Lessons & Patterns

I learned how to initialize a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal Raspberry Pis. I have been using K8s for years at this stage and not just as a developer, but I have built so much on top of it like a whole controller and a service mesh, but never really administered one, so that was cool.
I was debugging some Circuit Breakers configurations with Contour and Envoy so that was fun as well!
I got into supplements and vitamins, and I know it is a slippery slope, but I think for now I don’t want to go crazy with supplements and just keep the list short. I am currently only taking: vitamin D, omega 3, creatine, and magnesium.

🏃 Running & Training Summary

I finished week 19 of my training plan. It was a “deload” week, which means I run about 50% (or even less) of my regular mileage to give my body and my nervous system time to chill and recover. I did 4 runs and about 43km this week. At the end of last week’s training, I was really tired. I tried to do some half-marathon pace blocks on my long run and it was so hard. Then when I did the interval session on Monday it felt very, very hard as well. So I was freaking out before the time trial session because I was worried that treadmill running has ruined my fitness. However, after Wednesday’s session and hitting 8km in 35 minutes, I got a big confidence boost. 5 weeks left before Berlin Half, and I am excited for next week because it is going to be the peak week of this training block.

😄 Things I enjoyed this week

Lately, I have been listening to Arabic music again since I left home. God I miss these songs so much!
I still watch the Bad Bunny halftime show every now and then to make me feel something.
I discovered Caleb Hearon lately. What a funny guy! I’m enjoying his podcasts and videos a lot.
Still binging the Silicon Valley show. It reminds me of how simple and fun tech was 7 years ago!

🎯 Next Week Plan

I want to restore some good habits again, like not using my phone first thing in the morning and also respecting my personal blocks on the calendar.
I am planning my next career steps. I think I know what I wanna tackle next so I will be focusing on that during the week.
We have some sort of “Work on whatever you cannot work on during a working day” week. I will take advantage of that and explore two areas I have in mind.

Maybe I don’t need a perfectly optimized year. Maybe I just need steady weeks like this.