2025
(You may be interested in 2024 as well, which was last year's annual review.)
Family
Lucy is now fifteen months old; I think my previous writing (two-weeks-of-parenthood, eucharist, fatherhood) serves better than trying to sum up the full year into a few paltry paragraphs.
And yet!
It would be disingenuous for me to pretend that Lucy right now isn't synonymous with family, nor with the year writ large. But what has perhaps been unexpected — or at least underestimated — is all of the other great stuff: much like her big brother before her, I get to see more of my brother and my parents than ever for purely selfish reasons on their part, because they too are in desperate thrall to this tiny perfect little person.
One of the greatest parts of this is that I get to see the people who I love most, friends and family alike, through a lens hitherto unknown to me:
- My father, bless his heart, often looks and acts like the stereotype of a strict 80s sitcom dad. He also melts into a puddle whenever Lucy is in the same room and will happily spend hours on end meowing—yes, meowing—at her because it elicits a wide and toothless smile he can carry in his pocket like an amulet for weeks on end. (My brother, too, has spent the past few months practicing pratfalls purely for Lucy's amusement.)
- I get to see Telly, who has gracefully and bitterly accepted his new role as older brother, pretend in vain to act tough and put upon by his sister's presence and then immediately have a panic attack whenever she leaves,
- but most of all I get to see my wife become a person who I can describe in no other way than motherhood personified. I have known for every day since the one I met her that I was lucky to have Haley in my life; my fortune is dwarfed by Lucy's, who gets to spend her days being nurtured and entertained and chased by a woman who would lift cars and traffic if it meant her child's laughter, let alone her safety.
Health
On the fitness side of things, I struggle to give an answer that is both contextually and objectively true. Let me start with the good stuff:
- I did not become drastically overweight when Lucy was born. And I still eat fairly healthy on a day-to-day basis.
- I bike to work most days, even if that bike commute is all of 15 minutes.
- I spend a lot of time on my feet and going up and down stairs, as all new parents do, and my cardiovascular fitness is mostly flat.
And on the flip side, I, from a lifting standpoint, am probably the weakest I've been in a while.
This is all relative, of course. I'm stronger than I was, say, five years ago, as the barbell coldly informs me; but, with the same coldness, it informs me that I'm weaker than I was a year ago. For the first six months of the year, it was a practical impossibility to try and fit dedicated lifting time into my schedule; for the back half of the year, it should have been easy and has instead proved difficult for reasons passing understanding.
Part of this is calendar Tetris: the only two real windows I would have are in the very early morning before Lucy wakes up or right after Lucy goes down for the night, the latter of which I've decided is not in the realm of possibility, because at 7:30 p.m., after a full day's work, I just don't have the activation energy required to get myself amped up for a workout. This leaves morning workouts which have gone better, but are let's say flaky sometimes:
- Sometimes Lucy wakes up early;
- Sometimes I just don't have the juice;
- Sometimes I wake up and immediately I'm thinking about something else, and so I'm kind of phoning in the workout.
Either way, this is officially the realm of a me problem, and one of the things I want to get a lot better at next year. I still wish to rejoin the 1-2-3-4 club. The 1-2-3-4 club refers to hitting a one-plate overhead press, two-plate bench, three-plate squat, and four-plate deadlift—plates being 45 pounds, so 135/225/315/405 respectively. And the knowledge that such endeavor just requires discipline and not Herculean effort is a cold comfort.
Buttondown
First, there's the objective and then there's the subjective. We had 10 specific goals for Buttondown last year. We accomplished 5 of them!
| Goal | Status |
|---|---|
| Delegation-based DNS | Complete ✅ |
| Localization | Complete ✅ |
| Improve search | Complete ✅ |
| Revamp onboarding | Complete ✅ |
| Dark mode | Complete ✅ |
| Better subscription form/widget | In progress 🟡 |
| Launch 2 new archive themes | In progress 🟡 |
| Migrate traffic to Postal | Stalled 🟠 |
| Exit cloud (Redis/RDS) | Stalled 🟠 |
| Better automations | Not started ⚪ |
Certainly, if you had told me 12 months ago that that was going to be the outcome, I would have happily taken it. And on the quantitative side, we had a strong year as well:
- Our overall topline growth has flagged but we're still growing at a healthy clip, and I feel comfortable ascribing most of that flagging growth to me dropping most of my concierge/sales work in favor of, well, Lucy.
- Our team grew, and is much much better for having done so (though it hurts our final cash flow, as is expected.)
- We spent a fair amount of time overscaled and overprovisioned in order to trade money for peace of mind during most of the spring and summer. It was the right choice and one I would again happily do, but it meant that our operating costs were higher this year than last year. Our total marginal rate right now is great, now that things are stable enough for us to feel comfortable not being overscaled.
Numbers, of course, don't tell the entire story. This was a very weird working year for me, even without the Lucy of it all. On multiple occasions, I've called this the most taxing working year of my life. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I don't think that's an exaggeration. I spent more time in a reactive mode than behooves me or anyone else. I spent more time too in functions that felt comfortable but not meaningful, such as low-value engineering work.
Third South
Third South, as it stands today, is a radically different company and project than it was 12 months ago. For starters, we brought on our first full-time hire, who is now also a partner in his own right, Myles. And we reoriented the core mission of the firm from stewardship to active growth—not in a gross PE sense, or at least ideally not—being able to leverage the tooling and tacit knowledge that we've built up over the past three years in service of companies. Our flagship project right now is rebuilding the single worst codebase I've ever seen in my entire life into something modern, sustainable, and high quality, and doing so with the goal of taking over the market. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this work is the single most fun I've had on a technical project since starting Buttondown. This is the first time I've really gotten to challenge some of my assumptions about how technical businesses can, should, and do work, and I get to do that alongside three of my best friends. It is just terrifically fun, and I'm learning a lot more than I expected to learn.
Side projects
The only side project of note is this very website and my writings on it. And honestly, I'm pretty proud of my progress there. I published 58 posts this year: fewer than last year, but last year I spent nine months without a child and therefore I think that warrants a little leniency. I also relaunched it with the new design that everyone seems to love. You can read more about it here. I still have two burning ideas for projects that I would really love to do, Whisperglass and Shovel, but I just can't justify spending the time. Life is about accepting the battles not worth showing up for.
Travel
We didn't travel much this year—and by "not much" I mean "barely at all." A work trip to Chicago, a handful of Florida trips to see extended family, but/and no grand adventures to speak of. This is the natural consequence of having an infant: the logistics of travel become exponentially harder, and the marginal utility of any given trip decreases when you're spending half of it trying to get a baby to sleep in an unfamiliar crib. I expect this to change in the coming years as Lucy becomes more portable, but for now, we're homebodies.
Media
I've watched more movies this year than I think any year before. Perhaps even more than that. This is the first year where film feels like the most quote-unquote important medium for me, excepting books. Admittedly, this is more out of circumstance and context than suddenly deciding that cinema has inherent artistic advantages.
But with my time and schedule being what it is, I find myself more disinclined than ever to front mediocre long content in the hopes that season two will actually be worth the wait. Video games are not dissimilar in this respect. I love JRPGs, but the idea of committing 60 or more hours to a game and really only enjoying a fraction of that is unappetizing.
The games that I really love often take meaningful amounts of time to get in the flow of. Think Baldur's Gate, where a really good session necessitates a serious amount of time to start really thinking about the whole thing. And that's just not what my evenings look like at this point.
Meanwhile, films have a very simple value proposition. You spend two hours with them, and if they're worth those hours, then great. I owe a lot of my curriculum to the Big Picture Podcast, which for me is just the right blend of normie surface level and erudite name dropping. I don't listen regularly, but the movie drafts are a great way to A) spend two hours, B) come away with a list of ten movies that sound interesting.
| Link | Genre | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| long-story-short | Television | 10/10 |
| paris-texas | Movie | 10/10 |
| before-sunrise | Movie | 9/10 |
| capote | Movie | 9/10 |
| diner | Movie | 9/10 |
| fable-sable | Album | 9/10 |
| the-quiet-american | Book | 9/10 |
| zodiac | Movie | 9/10 |
Coda
Looking back on the past 12 months, I feel an immense amount of pride; I also feel no small amount of guilt. It has always been hard for me to solve the bell jar problem; I wrote about this six years ago, and I write about this now. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. I end every day exhausted and satisfied with the work I've done, but anxious about the work that I haven't.
Being a father is easy in one very specific way, which is that you never have any doubt about where the priorities are: they are at home.
But all of the discipline in the world does not solve the fact that sometimes we are given each day 30 hours of work to do, and I'm still reckoning how to solve this. I know one of my habits that I need to break is to let the reactivity take over me and spiral me into only ever focusing on whatever push notification comes in. Here, of course, I speak of metaphors—I don't allow push notifications on anything except family and pages.
I didn't get to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do when I set out the year. That's life — I commend myself for doing the things that matter, no matter what needed to be done, to the exclusion of everything else.
I'd love to tell you broad and lofty aspirations for the year ahead: 2026 being the year I launch Shovel, the year I finally run my first marathon, the year Haley and I get our speakeasy off the ground. But — I think those things are best left in the middle distance, to be oriented towards but not quite racing towards. None of them are worth sacrificing my larger or more meaningful obligations: to do right by my employees, to do right by my customers, to be a good friend and a good partner and to be there every night and every morning for my family.
Thank you
To Haley for everything, and keeping me grounded while doing so; to Telly for ending every day with his snoring in my lap; to Lucy for making me happier than I have ever been in my entire life; to Sonny for reminding me who I am; to mom and dad for that one time in Nice and the other hundred times besides; to Steph and Ben and Matias and Tanvir and Anita and Mary and Nick and Asharee for putting up with me; to Colin and Harrison and Myles for footing the bill for all of my .horse domain purchases; to Shep and Deema and Chris and Daniel for friendship that persists even though I'm worse than ever at responding to texts; to Robert Caro and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ; to Lucy Ellmann and Mick Herron; to Linklater and Soderbergh and Fisher.
And to you, dear reader, for getting this far and sticking with me despite it all. I hope your 2026 is as lucky as my 2025 was.