I can't has cheezburger

Note: this is about 2025 for my life specifically. For the world at large, it continued to be a dumpster fire and I acknowledge that how my own life went and how the world went aren’t necessarily in sync.

I’m really happy with how life went for me in 2025. And that’s pretty exciting, considering that I got a nasty little surprise the week after my birthday when I learned my job had been eliminated at GitHub, presumably to burn the extra money on more Copilot stuff.

But I seriously couldn’t have asked for a better year:

• I biked over 550 miles this year, blowing way past my goal of 375 miles.
• I finally made a modern macOS port of my favorite Tetris clone from the 90s (I can’t really share it with the world because reasons, but it exists now and I’m happy it does).
• I got to meet up with a childhood friend I hadn’t seen in almost 25 years.
• I won a free ticket to the final RailsConf, where I got to meet another friend in person that I’ve known for almost 20 years. Then we road tripped back to Portland together.
• I took another road trip to California with my boyfriend, during which time he proposed to me.
• Then he got top surgery, for which I provided moral and logistical support.
• I sent my resume to exactly one company and they offered me a job. And I’m having a lot of fun here!
• I closed out the period of unemployment by getting married in a humble and intimate ceremony in our living room.
• I finally got an electric car.
• I gave a talk at XO Ruby Austin (it was recorded but not yet published)
• My long-awaited kitchen remodel began after a ton of delays.

In last year’s post I said I’m going to make more in 2025, and I executed super well on that.

I didn’t fully check off every single thing on that goals list, but I’m really happy with what I did (and all the other things I did)

These were great highlights but I’m going to remember 2025 for so many simple and enjoyable moments I remembered to pause to enjoy. I enjoyed so many dusk walks in my neighborhood. I loved stepping inside from the hot summer evenings into the air conditioned house and relaxing in my hammock chair. I cooked delicious meals. I made some tasty non-alcoholic cocktails. I relentlessly tried finding the perfect watermelon.

I also felt like I got to be really prolific in 2025 and that was really healing to me.

I did a lot of soul searching this summer too. I participated in a program designed by a good friend and former colleague who stepped away from a lucrative tech career to help people find their true calling. I’ve never necessarily seen myself as an entrepreneur type, but after spending a lot of time thinking about how I want to spend my life, it feels like an inevitability to me, and I am investing more heavily in finding the right calling for myself.

Going into 2025 I felt like I had been putting a lot of work into healing (from what, you ask? It’s a long series of stories), and 2025 got to show me that that healing work was bearing fruit. When faced with some serious challenges I took them in stride.

But I admit that in 2025 I’ve been running hot. My bullet points above don’t even capture the half of what I did in 2025, and I don’t want to try keeping such a frenetic pace.

My 2026 is going to look decidedly more chill.

Whereas 2025 was about making more, 2026 is going to be about doing fewer things. I will do plenty, but I’m going to be really selective about what makes the cut.

I’m going to focus on much smaller subset of things and really get into them more:

• Enjoy the new kitchen/home remodel, hosting friends for some great meals and get togethers
• Use the remodel as a ground-up fresh start in terms of home organization, and establish a few tweaks to sustainably keep things organized (and also share that journey as part of a 3Delights project I’m calling 3Drawers)
• Bike at least 400 miles (that’s less than what I did this year but also I don’t think I’ll have several months of being unemployed)
• I’m keeping retro game nights as a thing I do with my friend, but we’re going to play a bigger variety of games, and invite other friends into the fold

I’m keeping up with 3Delights, my side hustle. The thing I love about 3Delights is that it scales down beautifully and has only a handful of fixed monthly costs, so even if things are very slow with it I won’t feel pressure to shut it down (not unlike this blog 😏). If no one buys anything I won’t print anything, and people can literally order anything I make and I can make it on-demand, so I don’t have to worry about inventory (aside from supplies)

I like using 3Delights as an incubator to experiment with entrepreneurship. The skill I want to start building in 2026 is community building. I stop short of calling it “audience building” because I really hate that framing. An “audience” feels like a resource that you extract value from. I want to do something that feels truly mutual. I want to help people out by putting out useful and entertaining stuff, and I want to make cool things for friends to help them solve problems, and then share that with the world and help build a bigger following.

I’ve done small marketing experiments in the past, and my biggest conclusion was I don’t want to throw money at Big Tech on ad campaigns to try to drum up business; I want to make better connections with real people and help solve problems for them. That will take time but I want to approach it with more intentionality because I think it’s a long game for me. Generosity is a core value for me, but I want to try to see what generosity at scale looks like. Baby steps.

Even if the world is continuing to suck in a lot of ways, I am intent on having a wonderful 2026 and helping other people have a great 2026 with me. I cannot single-handedly solve the big issues the world is facing, but I can directly make other people’s lives better.

Goodbye, 2025. You’ll be a memorable year.

2025 is the year display makers finally put out a bunch of 32″ 6K displays, and the best one is from a Chinese brand you probably have never heard of.

I figured Kuycon’s “We have the Pro Display XDR at home” would superficially look like a Pro Display XDR but otherwise feel like a cheap knockoff. I initially filed it away mentally, holding out for LG’s 32″ 6K display. I’ve been a loyal LG Ultrafine customer for almost a decade and I assumed the 6K display was the next logical choice.

But LG’s 6K display gave me the ick shortly after I had it set up.

Almost immediately, I could tell the matte plastic screen looked just awful. Contrast was way lower, colors weren’t quite right, and the diffuse pattern made looking at text blurry. LG’s great display panel produced a beautiful picture, and the rest of the display did its best to prevent me from enjoying it.

What’s worse, the display’s enclosure and stand are flimsy plastic. The Ultrafine 4K and 5K displays had a pretty basic black enclosure that wasn’t fancy but looked fine (you could even call it… Ultrafine 😎). The Ultrafine 6K wants to look like a high-end aluminum device, but it’s just plastic and plastic pretending to be metal never looks good. My 4K and 5K displays are plastic too, but they were at least honest in their design.

Also, my first impression of the LG was worse because mine was defective (it had non-working USB ports). But even if everything was working, I just wasn’t happy with the display.

So I was back at square one, and unfortunately, all the other options from reputable display makers also used matte screens (and they were all kind of ugly too).

So I checked out the Kuycon G32P’s reviews, and they were all pretty positive.

Its enclosure is aluminum and glass, and that glossy glass front gave me hope.

And the best part: this monitor is using the same LG panel all these monitors are using. LG’s panels are good and that gave me confidence the monitor would be fine.

Long story short, I love it, and it’s actually priced a little cheaper than LG’s display.

I do miss embedded stuff like speakers, mic and camera that I had in my Ultrafine 5K (the Ultrafine 6K dropped the mic and camera too though).

But the G32P is the real deal.

It looks absolutely beautiful, both as a piece of kit, and the picture quality is great too with the glass front. There’s a tiny bit of a grain pattern that isn’t present on my Ultrafine 5K, but it’s only visible at certain angles and I suspect is related to the antiglare finish on the glass.

The display wakes up just as fast as the Ultrafine 5K it sits next to (weirdly the Ultrafine 6K took longer to wake up from sleep).

Colors look great out of the box. They’re bright and saturated looking and to my eye it’s got excellent color accuracy.

One thing you don’t get with this display is a high refresh rate. This display is 60Hz, which is on par with other displays of this size and resolution, and I’m actually not sure if it’s possible yet to drive this many pixels at 120Hz quite yet with the latest Thunderbolt. I love having a 120Hz display on my iPhone, but for my computers, I’m happy to compromise ultra-smooth motion for more real estate any day.

I’m a few weeks in and it feels like an appliance. When not in use it looks great at my desk, and when it is in use it fades into the background as I focus on the screen content.

## Why 32″ 6K?

Long story short, I love displays with a ton of screen real estate.

Having a bigger monitor literally makes your more productive ([seriously](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/productivity-and-screen-size)). Nothing beats being on a screen with tons of real estate. When I have to work on my laptop screen doing a task that involves multiple apps I just feel cramped.

And you can’t just pick the screen with largest diagonal size and call it a day. I see lots of big 27″ and even 30″ displays (and sometimes ultrawide displays) that are still just 4K resolution, or some big 38 to 40 inch displays that are 5K resolution. When you make the screen bigger but don’t add more resolution, you’re getting bigger pixels and you lose crispness.

I read text for a living, and it makes a big difference to have a monitor with pixel density on par with printed paper.

Parting Thoughts: 👍️

At about $1800-1900 shipped, this monitor in the middle of the price range. You can get an Asus display at this size and resolution for about $1300. LG’s is $2k, Dell’s Ultrasharp 6K is over $2k (but there are often sales). You could go high end and get Apple’s Pro Display XDR if you are willing to drop $6k. In fairness, the Apple display has some pro-level color fidelity and brightness levels, but for me that display was overkill and I didn’t buy one to complement my Mac Pro back in 2019. I just wanted a nice display that’s big.

Kuycon isn’t a brand new company; they’ve been around for a little over a decade, but I think they’re new to selling in the US.

It felt like a riskier buy, spending $1800 on a relatively unknown brand (in fact, my credit card company flagged the transaction as potential fraud on the first try), but I’m glad I did. And you can even buy this display on Amazon now for the same price, which might assuage some anxieties.

The G32P gets my hearty endorsement, and I’m rooting for Kuycon. I like mine enough that I’m severely tempted to get a second on in 2026.