I know it's already a bit into 2026, but I wanted to take some time to outline my goals for the year. I feel like having this stuff written down will help me reflect on my progress and keep me accountable.
My Top Goals
1. Grind out 300 LeetCode problems
I know this sounds goofy as my top goal, but I really want to solidify my problem-solving skills this year, and even though 300 might be slightly overkill, I’ll feel a lot more confident during interviews and contests. I’ve always enjoyed doing LeetCode questions because they challenge me to use my “toolbox” of skills and patterns from previous questions, and then apply them in interesting ways to solve problems.
2. Participate in at least 1 hackathon
I think after winning GenAI Genesis last year, I was exhausted from hackathons and, as a whole, web development. The AI boom of made it less fun for me since everyone was building really similar projects. With HackTheNorth 2025, I tried to make something different by combining AR with hardware, but that took a lot of effort and I didn't have too much time to really enjoy the hackathon as it was just facing technical challenges the whole time.
This year, I want to be more experimental with my hackathon projects rather than just putting together a web app and a few APIs.
3. Read 5 books
I feel like I kind of forgot about reading last year. I was constantly on my computer for work and school, so I didn't really have the motivation to pick up a book. I might try to chill from the programming grind in terms of constantly pushing out projects and just read for fun.
4. Write more
I want to write down more of my thoughts and share them with others. If I write down what I'm thinking in the present, I can look back on it and reflect on changes. As I just set up this blog, I will try to get a total of 10 posts out this year. I don't really care about the quality of these posts, but just putting something out there, which I can look back on, would be really meaningful to me.
5. Reach Plat - League of Legends
Last year, I reached a new peak: Gold 1. While being Gold 1 isn't anything super impressive, I feel like I made a lot of progress from being stuck in Silver for the longest time. I will probably try to reach Plat or Emerald this year if I can find the time to play. I think the state of top lane is pretty good right now, but I might want to get more comfortable with some more champs since my mains (Irelia, Jax) are quite challenging to play in the current meta.
Conclusion
I will most likely update the blog page as the year progresses. Hopefully by the end of the year, I can look back and see how these goals come to fruition!