Notes
February 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Preparing for the next five years.
Where I think product engineering is going for the rest of the decade — and the small habit I am building now to keep up without burning out.
I keep a small file called five-years.md in the same folder as my journal. Every quarter I open it and add the smallest legitimate change I have noticed in how I work. The file is short on purpose. The point is that I look back at it, not that it gets long.
What I think is changing.
The default skill is shifting from writing the code to deciding what the code should do. The code itself gets cheaper every quarter; the part that does not is knowing which of three plausible directions is the one that ships. That is what I am practicing now, in small amounts, every week.
The small habit.
Three things I do every Friday afternoon — small enough to actually happen, big enough to compound.
- Read one essay outside my discipline — design, fiction, or finance, never engineering.
- Open a tool I do not use and try to ship a one-screen prototype in it.
- Write a single sentence into five-years.md about what shifted in my work this week.
The list is short on purpose. The point is that I do it; the point is not that the list is long. Five years is a long time to keep paying attention; this is the smallest version of that I have managed to sustain.
Taste compounds. The engineers who keep paying attention will be the engineers who keep getting hired.
Working on something like this?