“How desperate are you?” “I’ve setup a blog between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to tell everyone how great AI is” “Oh poor, little CEO. Here have a hot chocolate. It’ll be alright. People surely will believe you and stop hating your products.” I’m sorry, but even if we accept the premise that there are good parts about LLMs, Microsoft didn’t find a single one in 2025.

sn scratchpad

Looking Ahead to 2026

As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this m...

Today was the second time both of my credit cards failed to work when Safari autofills the CC form. The banks simply bounced the transactions for “technical reasons”. Turns out the expiration date of *both cards* was moved one month forward in Apple Wallet. I surely did not do this and didn’t change CCs in the last two years. Manually changed the exp date and everything works. I’m not saying things are any better when using Android, but they surely cannot be worse. #apple

During Covid when our local, family owned gym had to temporarily close my parents and me continued paying our monthly fees to support them. Last month the collection office decided this wasn’t okay (taxes were obviously paid). They now have to credit the fees and people train for 5-6 months for free. Sometimes I don’t know anymore. It’s just tiring.

Clicks (the iPhone keyboard case folks) announced a Bluetooth keyboard I might get depending on the reviews and a new phone that’ll either end on the gadget pile or as hipster accessory.

Clicks Keyboard gives your phone new superpowers

Turn your smartphone into a productivity machine with Clicks. A premium keyboard case with real buttons, more screen space and customizable shortcu...

I’m not saying there’s an agenda behind the small LED matrix project I’ve built for testing before moving to the large one, but…

Spending the last 30 minutes setting the system time on a Matrixportal M4 via NTP and not using Arduinos servers that require an account made one thing very clear: LLMs aren’t even close to replacing documentation. We don’t even have to have a conversation about replacing a junior engineer. The amount of hallucinations and made up attributes the moment MatrixPortal is initialized was staggering. My favourite was “you can initialise the ESP if it’s already initialized. You simply have to…” -.-

Reading up on CiruitPython on an EPS32 and I have the strong feeling I'm either missing something essential here or that whole thing is so much easier than people want you to believe. Take this perspective with a grain of salt right now - I'll write more about it once the project is done. (I still haven't pushed any code to the board and I can do basic FPGA modelling, programmed embedded boards in C and use Python for >20 years.)

As every year I didn’t do a retrospective of the last year but some predictions for the current year. Some of them are a bit of a gamble, some I’m fairly certain about. Let’s see how wrong I was in 2027 :)

2026 - Timo Zimmermann

Timo Zimmermann talking about software engineering, leading teams, consulting and start ups.

Happy New Year everyone!

Ending the year with good friends, good foods, good scotch and unspeakable rage against Mario Kart World. <3