What's new in 2026?
Hey team! I know it's October, so 2026 is practically behind us, but this year has been a wild ride, and I have thoughts on the tech industry right now.
I've always wanted to start a blog, but my ideas were all over the place. Elixir? Cooking recipes? Bullet journaling? I have a lot of hobbies, folks. Plus, I've been sitting on this domain for over a decade without ever actually doing anything with it. (Par for the course for a lot of us, I imagine. What's your domain count these days?) But today is the day. We're doing the thing.
So let me introduce myself, and this blog. I'm Sundi, and I'm an engineering manager. Before I was a manager, I was an engineer focused in the Elixir & Phoenix space — today I'm still a part of and committed to contributing to the Elixir community where I can. If you've heard my name before, it might be from my co-hosting on the Elixir Wizards Podcast1. The most recent talk I gave was the closing keynote at Code BEAM Europe 2025 in Berlin about the importance of Empathy in Engineering2. My fun fact when I walk into a room of new people and they make us present fun facts about ourselves is almost always that I'm a retired figure skater. And 2026 is the first year in many years that I didn't attend a conference of any kind (so sad!), but that's because I had my first baby this past summer (super yay!) and life has been a rollercoaster in the best way ever since.
Missing out on conferences is another reason I wanted to start a blog now. ElixirConf and Goatmire just passed, and the FOMO is real, guys. I miss my BEAM friends, and especially the hallway track: the unofficial-official track for weirdly tangential but slightly relevant conversations between talks. It's my favorite place to be.
Those conversations are where I tend to mull over the things I want to write about here: the industry today, our problems with hiring, AI output and developer burnout, and how AI is changing the literal shape of our industry, not just productivity. And the biggest thing on my mind right now is something some of my teammates tell me every day:
There are no new problems.
Everything we're facing today is a version of something the industry has seen before; right now it's just AI-flavored. And I'm curious. Does this theory hold if I apply it to the (seemingly) recent push for faster code delivery? To questions about code quality, and the call for better tests? Why is it so hard to find a good fit for an open role? Or why is it so hard to find an open role, period? A lot of people say: AI, AI, AI. They might be right. They might also be wrong. I'm going to explore it.
Along the way, I might pick up some of the old standby management books and see how they hold up today, in between musings on whatever I run into as an EM in this space.
If that sounds interesting, come along with me into the hallway track. And if you have your own question you think would be interesting to answer in 2026, drop me a line.
