Mike Mathew
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In my dual life of running a small business and working for a tech company, I have a lot of plates spinning. Starting next week, I'm taking a paid four-week sabbatical to focus on the small business part. I plan to focus on finishing up several small tasks that are currently in motion. Then, I'll be laying the groundwork for larger projects and systems.
This new year 2026 has started off strong. Our family got a new dog at the very end of 2025. He's amazing. When I'm working from home, he tends to be my shadow, which is quite something since he's about 70 pounds. I've been more focused on taking care of business than I was in 2025. I wasn't necessarily aimless last year, but many things happened that knocked me off course from January through December.
I'm working on quite a lot of React Native tasks right now. Some of the work is updating old crusty versions of RN and dependencies to more modern stuff. In particular that work is making sure that Android 16.0 looks correct with the edge-to-edge display. This project uses RN CLI, not Expo, so it is quite a slog. Let's just say I'm looking at more Medium articles about which Kotlin code to update than I would like.
The other RN work is a greenfield app using Expo. Right now the project is still somewhat simple, so it's interesting to plan it out, trying to make choices that will scale and handle complexity well. This is 1000 times easier to deal with because of using Expo. Seriously, it's so much easier.