What I’m doing lately. This is a /now page, an IndieWeb convention for “what you’d tell a friend you haven’t seen in a while.”

Last updated: May 2026.

Work

  • Day job: still the same. A small infra team at a mid-sized company. Rewriting a request-routing service from a tangle of Python + nginx into Go + Caddy. It’s going fine. The hard part is never the code.
  • Working with a junior engineer who joined six months ago. Pairing two hours a day. It’s the most effective I’ve felt as a teacher; would recommend.
  • We’re turning off a deprecated service in June that I’ve been tiptoeing around for years. Looking forward to the deletion PR.

Side projects

  • httptap — fixing a couple of bugs that surfaced on arm64. It turns out the kernel’s BPF verifier got stricter in 6.8 and my programs need adjusting.
  • tilstream — quietly ticking along. Added a --draft mode so I can write without publishing.
  • Thinking about writing a small book of notes for engineers early in their career. Very unclear whether I have enough to say.

Reading

Currently in the rotation:

  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces — rereading the virtualization chapters, trying to deepen my mental model of process scheduling.
  • The Goal by Goldratt — a friend recommended it in the context of release engineering. Surprisingly useful.
  • The Postgres 17 release notes — the incremental sort and logical replication improvements are relevant for work.

Life

  • Running three times a week. Slower than I used to be; happier than I used to be about that.
  • Fermenting hot sauce in the closet. Attempt #3 after two previous failures (one mold, one explosion).
  • Taking a film photography class on Saturday mornings. Burning a roll of Portra 400 a week. See /photos/pentax-test-roll/ for early results.

Not doing

  • Conferences for the rest of the year. Giving myself a break.
  • Any new side projects. Four is too many; I have four.
  • Looking at my phone in the morning.

The /now page convention is by Derek Sivers. Worth 5 minutes of reading if you haven’t run into it.