Now

A /now page, in the sense Derek Sivers meant. Updated 1 August 2026.

Building #

Project 26 of the Vibecoding series. The pace slowed from one-a-day to one-when-it’s-ready, which was the right call — the point was never the count.

The last few: an internet radio station running at /radio, a URL shortener on s.mrdee.in, a privacy-first article reader that strips trackers, a mood check-in PWA that stores nothing it doesn’t need. Two bots keep posting without me — DVG verses to Mastodon, Wodehouse to Bluesky, twice a day each.

This site also has a custom 404 page. Hit a broken URL and you get a random Rajnikanth joke.

Learning #

The kernel. I spent years wanting to contribute and never having a safe place to break things, so in July I finished a stalled Debian 13 upgrade, stood up KVM, and built a custom kernel that boots in QEMU in about a second. Now I’m working through a 90-day plan toward a first patch — the note is here.

Alongside that: fuzzing. AFL++ harnesses against curl and parts of the Bitwarden SDK. Reading curl’s source was what started it — it’s been running on nearly every computer since 1998 and most people treat it as furniture.

Reading #

Mankutimmana Kagga by DVG, dipped into rather than read. 945 verses of Kannada philosophy from the 1940s. The kind of book that rewards returning to.

At work #

Risk, governance, incident response. The usual. The gap between what organisations think their security posture is and what it actually is remains a rich seam of material.

Not doing #

Chasing frameworks. Building things that need a slide deck to explain. Optimising anything before it’s shipped.