What am I doing now?

This is my “now” page inspired by Derek Sivers. It answers “what I’m doing now?“. My life, projects and priorities. I post an update here every 1-3 months.

What’s up as of April 2026?

April in our house always orbits Easter — the Resurrection Mass, the family Sunday, the kids hunting for chocolate eggs. But this year the moment that stayed with me wasn’t the celebration itself. It was the image of one humble candle quietly bringing a whole church out of darkness. That same idea kept turning up in other corners of the month — in a meeting room in Amsterdam, where a quiet word from a new manager helped me find my feet in a role I’d never held before. And on a desk at home, where a small mini-PC and a quiet NAS turned into the first version of my own homelab. Three small flames in three different rooms. April 2026 has been about how the quietest things spread the furthest.

🕯️ One Humble Candle

Christus resurrexit! One humble candle — that's all it takes to light a whole church.

Easter sits at the centre of our year, and the Resurrection Mass is the heart of it. The service begins in total darkness. The priest steps outside, blesses a fire, and from it lights the Paschal candle — the one that stands for the Risen Christ. That single flame is then carried back inside and passed from hand to hand, candle to candle, until every person in the congregation is holding their own small light. The whole church goes from black to glowing, all from one quiet source.

A bit like life. One small gesture of kindness can trigger a cascade of others, multiplied by everyone it touches. That's how each of us, in our own small way, helps the world become a little better.

We closed the weekend at Hever Castle, our favourite place, where the kids hunted for dragon eggs at a special Easter event laid on just for them.

✍️ Learning to Let Go of the Whiteboard Marker

Spent three days in Amsterdam at a company offsite, prepping for a product launch later this year. Our team is spread across countries and time zones, so we packed the days with technical sessions and a lot of whiteboarding — the kind of work that's just easier when everyone's in the same room.

The twist for me: I showed up in my new role as a technical leader — an individual contributor, not the people leader I've been for years. After years in the facilitator's seat (letting others speak first, taking notes, steering conversations from the side), I was now the one prepping topics, kicking off discussions, and owning the technical direction.

I kept drifting back into facilitator mode out of habit. My new manager would quietly, subtly, course-correct me back into deep technical ownership.

A good reminder that experience in one role doesn't transfer automatically — but the retrospective mindset does. You're never really starting from zero. You're transferring skills from one place to another.

🧠 A Homelab, Built by Asking

In March I said I was hoping AI_devs 4 would equip me to build my own assistant from scratch. April is when I started — and the project quickly outgrew the assistant.

What emerged is a two-node homelab: a small mini-PC called manfred for the compute, and TinyNAS, my Synology box, for storage and backups. On top sits a stack defined as code in a private GitHub repo — Home Assistant for the house, Prometheus and Grafana for visibility, n8n for the automations I keep meaning to write — all wired through Docker Compose, with restic snapshots running to the NAS each night.

The honest part is that I didn't really know how to do any of this. Where to put database files, how to wire systemd timers, how to scrape SNMP from a Synology — none of it. I learned each piece by asking LLMs to teach me, then to write up the requirements and the phased implementation plan in markdown files I'd come back to later.

A funny loop: using language models to write the playbook for the lab that runs them. Spec-driven development, but for infrastructure.

#blog

This page is inspired by Derek Sivers “now page” movement.

Updated: 25 Apr 2026