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 January 2026?
This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hidden architecture of things—the systems, both visible and invisible, that shape how we experience the world. It started with a book that felt like a blueprint for the emotional toll of ADHD, continued with another that revealed how the web’s biggest flaws became its foundational pillars, and it all culminated in the work I’m doing on my own digital garden, turning years of messy notes into a system that thinks. It’s a recurring lesson: understanding the system, whether it’s in our brains or on our screens, is the first step toward changing our relationship with it.
📖 Understanding Loved Ones
I’ve been reading Dirty Laundry: Why Adults with ADHD Are So Ashamed and What We Can Do to Help, the kind of book you press into a friend's hands to say, "This. This is what I've been trying to explain."
It's built around the real, chaotic stories of ADHD—missed bills, time blindness—and shows how that chaos turns into a deep, pervasive shame. Its power isn't in productivity hacks, but in its relentless focus on self-compassion.
For me, this book was a godsend. Having people close to me with ADHD, understanding concepts like "Time Blindness" was a huge learning. It reframed my perspective, showing me how our brains can operate so differently. It was the key to learning how to help and complete, rather than to judge and take things personally.
🕸️ Reading (and remembering) How Pain Built the Web
I also read Tim Berners-Lee’s book, This is for Everyone, which felt like having coffee with the person who built the web and hearing him say, "This was never meant to turn out like this." He frames the web's evolution as a series of responses to pain. The web creaking under its own weight birthed Akamai. The chaos of unqueryable data led to Oracle. The noise of early search engines produced Google’s PageRank. Each bottleneck became an invitation to build the infrastructure we now take for granted.
Having been in the industry for a while, reading this was a nostalgic journey. It gave me a serious "I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago…" moment. I'm old enough to remember many of these technologies being presented to us for the first time, seeing the very pain points that drove their creation.
🕰️ Time-Traveling Through My Notes
That idea—of solving pain by building a better system—is exactly what my digital garden has become. For years, my notes were a messy, untamed stream, and the pain was a mix of “folder anxiety” and the inability to find emergent connections. My solution was to methodically cultivate that stream into a structured, metadata-driven garden.
The biggest payoff has been with my travel notes. By systematically mining years of old journal entries, I’ve created an interconnected database of past trips, complete with cities, places, booking details, and costs. It has become a fantastic way to travel in time. I can pull up a trip to Scotland from years ago and not only see the itinerary but also re-read the stories and feel the moments I documented. The system has turned a chaotic archive into a personal time machine.
- Travel Memory System: How I Built One That Carries the Admin
- From Evernote to Obsidian: A Note-Taking Migration Story
- Be Curious, Not Judgemental – shifting from perception to perspective
- A Farmer’s Guide to Patient Leadership and Being Present in Growth
- Build a Home Lab for Local LLMs with Docker + AMD iGPU
#blog
This page is inspired by Derek Sivers “now page” movement.
Updated: 30 Jan 2026
