What’s a Now Page?

“Now” pages are inspired by Derek Sivers ↗. They attempt to answer the question: “What is this person focused on at this exact point in their life?” Whist all the masses of information on my bio page and works page tell you what I’ve done, they don’t tell you what I’m doing now, what I’m going to do, nor what’s important to me.

So, what am I doing, now?

Life

I’m living in the countryside near Comber, Northern Ireland ↗. With my partner, and two Italian Greyhounds - Gnocchi and Capo - who are the right blend of dog/cat hybrid by mannerism. Thinking of moving to mainland Europe, let’s see.

Work

I’ve been focusing a lot on components of infrastructure that are higher in the stack than my previous wheelhouse. Think Kubernetes and above; Things like Knative ↗, Event-based programming and serving ↗, building ↗ and serving ↗ Machine Learning models scalably ↗, GitOps ↗, Continuous Delivery ↗

Research

I’ve got way too many books on my backlog and thing’s im interested in learning more about and building with. A few tasters;

Hobbies

Code

I just rebuilt this site on Hugo ↗ and heavily customised a theme ↗ for my purposes, it now runs on GitHub Pages and Actions ↗, Cloudflare Workers and has a privacy-first model ↗ to analytics. Give me that markdown and git life.

Cars

I finally got round to finishing that Mini after some coaxing from my brother for my 30th birthday, it’s got (another) new engine, suspension and a new ECU tune. And no matter what I do, it won’t be faster than my daily driver, which has a warranty.

3D Printing

I recently built a Voron v2.4 ↗. It’s an ABS-first enclosed chamber printer with a modern firmware ↗ and some really neat kinematics ↗.

Flying

I’ve started studying for my PPL (Private Pilot’s License) in the UK, that consists of many books, Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 ↗ in a Cessna 172 and VATSIM ↗. Before I get into some real lessons that is.

Simulators

Speaking of simulators… I built quite a considerable motion sim rig recently, initially for racing, but I’ve been using it for flying a lot now - I learned things about industrial servo drivers, EMI ↗, household wiring and RCDs ↗ I never wanted to know.

Brewing

I started brewing beer, the first (a chocolate imperial stout) actually didn’t suck, up next is a Weiss.

Robotics

I finished up a JetBot ↗ recently, that uses live image inference to chase my dogs around and i’m working out how to build a SpotMicro ↗.

Music

My latest fascination is vinyl. I’ve become one of those unapologetic hipsters who buys new music on vinyl from bands I really appreciate in order to support them, and man, it’s just amazing how that needle works. Still plays the record through a wireless sound system.

The tous les jours right now is:

And a huge, huge shout-out to Toundra ↗ my absolute favourite from the last two years or so. For a taste of all of the above (it’ll be a journey, I promise you) give the playlist below a spin or check out my last.fm ↗:

If you’re into music like this, hit me up on Twitter ↗, I could talk about this for hours.