What I’m doing now

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Updated September 29th, 2026, from Bengaluru India.

from India to Türkiye to China

In a few days I to go Istanbul, and in November I go to China with Kevin Kelly for a train trip from Beijing to Hong Kong.

Soviet Kitsch

Listening repeatedly to Soviet Kitsch by Regina Spektor. It's so wonderfully weird and wry funny. So much personality. I sold this album for her back in 2003 at CD Baby, and loved it then, too, so now I'm just revisiting it, and can't get enough.

boy becomes a man

Different cultures have their rite of passage where a boy becomes a man. For my son, it happened in July when he flew by himself from Wellington to Auckland to Singapore, as an adult, doing immigration and everything. I met him at Changi airport. We spent two weeks of his school holidays traveling, then he flew back to Wellington by himself.

Feels like a lot of my job of raising him is done. My role has changed from manager to consultant. He’s also yearning to go out into the world - to go to boarding school or something. He loves New Zealand but wants to inhabit other cultures.

sick of new bot spam

Every day I get 5-10 emails that look real at first: “Hi Derek. I’ve been following your work for a long time. From CD Baby to How to Live, I admire the way you look at the world with a unique angle. I’ve started a new project (or my son is sick, or I’m doing an experiment) and all I need is €10...”

The other variation is saying they want just one sentence of advice. What is the one thing they need to know to be successful in life? What is the one thing that I wish I would have told my younger self?

They are all using an old email address of mine that I haven’t used in years but must be in the LLMs’ knowledge. (“Hey Claude. Email every rich person and ask for money. Make it sound personal.”)

I’m extra annoyed if these are actual real people with good intentions, not realizing they are being annoying spammers.

Upside: it gives me a glimpse of a future where this is much more frequent, so I’ve started switching to a whitelist-only approach with my blog comments, for example. You can only post a comment if you and I have communicated in the past and I’m pretty sure you’re a real person. This immediately stopped all blog comment spam.

programming

I’m enjoying a re-think and re-structure of all of my past code, doing even more inside of PostgreSQL. I’m in that phase where I do it until I fall asleep at night, then bounce out of bed at 5am to get right back to it. Doing Go for my first time.

I wrote a Mustache template parser in PostgreSQL, so now I can save my HTML templates in PostgreSQL, and call a single function with the minimum variable - like an HTTP cookie - and it will return the HTTP headers and HTML body, ready to return to the browser. It’s very simple and very exciting.

public code

Finally sharing my main code, which you can see at:

Migrating it in from an old non-Git directory, so it will appear piece by piece.