Now, October 2026
A page about what I am focused on this month, in the spirit of the now page movement. If you are reading this a year later, assume most of it has changed.
Building
Most of my week goes to a reconciler for a buy-now-pay-later company in Kuching. They settle with three banks, each sends a different file at a different hour, and today a person matches them in a spreadsheet every morning before nine. The goal is that by December the spreadsheet only shows the lines a person actually needs to look at, which on a normal day should be fewer than ten.
The interesting part is not the matching. It is deciding what counts as the same transaction when a bank splits one payment into two lines, or merges three into one, and writing that down so the next engineer can change it without fear.
Writing
A follow-up to Money is an integer, about append-only ledgers and why a month-end close should take an afternoon. It is half done and about twice as long as it should be.
Learning
Better SQL for time series. I have been writing window functions badly for years and finally sat down with the PostgreSQL docs on a Saturday morning. Also slowly learning Hokkien properly, so I can follow my grandmother's stories without asking my mother to translate.
Not doing
New side projects. sempadan v3 is the only open source work until it ships. Conference travel until March. Saying yes to calls on Friday afternoons.
Also
- 5 km, three mornings a week, before it gets hot
- Old Teresa Teng records, and a lot of rain
- Same keyboard since 2021, a small board for testing webhooks, kopi-o
Available from January 2027
One engagement at a time, four to six months. If your product moves money and month end is starting to hurt, write to me.
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