$ cat ./now
Now
What I'm focused on at the moment. This is a now page, so it goes stale on purpose between updates.
last updated August 2026
# Running the lab
Keeping the 9-node Talos Kubernetes cluster healthy under GitOps, and slowly retiring the last of the homegrown glue in favor of boring, standard tooling. Recent work: controlled image updates through Renovate so every version bump is a reviewable, revertible change.
# Writing it down
Turning the interesting failures and design calls into posts here. The queue includes a hardware deep-dive follow-up and a couple of outage post-mortems I've been meaning to write properly.
# Open source
Maintaining dnsweaver: keeping DNS records following the infrastructure instead of drifting. Small, focused, well-tested Go. It has an outside contributor now. Someone went looking for a way to keep Technitium records in step with Traefik, found mine instead of writing their own, hit a bug my lab could never have produced, and sent the fix before we ever spoke.
# Upstream
Two contributions merged into OPNsense, six years apart. A maximum packet length option for traffic shaper rules back in 2020, and BGP maximum-paths for ECMP this March, which shipped in FRR plugin 1.52 with its documentation alongside it. The second one started life as an issue a bot closed after six months of nobody picking it up.
# Sharpening the craft
Getting better at directing AI agents without letting the quality bar slip. The judgment stays mine; the typing is just faster.
More about the professional side over on maxfieldallison.com.