What I'm doing now

Inspired by the now movement. If we had not met for a year, this is what I would tell you.

Happy Christmas!

It's been two and a half months since the last update. Since then, life has moved forward. I've moved back to Galway and found a nice little one-bed apartment in the city centre.

I've started a Meetup group for the Galway Go Club. I've been doing some teaching-style games recently, which has been fun.

Work at OnePageCRM goes well. I've been working on some performance improvements across our applications. In early 2026, I'll be working on infrastructure updates.

Fitness-wise... In the last entry I said I would do 75 Hard. I failed. However, I've decided to run a marathon in 2026. So I'm at the very beginning stages of training for this. By "very beginning", I mean I've made a spreadsheet and gone on four runs. Follow my journey on Strava if you want. We'll see how this goes.

My HomeLab is slowly progressing. Running Proxmox as hypervisor with Pi-hole and Unbound for ad blocking and DNS, Tailscale across all devices with Mullvad as exit node, Nextcloud (though not really using it yet), and of course my Bitcoin node and Fulcrum Electrum server. Lots of ideas for extending this, but it's stable and covers my needs. Extending when time and motivation align.

Still loving my Omarchy setup. This site has been neglected over the last few months, but I have plans for it in 2026.

Right now life is mostly about re-settling in, building structure again, and getting back into good rhythms. It feels like a rebuilding chapter.

After taking a couple of months off in Guadalajara, Mexico after my bike tour, I decided it was time to head back home to Ireland. Currently adjusting to life back here.

I'm in the process of house-hunting in Galway. The rental market is absolutely insane. It was always bad, but somehow it feels even worse than I remember. If someone reading this hears of a house or apartment for rent at an anyway reasonable cost in the city or nearby, please reach out!

I've also started back at OnePageCRM as a Senior Software Engineer, focusing on DevOps and Security. OnePageCRM is a simple, no-nonsense CRM built for solopreneurs and small businesses.

Still playing Go, and it's great to be back at the Galway Go Club.

I've started the 75 Hard Challenge with two groups of friends and colleagues. It's the good kind of bullying. Am two weeks in, and so far so good. The first time I did this, I was very strict with myself. This time not so much. Am currently reading Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink as part of this challenge.

On the tech side, I picked up a little MiniPC with grand plans for a home lab and some self-hosted services. So far I've only gotten as far as installing and configuring Proxmox, but the ideas are there... time, less so.

One of the nice things about being home is having my laptop again. I finally switched from Ubuntu, which I'd used for years, to Arch/Omarchy. Loving it so far, though it still takes a bit of getting used to.

Still tinkering with this website from time to time. I've completed the migration of my Winging it on Wheels bike tour journal here, and started some entirely unnecessary infrastructure experiments, which I'll document in a new series starting here.

I quit my job one year ago to start a long distance bike trip. After more than 10,000 incredible km on the road, I wanted a base for a while. Not quite sure if I want to end the bike trip, but also not sure if I am ready to go home. So I now find myself in Guadalajara, Mexico. Tacos, the local Go club, and long sessions in cafes are my current daily rhythm.

I have rediscovered my love of software and building things. I am building out this site, and playing with some small toy projects.

Am also working on moving my Winging it on Wheels bike tour journal from CGOAB to this site so I can host it myself.

I am teaching myself nvim, Astro, and some frontend by building this site. I am doing it without a laptop, inside a terminal on my phone, which is an interesting experience to say the least.