A snapshot of what I'm working on, reading, and thinking about right now. Inspired by nownownow.com.
What I'm doing now
Last updated May 2026 — from Amman, where the coffee is strong and the internet is... consistent.
yabasha.dev — turning my portfolio from a business card into an actual home. Recent work: this /now page, an Ask Yabasha chat that actually reads my writing before answering, and a Filament admin so I can stop editing markdown by hand like it's 2014.
Managic tokens — scoped bearer tokens for posting from anywhere. CLI, scripts, maybe an iOS shortcut someday. Audit log, per-token throttling, and a typo in the table name that I noticed six months ago and still haven't fixed. Some bugs become features. This one became personality.
wasansart.com — my daughter's watercolor gallery. She's seven. I built it because she asked me to "put her paintings on the computer like real art." Best project I've ever shipped, zero PRs, zero Jira tickets.
A couple of client projects I can't name yet. Next.js + Laravel stacks. The usual.
Production RAG systems — not the demo kind. The kind where chunking strategy determines whether your user gets an answer or a hallucination. Testing dense vs. sparse retrieval, re-ranking pipelines, and why "just use a bigger context window" is usually the wrong answer.
Vector databases in anger — Qdrant for hybrid search, Pinecone for managed scale. Learning that embedding model selection matters more than most teams want to admit. text-embedding-3-large vs. local models isn't a cost question — it's a recall question.
Tool-using agents that don't hallucinate their tools — the hard part isn't giving an LLM a function schema. The hard part is making it ground the decision in something real. Building evaluation frameworks that catch when an agent reaches for a tool it doesn't have, or argues with the result instead of using it.
LLM orchestration — prompt engineering for outputs that cite sources, refuse gracefully, and don't sound like they swallowed a terms-of-service document. The gap between "it works in my notebook" and "it works at 3am on a Saturday" is where actual engineering lives.
Next.js 16 — use cache finally makes sense. After years of drawing revalidation diagrams for teammates, this model clicks without the whiteboard.
React Server Components — in earnest now. I spent two years writing them like client components with extra imports. Finally stopped fighting the model and started using it.
Filament 4 — the admin panel I should've adopted in 2023. Every new project that needs a backend gets this now.
A Philosophy of Software Design — Ousterhout. Re-read annually. "Deep modules, simple interfaces" still hits harder than most conference keynotes.
The Pragmatic Engineer and Construction Physics — weekly, in my inbox, actually opened and read. Rare for newsletters.
The Next.js changelog at 2am. Not a book. Still counts.
How to make AI assistants useful for writing without making the writing sound like it came from the same model everyone else is using. There's a line between amplification and homogenization, and most teams are on the wrong side of it.
The right amount of structure for a personal site: enough to keep me posting, not so much I spend weekends building a CMS instead of writing.
Speaking more. Less rehearsed, more honest. Twenty years in and I still learn more from a 10-minute hallway conversation than a 40-slide deck.
Side projects that need a team. I've got ideas that require three engineers and a designer. They can wait.
Twitter as a primary channel. I post when I have something to say. The algorithm doesn't get to schedule my thoughts.
Crypto anything. I said what I said.
Inspired by Derek Sivers' /now movement. If you've got one, send me a link — I collect them like some people collect mechanical keyboards.
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