A snapshot of what I’m up to right now. Inspired by Derek Sivers’ nownownow.com. Last updated May 5, 2026.

Work

I’m about four months into running Two Bit Consulting full time — IT support, fractional technology leadership, and web design for small organizations doing meaningful work. Six active clients at the moment, which feels like the right amount of busy. I’m also actively looking for the right full-time IT director or CIO role in Kansas City. Those two things are more complementary than they sound.

Writing

I published my first personal essay here in February — “Building Something Out of Nothing” — and I’m trying to keep the momentum going. Writing is the thing I find simultaneously thrilling and terrifying, which probably means it’s worth doing. A book idea keeps surfacing, from multiple directions. I’m not ready to say more than that yet.

Reading

Working through several books at once, which is my natural state. You can see what I’m currently reading and what’s on deck on the books page.

Around the house

Maura and I are in a doing well. The dogs are well. Kansas City in the spring is genuinely beautiful, which I’m trying to pay attention to instead of just noting in passing. I’m also in the middle of painting the door in my study red — it was a dark stained brown, which was fine, but red feels more right and will contract nicely with the light blue — we love color!

This website

Spent a day overhauling jakefowler.com. Migrated the books page off Micro.blog to Hardcover, a developer-friendly Goodreads alternative with a GraphQL API. Books now sync automatically on every deploy, including the reading goal progress. Also added a /now page (this one), wired up a Bear → Hugo publish workflow for it, and cleaned up some long-standing CSS issues with hover states and deprecated Hugo config keys.

How this site works

jakefowler.com runs on Hugo, a static site generator, deployed to DreamHost via GitHub Actions. The publishing workflow:

  • Blog posts: Write in Bear, tag #publish, run the “Bear Publish” script — it extracts the note, builds front matter, copies images, commits to GitHub, cross-posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, and removes the tag when done
  • Books: Tracked in Hardcover, synced automatically to the site on every deploy via a Node script that hits their GraphQL API
  • Everything else: Edit relevant Bear notes, run the “Publish Now Page” script — it overwrites the pages and pushes

#publish/now