ALEXANDRU BADIU · 48K
Now

LOAD "now"

Where my attention is these days. Reasonably honest, and current.

Updated July 2026 · London

Work

Between roles since BENlabs wound down earlier this year. Looking for a senior IC or engineering leadership role.

I do my best work close to the product and the people using it. If you’re a charity or nonprofit and I can help, that too. Get in touch if that sounds like your team.

Making

Learning Go and Swift, and finally building the things I never had time for. InstaKobo and InstaRM for read-later, Incunable for EPUBs, and Zare, a bookmarking tool that surfaces connections between the things I save and reminds me about the concert I bookmarked four months ago.

Reading

Slowly chipping away at a large Instapaper backlog with the help of InstaKobo (and soon, InstaRM), dogfooding my own tools while I’m at it.

Devlog

InstaKoboOpen source
29 Jul 2026

Testing finished

I’ve tested the on-device version for two weeks without any major issues, and the filesystem corruption issue seems to be fixed. Currently working on the final touches before merging the Go rewrite.

Quarto GoOpen source
18 Jul 2026

Go version released

Part of the Go rewrite of Instakobo, I’ve ported the Quarto library to Go and released it as quarto-go.

IncunableOpen source
16 Jul 2026

Minimal version working

I got a minimal version running locally that synchronizes with my Elipsa 2E. Currently it has:

  • User authentication.
  • Initial Kobo proxy implementation.
  • Kepub conversion.
  • Minimal UI for book listing and details.
10 Jul 2026

Research

I looked into the possibility of extracting highlights from articles sent to a reMarkable device. There’s not a lot of example code out there, but I did get a proof of concept working on some test articles.

Music

Trying to learn (again) to play the theremin. If you have no idea what that is, it’s the first electronic instrument, with a fascinating history. It also sounds, according to a YouTube comment, like ‘dead people singing’. Also making music with odd things such as GameBoys and Commodore SID chips.

Inspired by Derek Sivers' now page, a small movement of sites with a "what I'm doing now" page.
Seabed from Glug Glug (CRL, 1984), the game that started it. Everything else is an ICE Felix HC 88 wearing a website.