February 2026: What I've Been Working On

Trying to keep up this practice of reflecting on the past month of work:

BookStack

This month I’ve still had trouble migrating to Codeberg, although my attempts may have got a little further.

Part of my focus was on the v25.12.4 security release, and then on the follow-up patch releases to address issues introduced in that security release. In hindsight, the changes made in that security patch release were a little too significant, and I probably should have delayed some of the more significant parts until a feature release. I spent a good while beforehand trying to ensure minimal impact, but you just can’t pre-empt every scenario.

Changes announced by Discord prompted me to start looking at platforms to potentially replace our Discord-based community. Just before this I was already testing a Matrix instance, bridged to our Discord, but I wasn’t really happy with the ease-of-use and the moderation control within Matrix. Later I set up a Zulip-based BookStack community site which, from a little bit of use so far, I’m quite enjoying. I’ve replaced many of our Discord links with this community site, but I’ll probably put together a blog post mid-March properly announcing this if there are no issues.

Another non-code-development element was coming up with a new community rules page for BookStack, to replace our fairly hidden & generic code-of-conduct in the project repo. This aims to be a bit more specific to our community, while also addressing some new considerations like the use of LLMs/AI. I’ve had some good feedback and discussions on this, some of which I need to consider before publishing out of draft.

I was aiming for the next feature release this month, but that was delayed due to some distractions, including the above series of patch releases, community site, and other bits, along with feeling unwell towards the end of the month. Instead I’m aiming for early/mid March.

I’ve worked through the assigned changes for the next feature release, and have done a pass through the pending pull requests which have stacked up over the last 6 months or so. There’s now just a fair bit of related external elements to work through, which include refinement of the BookStack query module which will be featured alongside the release, in addition to reviewing the BookStack hacks site to work with the new module system. Then it’ll be on to a few days of preparing release content (blog post, video etc…).

DanB/RSS

This month I made a couple of changes to DanB/RSS which fixed sub-path handling while reducing the docker image size a bit, taking it from 140MiB to 95MiB.

Debian Wiki

Having used Debian (either directly or via Ubuntu or Ubuntu variants) for almost a decade and a half, I’ve long wanted to contribute back in some way but the operating system software world is quite outside my comfort zone in terms of development, but I thought I could instead help contribute to the Debian Wiki, which can often feel quite lacking (especially compared to the Arch wiki).

After requesting & gaining access, I’ve started on making a few minor edits to the MariaDB wiki page, to add install & access guidance, along with version details. I’m very new to this, so just going very slowly in spare pockets of time to understand the process and style.

3D Print Models

Last month was focused on decorative prints, but this month was much more focused on functionality:

• Scrub Daddy Holder
  • Just wanted something to hold my sponge in a sensible way on a drying rack.
• Hoover Freedom 50mm Hose Adapter
  • Needed so I could connect my saw to my vacuum.
• 50mm Hose Adapter for Bosch Circular Saw
  • The other end of the above.

Blog Posts

A couple of new blog posts this month:

• My Sovol SV08 3D Printer Setup in 2026
• Your BookStackApp project was assigned as a project for my Software Architecture course

Is It Really Foss

Got into a slightly better flow for adding content this month, dedicating infrequent days seems to work better than occasional nights.

4 projects reviewed, with some extra background email work for another (LibreOffice). Most interesting was Netdata which appears to slowly be going more and more non-FOSS.

I also added an “Interesting Cases” section to the homepage to highlight what I think are quite intriguing scenarios.