January 2026: What I've Been Working On

31st of January 2026

#WorkUpdates

Going into 2026, I thought it’d be a good habit to take note of my work each month to reflect on any progress I’ve made, and to take note of things I’ve enjoyed. This may be a habit I quickly drop, but let’s give it a try!

This is not an exhaustive list of everything I’ve done, but instead just the notable public work.

BookStack

My main task was to migrate the main repo to GitHub, but I’ve had some trouble with that. I think, with its 6000+ issues and 200+ releases, BookStack is stressing out the import process. Just waiting for various fixes to be merged into Forgejo, and make it into Codeberg. I may have to dive deeper into the migration code myself if I continue to have issues. There’s been some extra little parts to work out around this, like how we’ll sync translations, but I’ve got things loosely ready and planned out for when we can actually migrate.

I’ve continued work on an LLM/AI based query system, this time evolving my previous work into an external hack & docker setup, which can be used with current BookStack instances. The code for this is here: https://codeberg.org/bookstack/query. I’m not yet widely announcing this though, since I want to use this as a basis for extending the BookStack hack/theme systems to be more modular, which I’ve started with the intent of that being the focus of the next feature release. After then, I’ll use the LLM/AI system as an example of that, and develop it out further.

Otherwise, I’ve released some patch releases, including a security release. I’ve had quite a few bogus AI-driven security reports recently, so it was nice to have a legitimate disclosure report provided with good communication. In that communication, I’ve opened discussions about the potential of regular security reports/evaluations for BookStack.

At the start of the year, I spent some time finishing up the 2025 blogpost. It was great to see things like the growth of the project are keeping on track in the right direction. I made a video to go along with the blogpost:

DomPDF

This is a PDF generation library which we use in BookStack. When we added AVIF support to BookStack, one concern was that this library did not support AVIF images, so when I had a moment I implemented and tested support which is in a pull request due to be part of a future release.

OnlySpoolz

When 3d printing, I’ve found the onlyspoolz site super useful, mainly to know the empty spool weights to estimate how much filament I have remaining.

I noticed the site was super heavy to load though due to the images, so I provided a PR which automatically resizes images on the build of the site, reducing the homepage loading from 103MB to 5.28MB (and potentially less if the browser uses lazy loading).

I later opened another PR to add spool type filtering, to reduce the options to sift through when looking for a specific spool design.

Both of these PRs have been merged and are live on the site. While making these PRs, I’ve enjoyed revisiting some very old-fashioned code libraries like jQuery, Bootstrap 3 and Masonry, and also enjoyed getting into some design work to create icons for the spool type filters.

3D Print Models

I’ve continued to enjoy creating new 3D printable models, a few of which I’ve shared on Printables:

First is a remix of E-Ink display frame, which adapts a different model to provide a more interesting design, to fix a different screen panel, and to sit better on a table. I’ve really enjoyed making a couple of these screens now, and iterating on designs. One of them is wall-mounted in my hallway to provide a nice weather display. The other I gave to my Dad as a birthday gift.

Then I enjoyed creating an ideal lampshade for my bedroom. I’ve been iterating on this so that the opaque part prevents the light shining directly at me when I’m in bed. This has been a learning process, to design more decorative geometry which is also printable. Had a couple of rough/failed prints before landing on the right thickness and design structure.

Later I created a Valentines Love Heart Lampshade. It’s not really a design I’d use, but I wanted to take part in a Printables design competition, and thought this would be a good design to produce with my newly found design skills from the lampshade above.

Blog Posts

I’ve been attempting to write a bit more, so have published a few posts this month:

Is It Really Foss

Progress on isitreallyfoss.com has been a bit slow so far. I’d like to increase the pace of projects added to the site, but it’s tricky to work on since project reviews can take over an hour, and may need further discussion/discovery/communication. I’m thinking it might be better to devote a day per week or two to focus on developing the site, rather than trying to find spots in the evening.