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SEPTEMBER 2026 · UPDATED MONTHLY

What I'm doing
right now

Ngo Huu Loc  ·  Khánh Hòa, Vietnam 🇻🇳
This is a /now page. Inspired by Derek Sivers.

BUILDING

Still in Vietnam. Still at my desk. A self-hosted TLS certificate authority — implementing ACME/RFC 8555 from scratch, because reading the Let's Encrypt docs wasn't enough. I needed to feel every byte of the handshake.

Also: a static HTML5 game serving pipeline. Turns out "just put the files on a server" hides an enormous amount of nuance — root-relative paths, base tags, Service Workers, the entire JS boot process. I'm mapping all of it.

And Minecraft Bedrock add-ons. Everyone needs a project that doesn't matter.

LEARNING

RFC-level deep. Not tutorial-level. The full stack, from ASN.1 DER encoding up to the browser's certificate UI.

PKI · CERTIFICATES · TLS
ACME / RFC 8555 Let's Encrypt X.509 / RFC 5280 PKCS#10 / CSR ASN.1 DER CRL / OCSP TLS 1.2 / TLS 1.3 Cert chain validation Trust stores Certificate Transparency RDAP IANA registries
SYSTEMS · OS
Windows internals WDK browser sandbox
WEB PLATFORM
localhost HTTP / HTTPS TLS browser cert validation static HTML5 game serving JS boot process root-relative paths <base> polyfills bundled JS
BROWSER APIS
Web Workers Service Workers IndexedDB Web Crypto
MISC
IELTS Minecraft Bedrock add-ons
READING

Four books in parallel. None of them are easy. All of them are necessary.

Serious Cryptography
Serious Cryptography
Jean-Philippe Aumasson
The Linux Programming Interface
The Linux Programming Interface
Michael Kerrisk
Designing Machine Learning Systems
Designing Machine Learning Systems
Chip Huyen
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1
Fall & Stevens
NOT DOING

Not applying for jobs. Not on social media. Not starting anything new until I understand what I'm currently building.

If you're wondering why I'm learning all of this at once — I'm not. It's the same thing. Bytes over a wire, with trust negotiated by math. Zoom in on any of these topics long enough and they converge.

September 2026 · Khánh Hòa, Vietnam nownownow.com
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HARDWARE & SOFTWARE · SEPTEMBER 2026

What I use

Ngo Huu Loc  ·  Khánh Hòa, Vietnam 🇻🇳
The gear and tools behind the code. Inspired by uses.tech.

MACHINE

An HP laptop running Windows 11 alongside WSL2 — the hybrid setup that gives me the best of both worlds. Native GPU access for CUDA and a full Linux development environment in the same box.

HOST HP VHP 8DCD · 50.11
OS Windows 11 Home 25H2Build 26200.9457
CPU Intel Core i5-13420H13th Gen · 8C/12T · 2.1 GHz → 4.6 GHz
RAM 16 GB DDR5single-channel SODIMM
STORAGE WD PC SN5000S 512 GB NVMePCIe Gen 4 · SDEPNSJ-512G
DISPLAY 15.6" FHD IPS1920 × 1080 · 144 Hz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU
6 GB GDDR6 · CUDA 13.3 · Driver 610.43 · 50 W TGP
DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

Everything runs inside WSL2 (Ubuntu 24). The terminal is home — most of my workflow never touches the Windows side except for GPU-accelerated tasks via CUDA.

SHELL Zshwith Oh My Zsh · WSL2 Ubuntu 24
EDITOR VS CodeRemote WSL extension · 200+ extensions deep
TERMINAL Windows Terminalwith JetBrains Mono · custom cyberpunk profile
VERSION CTL Git + GitHubgithub.com/d4vucat
CONTAINERS Docker DesktopWSL2 backend
CUDA CUDA Toolkit 13.3NVIDIA SMI 610.43.02 · KMD 610.62
LANGUAGES

The order matters. C++ is home — it's where I understand what actually happens. Everything else is a higher-level abstraction I respect, but I always want to know what's underneath.

C++ Python TypeScript JavaScript Lua Bash / Zsh SQL HTML / CSS
TECH STACK
FRONTEND
Vue 3 React Next.js Tailwind Vanilla JS
BACKEND
FastAPI Express Node.js C++ / Boost
INFRA
Docker Vercel Nginx Linux
AI / ML
CUDA / CUDNN PyTorch Anthropic API
RUNTIME VERSIONS
NODE v22.0.0npm 10.x
PYTHON 3.12+ uv for env management
G++ / CLANG GCC 13 · Clang 18C++23 with concepts & ranges
PHILOSOPHY

Gear doesn't make the engineer. A mid-range laptop running WSL2 and a disciplined workflow produces the same output as a maxed-out machine with a messy one. The discipline is the setup.

I don't upgrade hardware until the machine becomes the bottleneck. Right now, the bottleneck is still me.

September 2026 · Khánh Hòa, Vietnam uses.tech