I build software

Every web app hands its code to every visitor. Your paywall check, your pricing rules, the license check in your desktop app, the anti-cheat in your game — all of it ships to the user's device. And in 2026, anyone can paste that bundle into an AI agent and get clean, editable source back in minutes, together with a one-line patch that unlocks your paywall. Yesterday I launched AfterPack — my…

After Kyoto, a night on Mt. Fuji and two days of Tokyo crowds, we flew to Siargao for 4 days of full chill-out. The Philippines became my 86th country — the last new one on this Asia trip. My fiancée tried surfing for the first time at the famous Cloud 9, and I found out the famous wave isn't for everyone. We also got two cats we didn't plan for, and an ATM with a screen melting in the sun. The…

We climbed Mt. Fuji in August 2026 the "wrong" way around: up the steep, rocky Subashiri trail and down the easy Yoshida trail. Two days, one night in a mountain hut at about 3,000 m, one 2 am start — and the top highlight of my four-week Asia trip. Below: getting from Kyoto to the trail, the 2026 fees and registration, gear rental, the hut, and the one junction on the way down you really…

Tokyo is now my favorite city in the world, and I only had two nights there. Japan became my country #85 in August 2026, one week of my four-week Asia trip: three nights in Kyoto, a night in a hut on Mt. Fuji, and two nights in Tokyo. This post covers Kyoto's five fires on August 16, a hotel public bath I didn't expect to love, and Shibuya at night. Japan is home to almost 123 million people, and…

In Seoul, a restaurant full of aquariums wouldn't sell me a few cakes unless I also ordered a drink I didn't want. That, and Google Maps being unable to give walking directions in 2026, were the two things about South Korea — my 84th country — that I didn't see coming. Everything else in our 2 full days was easy to like: the most comfortable bus of my life, a stone bathtub, Seoul from almost 500…

Taipei is where I finally bought a new DJI controller — I'd drowned the old one a few days before leaving home, and it took almost two weeks of our month-long Asia trip to replace it. Taiwan became my 83rd country: 2 nights, one day with a local friend, and a sunset from a hill instead of the top of Taipei 101. I found Taipei really nice, and my girlfriend liked it even more. If you travel on a…

Laos became my 82nd country, and we spent exactly one night in it. We came overland from Udon Thani, crossed the Friendship Bridge on an e-visa, had perfectly real US dollars rejected for being slightly creased, and ended the day with a 2-hour massage for $20 — for two. If you're planning the Udon Thani to Vientiane route, the practical part is at the end. This was a detour in the middle of our…

My third time in Bangkok, if not the fourth — and 7.5 years after the first one. This time the city was a base, not the destination: two short stays around a one-night detour to Laos in the middle of our 4-week trip across Asia. In between, I found the Grand Palace closed and went up a tower whose roof slowly spins about 300 meters above the streets. Thailand hardly needs an introduction (I've…

We landed in Vietnam at 00:40, straight after a 16-hour layover in Beijing that somehow included the Great Wall of China. Vietnam became my 81st country, and for the first two days all we wanted from it was sleep. Then came 5 days in Da Nang: my girlfriend's first scuba dive, an electric scooter on roads that are 80% scooters, and a dragon-shaped bridge I crossed again and again. This was the…

We landed in Beijing around 4 am with a 16-hour layover and, as it turned out, no internet. Google didn't work, our VPN wouldn't connect over the airport Wi-Fi, and the only navigation we had was reading map app names off posters. A few hours later we were standing on the Great Wall of China — on a free tour that starts right at the airport — and China became my 80th country. Four weeks later we…

Guess how many flights fit into 4 weeks in Asia? We took 16 — plus one Shinkansen and a few buses — through 9 countries between July 29 and August 27, 2026. Seven of those countries were new to me, #80 to #86, and a hot, crowded day on the Great Wall of China closed my list of the New 7 Wonders of the World at 7/7. This post is the overview: the route, and the few things that made 16 flights feel…

For months, the AfterPack waitlist — a launch page I put up for my upcoming product — did one extra thing after you entered your email: it popped up a small box asking what matters most to you. <img src="https://r2.nikitaeverywhere.com/2026/06-04-waitlist-welcome-old.png" alt="The AfterPack post-signup screen — after you enter your email, a single free-form box asks what matters most to you.…

I hate spam. But even more, I hate emails that look legitimate yet add zero value — the kind you glance at, realize it's just another "We updated our Terms of Service" notification, and delete. I'm registered on 1000+ websites accumulated over 15+ years. Even if each sends one Terms & Conditions update per year, that's roughly 3 emails per day. Every single day. Three more distractions pulling me…

Fifteen years ago, at the beginning of my software engineering journey, I wish I had a mentor. Someone senior — a CTO, a founder, anyone who'd been through it — to sit down with me for half an hour and explain how it all actually works. Not the syntax. The thinking. Patterns. Reality. I learned by Googling. The skill back then was asking the right query, finding the right article someone wrote…

A shared vacation calendar in Google Workspace is one of those problems that every company has and that is surprisingly still not solved out of the box. You'd think Google would have a native "team vacations" view — they don't. <Callout type="tip"> Important to know: Google Calendar has a dedicated "Out of Office" event type — selectable in the event type tabs — that auto-declines meetings and…

The era when devices are controlled just by thought is almost here. Until then, chat 💬 beats menus and forms as the way to interact with systems — and each other. I recently embedded an AI agent into Jinna, a free invoicing tool. By the way you can log in and create beautiful✨ invoices there, for free! It feels like magic: Ask an AI agent for an invoice, and it creates one. Understands complex…

For the past five years, Cloudflare has been my default infrastructure choice for nearly everything I build. I might be biased, but I genuinely believe Cloudflare gives you the most flexible, robust, easy-to-build, low-maintenance infrastructure — for FREE, until you finally make it. When DataUnlocker suddenly had to handle 50 million proxy requests per day after a major customer onboarded, I…

I love Google. I worked at Google. It was my childhood dream to work there, and I made it happen. So what I'm about to tell you isn't coming from a place of hate — it's coming from a place of genuine disappointment. Google deleted 10 years of my location history. Not intentionally, but that doesn't make it any better. How Many People Lost Their Google Maps Timeline? Google never published a…