Justin Merrill, MBA, BS .:|:. Platform Engineer

Platform | DevOps | SRE | K8s | GitOps | IaC | CICD | Security | IAM | Cloud | Software | Data | APIs

Now

Based on https://nownownow.com/about – Last Updated Q1 2026

Professionally

In Q1 of 2026, I’m using a lot of NixOS and Alpine Linux in a DevOps Engineering role with an awesome organization that has extremely innovative tooling and features, with a small-but-mighty of some of the most talent individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working with to date. I’ve been working daily with a wide variety of AI tools, products and services for numerous web services and upgrading web3/blockchains features and greenfield designs.

It’s serendipitous how I found a junction for my Engineering and MBA Degrees, using my favorite Flavors of Linux and building out new AI tools and features that integrate with DevOps workflows and automation. I’ve found new and interesting ways to nginx (and porxy) for scraping metrics and aggregating logs to keep things fresh, yet familiar. 2025 was a PROFOUNDLY better year.

I am continuing to learn new skills, studying for professional certifications and attending local software/IT professional networking groups, discussions, conventions and seminars. Some examples:

  • Generic new skills and side projects/experiments:
    • SERIOUSLY (Awesome) Advanced Nix (PL & PM), MCP (AI), Go, Rust, Financial tooling, Xen API, Prometheus + new observability stacks
  • Vendor-specific offerings
    • Claude (Anthropic), Grok (x.AI), Copilot (Github/MS), AWS, Oracle Cloud (OCI), Digital Ocean, Mellanox + Cisco (Network Hardware + Engineering), Hashicorp (Terraform, Vault, Consul)
  • Open-source tooling
  • General studies related to professional certifications

Respect to the NDAs, I keep it vague. This is fun update for me after a much better year. I hope it’s same for you, too.

Personally

I’m still “packaging” custom tools for AI. Mostly with Anthropic APIs/Claude in the last year, but I still try to keep up with Open Source LLMs, too. I still haven’t built that GPU farm yet… but I managed to find a few GPUs to keep experimenting interesting. The AI goal posts are still ALL OVER THE PLACE in 2025, but some of the experiments I’ve done with 13-20B Models are promising. But like I said, last year, too: AI is a tool, not an autonomous and critical thinking robot that understands nuance. I’ve seen a lot of the “personality” bleached out from models/providers in the last year, and some expanded tooling that has solid promise, but not much in the way of “game changing” features. I’m not really sure how I feel about it, yet.

Side Projects

I would like to hear from anyone interested in helping develop and maintain the various tools for Anthropic / Claude Code and OpenCode I’ve put together to fill the (massive…) gaps in options and offerings from Anthropic and x.AI features. MCP Tools have been something I’ve drifted away from in the last few months, in favor of old fashioned Bash scripting and custom Python. Why? Because it actually works. Still. Consistently.

I get it. MCP is the future. But “native outputs from AI” are so incredibly inconsistent and unpredictable, I’m instead going back to writing idempotent scripts that don’t require tty for CLI-based AI tools. MCP is great, when you can get the models to use them efficiently, but… In my experience, that’s been extremely rare, thus far (for better or worse, depending on your AI opinions and perspectives). Scripting is a little slower at first, but less tedious with more consistency in the longer term. I’d be curious to know if anyone else is doing the same, and interested in good old-fashioned human collabs. I see a lot of one-off OSS tools released, or gists getting outdated in a few weeks for said “gaps” in features, but not much in the way of workflow improvements around consistency or deterministic results (or at least less random?).

If you stumble upon my corner of the not-yet-Dead Internet and it sounds like something you’re interested in, drop me a line for a show-and-tell and we can work it out.

Leisure

I have recently rediscovered the beauty and tranquility of nature and silent spaces in my proximity. City, county and state parks with gorgeous water features are my happy places. Paddle sports, swimming, golf, hiking and the pursuit of great live music and food have helped me re-connect with my community and expand my social circles and discovering new hobbies and venues.

Goals

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”-  John Wooden

2026 Goals: More direct sunlight and yoga, preferably good enough weather for both at the same time, and less fighting with AI models that forget steps 3 and 4 of a six-step process when I’m brave enough to go full YOLO mode… Namaste!