Full Stack / Platform Engineer, previously at Trail of Bits.
Recent focus: Designed entire K8s infrastructure with secure best practices and Tailscale for intranet connectivity to self hosted services - supporting the team that placed 2nd at AIxCC DEF CON 2025. Built out multiple full-stack apps with Svelte, Tailwind CSS, Typescript, Python.
I like the idea. As a solo dev I've experimented with creating Claude subagents for multiple perspectives for "team leads" and will run ideas through them (in parallel). The subagents are just simple markdown explaining the various perspectives that are usually in contention when designing stuff. And a 'decider' that gives me an executive summary.
This looks excellent and very timely. We just started hand rolling our own ETL process with Python and Github Actions to ingest from various SaaS sources to a central DB for context to LLM(s) and traditional BI tools.
Speaking of Plaid, would love to see an integration there for personal finance
I think there's something to this and have been thinking about this for a while too. Just today tried to see if diff.me was available, sadly it's not.
I was thinking something like a git repo with a flat file in it. You list your beliefs / opinions / things you think are facts in a structured way (maybe a tree like structure) going all the way back to some "root". Then you can easily diff this file with someone else and see where you agree and differ. Changing someone's mind could just be a pull request :)
Same with the Smart Cover! I recently just found this out too, I can stick my iPad on the side of the fridge and plug it in and have a nice smart screen for family calendars, Siri / whatever
It depends on your scale of course. It’s not like “the industry” just wants to make things complicated for the fun of it. There comes a point where you’ll need more than one server to host your web app and when you do Kubernetes provides a nice abstraction in addition to providing a ton of other useful things at scale like infrastructure as code to zero downtime, continuous deployments.
I’ve been playing with xonsh lately and really liking it so far! From what I can tell it’s pretty close to feature parity with fish shell which has a lot of nice things like command auto completion but you don’t have to learn yet another shell syntax it’s just python. Wrote up a quick trip report at https://blog.jamesolds.me/post/xonsh-aws-example/
Thanks for posting this! Been playing around with org-mode and org-roam but setup is definitely more challenging and it does feel like a bit of platform lock-in since the only useful org editor is emacs.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Go, TypeScript, Terraform, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Dagster, LLMs/AI tooling (Pydantic AI, Langfuse, Qdrant)
Résumé/CV: https://blog.jamesolds.me/james-olds-resume.pdf
Email: james + hn @ oldsmail . com
GitHub: https://github.com/oldsj
Blog: https://blog.jamesolds.me/
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Full Stack / Platform Engineer, previously at Trail of Bits.
Recent focus: Designed entire K8s infrastructure with secure best practices and Tailscale for intranet connectivity to self hosted services - supporting the team that placed 2nd at AIxCC DEF CON 2025. Built out multiple full-stack apps with Svelte, Tailwind CSS, Typescript, Python.
Currently building https://github.com/oldsj/mainloop so that I can more quickly build https://understanding.news, a reasoning layer for political news and comments.
Looking for: Full-stack AI native product development roles or Platform Engineering roles. Full time or contract