newswangerd

Location: Moving back to the USA in March. Location TBD. Happy to consider anywhere in the lower 48

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Go, Python, Django, Ansible, Dart/Flutter, Docker, React, Envoy Proxy, REST, gRPC

Résumé/CV: available via email

Email: [email protected]

GitHub: https://github.com/newswangerd

I'm a principal level software engineer with a focus on architecture and design. I spent 8 years at Ansible (Red Hat) working on various Ansible web services (Ansible Galaxy, AWX, Gateway/Jewel) where I served at various points as a full stack engineer, technical lead and architect. During my last three years I designed the Ansible API Gateway, which is a project to unify all of the Ansible services (Controller, Automation Hub and Event Driven Ansible) under a common UI and API interface.

Last year I left Red Hat to find my fortunes as an independent developer. My main project is Digital Carrot (https://www.digitalcarrot.app/), which is a highly customizeable, cross platform screen time and focus app. The basic premise is that you block distractions (such as social media), until you complete a set of verifiable goals (such as walking 10,000 steps or physically spending 60 minutes at the gym). Digital Carrot has: fully end to end encrypted sync, a sandboxed plugin system for loading data to verify goals and cross platform support (mac, pc, android, iphone). All of this was built by myself, with no vibe/agentic coding, though I am currently in the process of re-writing the UI with AI as a means to learn how to use AI in a cost effective manner. If you've read this far you're probably wondering why I want a normal job again. Well, one of the things I've learned as an independent dev is that building an app is half the battle. The other half is marketing. Now, I want you to make an educated guess: do you think the guy that spent a year building an app to block social media wants to spend very much time on social media hawking his wares? If your answer was "no", then you might be smarter than me!

In summary I am generalist with a wide berth of experience that spans everything from building full stack web applications enterprise applications, large scale web services, consumer mobile applications, leading small (10 person) development teams, leading large scale organizational (200 person) initiatives and starting my own company. I believe that I am the perfect candidate for any company in entrepreneurial Hacker News orbit.

Yeah, no. I’m not jumping through any hoops to make my apps work on anything I don’t need to until Apple starts treating developers like people.

True. In my case I did off grid battery storage and batteries are not cheap, so having a tool like this to help me budget was a game changer.

Here's the tool I use for estimating solar performance: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#api_5.3

It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.

This is very similar to IPv6. Sure, the new standard solves a lot of problems, but it also has to fight decades worth of existing infrastructure.

I suspect the bigger issue for Linux will just be the sheer number of distros to contend with. I use Flutter which supports Ubuntu out of the box with snap, but idk how well that is supported for other distros.

Windows takes backwards compatibility very seriously, so I’ve never run into issues with new versions of windows. I haven’t started Linux development yet so I have no idea how that will be. At any rate, MacOS is my daily driver so updating to a buggy version of windows or Linux wouldn’t be as disruptive for me.

This is one thing I hate about maintaining any software in the Apple ecosystem. I have to install all these crappy updates so that I can make sure they didn't break my apps.

I can't wait for a version of this to come along that supports images. I want to build a feature into Digital Carrot for creating AI goals where you can create a daily goal to, for example, "empty the dishwasher" that you would then verify by taking a picture of the empty dishwasher at the end of the day. You can do this with current LLMs, but it's too slow and expensive for my use case at the moment.

Can't wait for literally any other company to make this!

I'm still trucking away on Digital Carrot (https://www.digitalcarrot.app/)

It's a screen time app/ app blocker that blocks distractions until certain programmable goals are met. For example:

- Block social media until you walk 10,000 steps

- Block Factorio until you physically go to the gym

- Block Netflix until you finish all your goals in todoist

The app is cross platform and available on everything (except Linux, which I'd like to change soon!).

Goals are all verified with real data from places such as your phone's GPS or fitness trackers. They can be programmed using a simple expression editor.

Right now I'm working on streamlining the plugin and goal system so that people can more easily write and share goals with one another!

Reminds me of the good ol' fail whale :)

One thing I'd like to learn is how to effectively meditate as someone with aphantasia. I took a course in college and all of the exercises involved some variation of tuning out your internal monologue going to your happy place in your minds eye. I'd love to get the benefits of meditation, but I can't visualize anything so none of the meditation tools that are taught in these kinds of courses work for me at all.

One thing I’m starting to see more and more is that software is no longer as big of a moat as it once was. Netflix gets to cruise along with a tech like evaluation because it pioneered online video streaming software. They caught the incumbents off guard and now the incumbents are starting to chip away at their tech moat.

I think we’re going to start seeing this happen more broadly across the industry. AI will get to a point where it becomes easy to clone any app or service. At that point software is no longer your moat. Your moat is going to be content, community and branding. This kind of makes me wonder if open source get even more popular. If software is no longer a moat, then you may as well release it for free and cash in on the goodwill and community.

I have an old iPhone SE and I want to give you kudos that the animations run buttery smooth on this page. There are a lot of websites where just the ads will cause my phone to completely freeze.

These are all very conservative back of the napkin calculations. Also, this isn't 1000 connections. It's 1000 customers, each of which can consume dozens of connections.

My point here is that it is important to match the tech stack to the challenge you're facing. When I started thinking about how to solve this problem my first reaction was to design an overly complicated distributed message queue using PG Notify, Redis, Kafka or something along those lines. The key takeaway here is that I realized that I probably wouldn't end up with more than 1000 customers, so I just needed to design a system that could comfortably handle that level of traffic without much effort. If, by some miracle, my business goes crazy viral, I know that my cloud provider can probably handle up to 200,000 customers by just updating a slider in my dashboard, which is way more business than I want anyway.

Engineers love to fantasize about Google levels of scale, but that's just not realistic for a lot of services.

This is one of the killer Firefox features. I'm so happy to see it's getting added by default!

I went through this process when I was designing the sync server for Digital Carrot.

In the end, I decided to just go with the simplest solution possible. In my case it's just a barebones Go gRPC service that uses an in memory channel to send notifications between connected clients.

The reality is that this simple Go server will scale up to about 1000 simultaneously connected customers on about 2gb of RAM. I don't expect to have more than that many paying customers, and if I do I can always just throw a bigger VM at the problem.

Engineers love to over complicate things in the name of infinite scalability, when in reality you can save a lot of time and effort by just understanding the scope of the actual problem you're trying to solve. Fingers crossed that this will become an issue for me some day, but until then most of us just don't need to worry about it!

I had to double check that today isn’t April 1st

Buf is well established and maintains a lot of protobuf packages for many languages, including the YAML implementation for go.

This is incredible news! I’ve used protobuf in Python, Go, Kotlin and Dart and the Python implementation is totally unusable. I don’t know what black magic Google uses for the Python implementation, but the classes it generates are totally opaque and impossible to inspect. I’ve been waiting for a proper python implementation for years now!

Using AI to inform architecture doesn’t seem so different from googling architecture in this case. Architectural patterns are mostly well understood and well documented these days and are something that you could piece together via Google search pre AI. The thing that AI brings to the table that wasn’t google able in the past is code generation. Previously you had to understand the architecture patterns to implement them yourself, but now the AI can just do it for you.

All so that they can lose this accumulated knowledge during the next round of layoffs.

Good gravy... I hadn't even considered that.

I assume end to end encryption would help mitigate this. Breaking E2E encryption would require a client side update that could be hard to implement if the company has already gone belly up.

I admit that vibe coding was kind of a clickbaity way to frame this, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. That might just underscore my ignorance in this domain.

One problem I personally have here is that I write code as a way to reason through and think about a problem. It's hard for me to grasp the best solution in a space until I try some things out first.