oldsj

Location: Remote (US)

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

I think we’re slightly better than random at this point

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.

  agents/
    |-- customer-expert.md - validates problem assumptions, customer reality
    |-- design-lead.md - shapes solution concepts, ensures UX quality
    |-- growth-expert.md - competitive landscape, positioning, distribution
    |-- technical-expert.md - assesses feasibility, identifies technical risks
    |-- decider-advisor.md - synthesizes perspectives, executive analysis

I’ve been working on running agents (Claude agent sdk) on k8s this looks great to control their egress

Wow I had not heard of Understanding Media that seems super relevant to some experiments in media literacy I’m attempting with https://understanding.news

I'm just glad it can run async of my main thread now, so I can spawn other agents for more interesting things

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

> Imagine spending a lot of time and money picking out the best possible gear for a hobby before actually starting the hobby.

Are you kidding me that's my favorite part!

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 :)

You can pass in the current user’s uid/gid as an environment variable check out linuxserver images for an example https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/unifi-controller

Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone control center access

Edge is just Chromium now https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-edge-chrome-chromiu...

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/

This is the present day experience of wiping an iPhone and restoring it from iCloud. It’s really that simple, but in general it’s unencrypted

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.

I think the cat’s out of the bag now and we really won’t know if we’re reading or responding to an actual human anymore.

He should really consider hosting the site on Rancheros

Ad Hoc (Modern US Government Contractor) adhocteam.us

Not very easy, but this is what bots are for

Currently Doom Emacs with org-mode [1]. I’m still very much a beginner but loving that it’s plain text but also so powerful with org-mode. I sync to beorg [2] on my phone with Nextcloud which keep all my todos in plain txt but gives nice iOS integration.

I have Nextcloud configured with a versioned and encrypted S3 bucket as the data store so everything’s “private”, constantly backed, up and synced.

[1] https://youtu.be/DxygfqLrFSU [2] https://beorgapp.com