jthegedus.dev

I'm James, a software engineer who tries to balance the suckless philosophy approach to sofware development with non-pessimization, anti-complecting patterns and security. This is a daily challenge, as balancing capability and utility from features against committments to maintainability and security of the additional code surface area is largely insolvable.

career

I am currently a senior software engineering consultant, I am waiting for the right opportunity to branch into a hands-on team lead role where I can drive the team practices I think are condusive to good software outcomes. These typically align with those found in the Extreme Programming (XP) practices, such as; small teams, pair-programming, test-driven development, continuous integration and delivery, shared responsibility and ownership, and constant customer feedback. Do not read stagnation as complacency - I am not short on ambition; I know the kind of team I want to help build, and I am waiting for the right place to build it.

If you have work like this available, contact me via email: jthegedus at hey dot com

tools & practices

My preferred tools include those which simplify solution space and make explicit the intent and compress complexity. These include:

Go - a concise language that makes difficult things simple.
Zig - an explicit language that makes difficult things clear. Embedding single-header/file C libraries is a fun way to program.
HTML, CSS & Datastar - lean on the browsers and use hypermedia-first frameworks for interactivity.
SQLite & Litestream - database as a file with realtime replication granting Disaster Recovery as part of the mainline application boot process.
CQRS & Eventsourcing - immutable history and clear separation of read and write paths yield great maintainability, debugging and security capabilities.

ai

I find LLMs can be useful under certain circumstances. I do not think LLMs will lead to AGI. I currently self-host AI and believe the future for most companies will also be locally-hosted LLM enabled tooling.

projects

Check back next week as I being to share my benchmarking of local AI across various hardware stacks, amongst other projects.

writings

Check back next week as I begin to share my thoughts on effective AI use, amongst other commentary on software engineering.

Most of what I write are summations of conversations I've had with friends or colleagues.

reading and watching

A list of books, blogs and videos I recommend:

currently reading

The Practice of Programming - Brain W. Kernighan & Rob Pike

favourites

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization - Jonathan Blow
Doing what you think, not what you thought - Jason Fried
Locality of Behaviour - Carson Gross

books

Extreme Programming Explained - Kent Beck
Understanding Eventsourcing - Martin Dilger
Hypermedia Systems - Carson Gross et al.