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/

---

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

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

Actually ECS Fargate 1.4.0 just switched to Containerd!

“Containerd is replacing Docker as the container runtime”

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/aws-fargate-launches...

I’m syncing my org files with Nextcloud, with an S3 bucket configured as a backend [1]. I can even sync to my org files and agenda to my phone configuring beorg to sync to Nextcloud via WebDAV. I’m still pretty new to emacs and org but this is very close to what I would consider an ideal note / task management solution. It’s all plain text (even in S3) and S3 is configured with server side encryption and versioning enabled.

I highly recommend Doom Emacs [2] and Zaiste Programming’s DoomCasts playlist on YouTube [3] to those just getting started.

[1] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/15/admin_manual/configurat...

[2] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

[3] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhXZp00uXBk4np17N39Wv...

Check out Composing Programs for an SICP in Python https://composingprograms.com

Let me try to break this down from first principles, since I'm not sure I agree with the largely negative sentiment ITT around how complex this looks:

Most software projects are long lasting, and have unpredictable and constantly changing requirements.

Agile is currently the best software development methodology under these constraints.

Effective Agile teams should not be larger than 10 people total, minus the PO and Scrum Master leaves 8 devs.

Its not possible to run a large scale, high traffic web application with only 8 devs.

Therefore, it makes sense to split large applications up into chunks small enough for a 10 person team to manage autonomously.

Since the application had to be split up, we now have to solve the communication issue. Now we need networking, DNS, TLS, have to consider latency and bandwidth, etc... We also have other issues if we’re running at scale: redundancy, monitoring, separate environments for testing and production, having a local dev environment similar to the production environment. There is a huge list of things that are not important to for an early stage startup to think about, but are very important and very difficult for most large enterprises to get right if they want to consistently and reliably deliver good software.

Google is a large enterprise that operates large scale web services that has proven they know how to get this stuff right.

This repo is a reference architecture, from Google, on how to run micro services at scale using modern tools and methodologies. If you think this is over engineered I think you're just not the target audience, and something like Heroku is much better suited for your scale.

Thanks for the recommendation, been looking for something like this.

Ad Hoc - https://adhoc.team is pretty great. No whiteboard, homework based interview process, unlimited vacation, plus you get to work on things that matter to a lot of Americans like healthcare.

Until self driving cars start crashing in to you

selection bias?

Yea how are you going to put Rust in your product name and not even include it!