wkyleg

FREELANCER | USA/REMOTE | WORLDWIDE

ABOUT ME Full-stack engineer with 9+ years of experience shipping production software and leading technical teams. I specialize in turning complex ideas into real-world products, especially at the intersection of emerging technology and pragmatic business needs.

My background spans startups, established products, and research. I've contributed to DARPA and NASA-affiliated research and helped launch multiple B2B/B2C/B2G products. My technical work is grounded by a business foundation (Finance B.S.) and strong product intuition.

I’m currently looking for freelance or contract roles where I can:

- Build MVPs or iterate on high-growth products

- Lead architecture and implementation from 0→1

- Join agile teams pushing the frontier in AI, biotech, data, or web3

- Consult on strategy + technical execution for emerging tech businesses

RECENT FOCUS

- LLM applications (chatbots, agent workflows, embeddings, prompt engineering)

- Blockchain tooling (Ethereum, Foundry, Viem, building protocols)

- Custom data dashboards & visualizations (GraphQL, D3, SQL)

- Real-time systems, graph databases, and event-driven architectures, general "big data" stuff

- Security-conscious engineering: OSINT, encryption, privacy tools

KEY SKILLS React, Next.js, Vue, TypeScript, Python, Java, GraphQL, Node, SQL, Linux, Rust (learning), Solidity, Viem, Foundry, Cryptography, Prompt engineering

CONTACT GitHub: github.com/wkyleg Email: wkyleg_eth [at] pm [dot] me ENS: wkyleg CV & LinkedIn: available upon request

In my experience Pi hole is a very worthwhile investment. People who used my internet when I had one would remark how much faster it was. Everything in general seems faster, even things that you wouldn't think of. I typically use Brave for browsing which has good ad blocking capabilities, but this adds a whole additional layer.

The only reason I don't use one now is that I travel a lot more so it's irrelevant, and I have to work enough on tools with Google/Vercel/other analytics that it is just very inconvenient.

Regarding smart TVs, I have found that it's better to just use an Apple TV or Kodi box and never connect to them internet though. Having said, I gave my TV away because I never used it, so this might not be as up to date. A Pi hole will block ads on smart TVs though.

Interesting that they don't know exactly how they are perceiving magnetism. I suppose it could be an internal brain mechanism, but if that were to be able to operate without direct outside sensory input, there might be all kinds of other potential latent abilities in animals.

More likely, this might be the same as the mechanism which exists in birds, who can effectively see the Earth's magnetic field in their eyes, although an internal magnetic detection system present in animals would be much more interesting. See https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.029.... Birds essentially perceive the Earth's magnetic field through a chemical process in the receptors for red and green light in their eyes, and are believed to have special cells in their beak, brain stem, and possibly their vestibular system as well. It can be disrupted fairly easy by magnetism or different wavelengths of light.

There are obvious other strange implications of this as well, although I'm not sure how much real evidence there is to support them. For instance, there are many concerns about the effects of EMF exposure, as well as that EMF can affect plant life. There is research on magnetic and electric brain stimulation as well. At the most out-there level, there is the research into remote viewing and things like telepathy. So, to whatever extent this actually exists, there are interesting implications for the phenomenological experience of other forms of animal life.

Regardless, it is interesting to see research that is actually showing new and intriguing things regarding different forms of perception (I guess this is arguably ESP, or at least a new sense) that are not complete crank nonsense. I've always felt like my sense of direction was a sort of 6th sense; I guess it really could be.

I can see that.

On most metrics I've seen Rust is comparable on general speed.

Maybe if you're at the level where you've essentially writing portable assembly and are okay with lack of safety. You need to know exactly what is happening within the CPU, maybe on custom hardware.

I bet some defense applications would be in this category too, although for my own sense of self preservation I would prefer the Rust type system.

I learned C++ and enjoyed it but never went too deep. I always enjoyed C more. There's also so many S tier codebases to read to learn C better like the original Dune game engine or Unix utilities.

Having dabbled a bit with Rust recently I can't see any strong reasons to use C++. The combination of strong functional programing inspired type system with performance seems unbeatable. Almost a perfect language.

I'm sure there must be some legacy reasons to use C++ though. Maybe Game Engines, embedded programing, some kind of other legacy tie in?

Something like air tags would be a great use case for an open source DePin project. Ideally Zero Knowledge proofs would be used to preserve privacy.

The Counterfactuals of his ideas are very interesting.

Chilean socialism didn't work (just ignoring the coup, it couldn't actually run the economy), but the reasons why it failed, or in other forms could have worked bear consideration.

In short, it failed for the same reasons central planning tends to, considering modern understandings of complexity theory and ideas suggested in books such as Seeing Like A State. Just having a dashboard and greater access to information is still subject to the same forms of hubris as is general central planning, even if these shortcomings are better anticipated.

Yet, many of the innovations in this project bare similarity to how large enterprises CAN run will, such as with ERP and Business Analytics in the private sector, and modern intelligence and command and control systems in the military.

So in all, they didn't completely work, but in the way is ideas did work they were very early.

This is how cool new ideas arrive each generation

Amazing. Younger people (and people new in any field) often think of intersting approaches without the blessing/curse of "best practices." The process for creating the game was very good and very logical way to learn a new field.

I would recommend a couple of small things for the code. Variable names are usually ALL_CAPS if they never change (for instance const PI =3.142) and camelCaseForOtherVariables. snake_case_variables aren't really used in JavaScript, but aren't technically wrong. Also, it's usually good to put variables into nested data structures with hashmaps instead of comparing based upon array index. This is in "the real world" though, in academic computer science algorithms based on position in lists are more common.

If you want to get what we call "Code Review" a good way would be to feed your source code into a LLM to have the LLM give feedback based on your code, and recommend improvements. Most people like Claude best for dealing with code nowadays.

I would also recommend putting your code on Github so that people can check it out.

Very impressive!

Yes, in terms of market share.

But the key difference is that it's leagues better than other browser engines on quality. From the perspective of competition this isn't great, but the network effects are hard to ignore. Firefox and Safari (webkit) just tend not to work as well.

It's very different in terms of quality though. Internet Explorer was a terrible browser and often lagging in implementing standards. The better comparison would be Safari now, which often completely breaks many sites on mobile for me. It also doesn't eliminate a lot of newer CSS animations properly.

This is really very unfortunate because it's good to have competition in browser implementations. Everything is Chrome under the hood now except for Safari and Firefox.

Deno doesn't implements this differently, it's just an alternative server side run time. It has some better defaults compared to node though

Nobody really uses multithreading for node. I mean I'm some projects do (maybe pnpm?) but the threading support isn't great and the event loop performs well.

Agreed, I realize it would need to be effectively another language, or at least a very different implementation.

This isn't to far off from what new projects like Deno and Bun are doing though, apart from also needing to spread the event loop implementation horizontally

I have nothing but disdain for TikTok and the CCP but this seems like a very misguided approach.

Being open and willing to accept foreign media (even when it's of low quality or propagandistic) is an advantage of genuinely open societies.

Bad speech can be countered with more speech, and media from western countries can easily be seen on VPNs in countries with heavy censorship. Bans only play to more repressive societies who can claim equivalence.

A better approach is to monitor the activity and narratives promoted and counter them. Chinese propaganda is usually ham handed and low quality anyway.

Funny thing, one of my favorite odd jobs in college was being a vote counter for AP.

Most of the vote counters would need to call the election centers over the phone and ask for results. Then they would input the results into a database system, which would feed into the overall tabulation for different elections.

I was one of the college students they would look for because they needed college students better at technology to be able to check the websites of some jurisdictions. So I ended up being paid a few hundred dollars to copy and paste one number from a website and eat amazing catered Italian food. For about 2 minutes of work and amazing food it was a great gig.

What's the consensus regarding best MacBooks for AI/ML?

I've heard it's easier to just use cloud options, but I sill like the idea of being able to run actual models and train them on my laptop.

I have a M1 MacBook now and I'm considering trading in to upgrade.

I've seen somewhat conflicting things regarding what you get for the money. For instance, some reports recommending a M2 Pro for the money IIRC.

Thanks!

When I was ~14 I downloaded Freenet after finding it on Stumbleupon.

After wondering why my laptop was loosing RAM for a few months, I realized I had been running a node continuously.

Great to see it's still alive though.

Does this version with the cool soundtrack still exist?

https://brutalisthackernews.com/

Do you really find Java backends to be that great?

I don't think they're intrinsically bad, and Kotlin or Groovy can be nice, but I've always found the community and lack of open source tools to be wanting.

I've found myself to be much more productive in JavaScript/TypeScript or Python, in part because of the languages, but also because the open source libraries have been way better

Yes! That's a good point

Docker is another technology that is sort of ridiculous from this perspective. Deploying an entire OS just to make dealing with dependencies easier

It's funny I think I remember explicitly reading this argument somewhere, that startups need to meet headcount as a metric for VC funding so they will end up picking "worse" tech for that reason.

I made https://brutalisthackernews.com/ as a somewhat polemical exhortation of this, though more as an art project than a practical one

"The Passenger" and "Stella Maris" by Cormac McCarthy are fantastic. In general, I enjoy McCarthy's work because I believe he manages to present interesting ideas drawn from philosophy and religion, and if you read between the lines of his work, there is a fairly elaborate cosmology behind them. With these final works, he manages to combine this tendency with his decades of residence at the Santa Fe Institute and work with researchers in complexity science, mathematics, physics, etc. Moreover, he does so without the more trite ways non-scientists often draw upon science (for instance, just crudely using quantum mechanics as a stand-in for the supernatural). I think you could probably write a thesis on the way he integrated advances in complexity science and mathematics/physics with philosophy/religion/mythology with a close reading of his work. I mention this first and with particular emphasis because I believe it is chronically under-discussed and deserves a systematic study by someone who understands philosophy and modern physics and complexity science much better than I do. There is a hauntingly dark and beautiful cosmology behind this work, in a way even darker than his earlier works like "Blood Meridian."

I can also see the works of Arthur Schopenhauer being of great interest to many HN readers. His reconciliation of Western philosophy (especially Kant and British Empiricists) with Buddhism and Hinduism is unique and for me the most interesting overall system. His work is entirely worth reading for the quality of writing alone. For me, his works evoke the experience of mathematical beauty. I would recommend gaining a basic understanding of Kant, Buddhism, Hinduism, and then reading his work "Essays and Aphorisms," followed by "The World as Will and Idea."

"Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" by Jacques Ellul is the book I have read that best explains the human experience in the modern media environment. Like "The World as Will and Representation," it also forms a sort of complete system, which can be read as an organic whole as well as with self-referential parts. I believe most of the "alienation" we experience from technology, which is often blamed on the internet, is really a much older and broader phenomenon, which Ellul attributes to the development of the radio, "technique," and broader phenomenological experience within 20th-century totalitarian societies.

"Simulacra and Simulation" is another that I have enjoyed. It is the work I have read that, in my opinion, best provides a model for living in a post-modern, post-industrial society, and my intuition is that it will also prove authentic in the age of artificial intelligence.

Static typing

What ever happened to Hack (https://hacklang.org) the language Meta built as a superset of PHP?

Why not take an approach more similar to TypeScript?

I sometimes do wonder if many of the server side rendering approaches (or alternative Node runtimes) would be better off trying to emulate some aspects of PHP

Love this!

I'm going to try using for programing.

I wonder if anyone uses Flipper Zeros for things like this yet. Cameras, garage doors, radio activated gates are usually very insecure. They were not built under the assumption that thieves could hack RFID devices easily.

I don't want this to happen but it's kind of cool in a cyberpunk dystopia kind of way.

https://flipperzero.one

I like Peter Norvig's book "Paradigms of AI Programming," where you learn old fashioned symbolic AI with LISP and Prolog. Is it outdated? Absolutely, but it is a classic read.

Maybe a use case for new AI models could be creating more old fashioned expert systems written in LISP or Prolog that are easier for humans to audit. Everything tends to come back full circle.

https://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Artificial-Intelligence-Pro...