I'm a Generalist Software Engineer

in San Francisco.
I build serious tools and silly hacks, mostly at early-stage startups. Recently at Daybreak Health. I'm often found at @kkuchta@ruby.social.

Startup technical choices that I endorse or regret

One of the coolest things about working at a tiny startup is getting to make foundational technical decisions and seeing how they play out. A couple years in startup time is as long as a life-age of the earth like a decade in normal business time. It lets you get feedback on how those decisions worked out as the company + team scale.

I was the first eng hire at Daybreak Health. 3 years later I was managing a team of 8 in a 70-person company. Here are the decisions I’m glad of and here are the ones I regret.

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A Blog To Last

How do you build software that will last more than a decade with no maintenance?

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CSS-Only Chat

So, it turns out that css background-images don’t get loaded until the relevant selector is triggered.

Many people might say “neat!”

I used it to build a bi-directional CSS-only async chat.

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Totes-not-amazon.com: Markov Chain Generation for AWS Announcements

I challenge you to reliably tell the difference between AWS and Totes-not-amazon.

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Scarr: S3 + Cloudfront + ACM + Route53

There are a bunch of free/cheap options for hosting static sites (just html/css/js) out there: github pages, netlify, firebase hosting - but when I want to build a bulletproof static site “for real”, my go-to toolset is S3 for hosting with Cloudfront caching in front of it.

My workflow for that usually looks like:

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