Kevin Highwater

My RubyConf talk is online! "Everything a Microservice: The Worst Possible Intro to dRuby" This talk teaches you about the little-known "dRuby" package in the standard lib by building the most ridiculous microservice architecture you can come up with. youtu.be/cC4kRXAnunc

Mixture of experts is also a great name for a post-ai-apocalypse cannibal stew.

We're hiring a Head of Engineering at @DuckbillHQ. We think the entire cloud cost management industry is solving the wrong problem. While everyone else is building tools for making bills smaller for startups, we're building a data platform for making them more predictable and less complex across an entire enterprise. Given we're early days, this is a builder role. You'll be in the code every day and setting the pace for the team. You'll be leading the team on foundational decisions from day one. The engineering problems are interesting. We're processing hundreds of millions of rows of billing data per customer per month. We're modeling pricing schemes and contract structures for every provider we support. The dimensionality reaches into the thousands of columns when you combine provider billing data with customer data and the datasets hit terabytes easily. The customer needs to not just query this data, but modify it too--faster than a traditional data pipeline allows. We're ~12 people, based in SF, well-funded through revenue and our investors, and have the kind of customer list and brand awareness most seed-stage companies spend years trying to build. Feel free to DM me. Job post and more details about our point of view are linked below.

@jwatte Tremendous respect to my friends who do, though. Balancing the legitimate needs of six different teams, plus the technical needs of your own project well is a sight to behold.

@jwatte For sure! I've spent a little bit of time at larger companies and realized there *is* a ton of skill in operating in that environment - in building consensus across a large group of stakeholders to get a project built. I could build that skill, but I'd rather not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As a perennial first engineer– yeah. I'd be way better off, financially, as a founder or growth-stage employee. But on the other hand, I get the 90% of the fun and impact of being founder while still being able to focus mostly on engineering (vs funding, sales, marketing).

github.com/kkuchta/rpgels… I'm still working on improving the data. Dndbeyond hates bots, so I cobbled the data together from their sitemap and sources like common crawl.

It's fast because it's only searching a couple thousand entries - I just shipped the whole search index to the fronted. It's decent because if you search "Wizard", the first thing you get is the wizard class, not some random wizard-related monster.

I use dndbeyond a lot for look up dnd stuff. The search is so slow and the result order is nonsensical. I finally got frustrated and vibed up rpgelsewhere.com, a fast and decent standalone dndbeyond search.

@23music Yeah, we're in a similar boat. We're starting to look into cost, but mostly just to get a feel for if there are any quick wins. At this point, "moving faster" is worth almost any amount of money we could throw at the AI companies.

In the AI era, I no longer have any excuse to have a messy codebase. That rolling refactor that's been in progress forever? "Cursor, finish migrating our models to the new pattern" That dead code from the system we removed last quarter? "Cursor, rip out the Foo class."

@jwatte Agreed on both points! It took us a little long to get to it, but 100% worth the effort.

@kkuchta We set this up day 1 at Reve and yes, it's The Way! (We also have local devenv because instant feedback is important)

Me and another engineer spent some spare time hacking and now every PR has a dedicated per-PR copy of our system spun up. This has been so amazing for letting non-devs test out their AI-authored changes without needing to set up and maintain local dev environments.

made a hook that adds a bouncing dvd logo to claude code whenever it's thinking

We're hiring engineers in SF. Come do cool shit with us. duckbillhq.com/careers/ geekwire.com/2026/cloud-and…

So, we did a thing 🤘

I will never not read this as though it's being sung by No Doubt

I'm going to try out a few different AI code review tools to see how they've progressed in the ~8 months since I last looked at them. Anyone got a favorite?

We're hybrid in-office in downtown SF. Come get nerd-sniped with us on everything from data pipelines to lunch options. duckbillhq.com/careers/

Hey, want to come work with me at a tiny startup? We're working on processing massive AWS bills + contracts for people. Right now we've got between 1 and 3 engineers, depending on what roles you count. We need some combination of backend, frontend, fullstack, and data engs.