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The_Foxon Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land

And provide firewood to heat your home for the year. Depending on how much of a problem the broken fence is, you might even like it to fall your way.

Depending on the size of the tree and your home you might have enough to sell to the neighbors too.

I'm assuming the state doesn't come around asking for payment for their fallen trees.

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)

  Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

  Remote: Yep

  Willing to relocate: Nope

  Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, SaltStack, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, Python, Django, apt packaging, iptables, VPNs, TCP congestion control algorithms (more than I ever wanted to know)

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

  Email: matt@tansen.ca

I have 15 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. 10 years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people. I have built infrastructure using Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and Linode.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes. It operates in 4 regions and has about 250 total CPUs.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Created an application CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and Gitlab, resulting in a DORA performance score of 8.0 (above average in all scores according to dora.dev)

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 350,000 times per month.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ordinary Abundance

I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.

The_Foxon Learning a few things about running SQLite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

In this context it means upon a successful backup, update a timestamp somewhere. Some other system monitors the timestamp and if it ever becomes more than for example 1 day ago, it fires an alert.

The_Foxon The Last Technical Interview

I read that post back in the day and have remembered it ever since, and used it as a basis for the process at my current employment. Thank you!

(For those interested: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

The_Foxon Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

I view this use of AI as a type of denial of service attack. Alice sends Bob a wall of text (low effort) and Bob must parse it (high effort, yet probably no value received for the effort).

The_Foxon British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time

"Pacific time" is going to be so confusing though. Should have just called it Yukon Standard Time, since that's already a thing, at least informally. Cause that would not be confusing at all...

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)

  Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

  Remote: Yep

  Willing to relocate: Nope

  Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, SaltStack, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, Python, Django, apt packaging, iptables, VPNs, TCP congestion control algorithms (more than I ever wanted to know)

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

  Email: matt@tansen.ca

I seek contract platform engineering projects. I can help early stage startups set up infrastructure and CICD so founders can focus on PMF. And I can help established software companies with outdated infrastructure adopt modern tools and practices.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Created an application CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and Gitlab, resulting in a DORA performance score of 8.0 (above average in all scores according to dora.dev)

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon I baked a pie every day for a year

It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)

The_Foxon AI makes you boring

Yesterday my manager sent LLM-generated code that did a thing. Of course I didn't read it, I only read Claude's summary of it. Then I died a little inside.

It was especially unfortunate because to do its thing, the code required a third party's own personal user credentials including MFA, which is a complete non-starter in server-side code, but apparently the manager's LLM wasn't aware enough to know that.

The_Foxon Painless Software Schedules (2000)

Agreed- just a month ago I told my team to read https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... and note how Spolsky knew the details of his application (weird date issues in Excel and VB). If you want to be a senior engineer, you need to know where are the odd edge cases in your app. I don't want to be the only one on the team who remembers that stuff.

The_Foxon There is an AI code review bubble

I installed CodeRabbit for our reviews in GitLab and am pretty happy with the results, especially considering the low price ($15/user/mo I think).

It regularly finds problems, including subtle but important problems that human reviewers struggle to find. And it can make pretty good suggestions for fixes.

It also regularly complains about things that are possible in theory but impossible in practice, so we've gotten used to just resolving those comments without any action. Maybe if we used types more effectively it would do that less.

We pay a lot more attention to what CodeRabbit says than what DeepSource said when use used it.

The_Foxon What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?

I was driving home with my family from a long trip having just bought a really cool camping trailer, a 1979 Airstream. Our vehicle died on the side of the road in a rural area. The owner of the property where we stopped was mowing his lawn and came over and asked if we needed help. When it became obvious our vehicle needed a tow, he used his own truck to bring the trailer onto his property. And he kept it there for a couple of weeks while the engine in our vehicle was replaced.

I'm really not sure what I would have done with the trailer if he hadn't offered to help. We were more than 600 km from home.

The_Foxon Django: what’s new in 6.0

I'm an avid HTMX user but never did I ever think "I'm using so many includes, I wish I didn't have to use include so much."

What I would like is a way to cut down the sprawl of urls and views.

The_Foxon Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware

This is a great quote for the topic, but the quote is normally about a bridge that barely stands.

I'm chuckling at the thought of barely building something. (All in good fun, thank you.)

The_Foxon Public static void main(String[] args) is dead

I distinctly recall early in my first university programming courses the instructor saying something to the effect of "Just wait until you learn 'public static void main'". I think we had only used BlueJ until that point in the course.

The_Foxon Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard (2019)

As someone who previously led development of a commercial VPN system, I assure you, there are about 100 ways for a VPN to go slower than the network hosting it. Unfortunately.

Two cases I can think of are MTU misconfigurations and constrained CPU on either endpoint, where the node CPU can handle non-VPN network demands but can't handle the VPN demand.

The_Foxon Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

> The rapid growth of revenue of AI model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

You can't use growth of AI companies as evidence to refute the article. The premise is that it's a bubble. The growth IS the bubble, according to the claim.

> I don't know why the author of TFA claims that he can't make a bunch of one-off apps

I agree... One-off apps seem like a place where AI can do OK. Not that I care about it. I want AI that can build and maintain my enterprise B2B app just as well as I can in a fraction of the time, and that's not what has been delivered.

The_Foxon The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

Tufte also had a lot to say about the Challenger disaster, which predates Powerpoint but not the visual display of information.

Found the chapter here: https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-ch...

The_Foxon Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries

With regards to wrapping your head around heat loss- this winter some work was done on our property while there was snow on the ground. A bunch of snow got covered in dirt. In the spring, maybe three weeks after all the snow on the ground had melted, I moved the pile and was surprised to find all the snow still frozen. It had been under maybe 18 inches of dirt. I was pretty surprised to see it.

The_Foxon How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

Yes although somewhere there will be an `if` statement to determine if the process being started should get the complete environment or a key to get the other keys or whatever. Best to make that `if` at the highest level of the architecture as possible and wrapped in something that makes it obvious, like a `DangerousUserCodeProcess` class.

The only other safety I can think of is a whitelist, perhaps of file pathnames. This helps to maintain a safe-by-default posture. Taking it further, the whitelist could be specified in config and require change approval from a second team.

The_Foxon How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

Their own tools would need the various API keys, of course, and they did build a method to filter out those variables and managed most user code through it, but it sounds like they forgot to put Rubocop through the special method.

So this researcher may have gotten lucky in choosing to dig into the tool that CodeRabbit got unlucky in forgetting.

The_Foxon Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes

As a teenager I did about 4.5 minutes, as I recall, in a bucket of water. I played the trumpet quite a bit at the time, so I think my capacity was above average. It was a competition and I got first, and the second place fellow was also a trumpet player.

The_Foxon Getting good results from Claude Code

I too just yesterday had my first positive experience with Claude writing code in my project. I used plan mode for the first time and gave it the "think harder" shove. It was a straightforward improvement but not trivial. The spec wasn't even very detailed- I mentioned a couple specific classes and the behaviour to change, and it wrote the code I would have expected to write, with even a bit more safety checking than I would have done.

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2025)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Nope

Technologies: Python, Django, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, Javascript, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, Linux, apt packaging, iptables, VPNs, TCP congestion control algorithms (more than I ever wanted to know)

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Trained a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* Improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2025)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Trained a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* Improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2025)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Trained a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* Improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2025)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Trained a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* Improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Trained a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* Improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

The_Foxon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2024)

Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

Email: matt@tansen.ca

14 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. Six years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people.

Looking for an engineering manager or senior IC position to mentor your team and make something people want.

Here are a sample of things I've accomplished:

* I built a platform for hosting web applications using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. It uses Helm to manage the instances of the single-tenant app and includes a Python application to manage the customer instances based on configuration from the subscription management vendor.

* I trained and mentored a team of developers in software patterns, communication, and prioritizing work, and I reduced context switching in the team’s workflows, leading to a 72% increase in velocity in two months.

* I maintain the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* I improved performance of a proprietary VPN by adopting Cython, permitting use of C functions in Python, resulting in a 2.5x increase in network throughput when limited by CPU

* I created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

* Currently leading a B2B SaaS company through getting a SOC 2 Type II report