I'm a software engineer based in New York City.

My experience is primarily on the backend, always at startups.

My dream is to bootstrap a side project into a commercial open source software company. I feel most fulfilled when I'm building developer tools, but most of my ideas already exist, and exist well. I haven't built anything worth sharing yet.

Here are some projects I admire:

• github.com/99designs/aws-vault
• github.com/99designs/gqlgen
• github.com/jackc/pgx
• github.com/twmb/franz-go

And here are some of my favorite COSS companies:

• Astral
• Confluent
• Docker
• Hashicorp
• LangChain
• Ollama
• Redis

If you've done this before and have any advice, I'd love to hear from you! If you're currently building a COSS company yourself, perhaps you'd like to check out my resume?

As I was making this list of COSS companies, I learned that more than one of them has been acquired by IBM. Interesting…