iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 17/04/2026

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer so your friends get flanking and have advantage on melee attacks against your enemies.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 06/01/2026

Whelp. Opus 4.5 can apparently one-shot the backend eng take-home test we used last year. Literally just the prompt “Checkout <link to challenge> - complete it.” Time to try to rethink this stage of eng interviewing yet *again* lolsob

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 14/11/2025

Homebrew packages are usually pretty safe, but I'm starting to think I shouldn't have `brew install --cask amontillado`

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 10/11/2025

Has anyone tried just stamping “Do No Copy” on all their ssh keys?

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 25/10/2025

Seriously considering building my own todo app. I really need something with better support for: - A recurring task - …that becomes due every, say, 3 months - …that becomes more urgent the longer I put it off after 3 months - …at an adjustable rate. And I just can’t find a good option here.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 17/09/2025

My house is under construction. My adjoining neighbor’s house is under construction. Every day I get to play the game of “is that my phone vibrating or is it just power tools above, below, or beside the room I’m in?”

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 02/09/2025

I heard a child screaming in distress outside last night. It went on for quite a while. It wasn’t moving on (like a family walking might), and really sounded pretty anguished. I put on some clothes and went out to investigate - as did some neighbors. I narrowed it down to an apt across the street.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 21/08/2025

I met a traveller from an antiquing land Who sold me two vast and legless trunks of stone

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 20/07/2025

My latest side project: Tic Tac Toe as a hidden-information game! Play live vs a friend, a rando, or a bot at kttt.io. Inspired by Zach Wienersmith (of SMBC fame): mastodon.social/@ZachWeiners...

kttt.io

Kriegspiel Tic Tac Toe

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 22/06/2025

There’s a poorly-attributed quote that goes, “When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” I don’t think it’s terribly *true* but I like it as a way to frame different types of discussion

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 14/06/2025

Visiting Seattle and the protest crowd is huge.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 02/06/2025

Damn. I was pretty excited, some years ago, by RedwoodJS. A graphql-based, full-stack, TS-native, serverless-focused, very rails-like framework. Looks like it died and went into maintenance mode a few months back. :(

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 25/05/2025

I’m replaying some late-90s space trading games. It’s a lot of fun. It’s impressive how thoroughly solved they are. One walkthrough from a decade after release will tell you how to achieve infinite money in exactly 13 hyperspace jumps.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 23/05/2025

There’s nothing like watching paid movers work to remind me that my job as a professional button pusher is not hard in any real sense.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 11/04/2025

I always feel a sense of disappointed victory whenever I successfully trick the American medical system into giving me basic medical care.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 24/03/2025

My equivalent of an old man using outdated terms is going to be “using actual emoticons like :) and :_(“

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 23/03/2025

I wish that Markov chain mashups were still a thing. I feel like a cthulu/ncaa skeetbot named “At The Mountains of March Madness” would crush it.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 20/03/2025

Are you telling me a vibe coded this?

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 05/03/2025

One of these days my CEO is *actually* going to be in a meeting and urgently need 30 target gift cards and then you’ll all be sorry!

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 27/02/2025

Whelp. I thought I new better than the react linter when it warned me “doing that will cause bugs.” If we had a bug tracker, I’d be closing this bug with a root cause of “hubris.”

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 26/02/2025

Just got back from my physical therapy appointment. Got assigned exercises every day for a month. I have been informed in no uncertain terms that "doing all 30 exercises back-to-back in one day" will not get me better faster and I am not happy about it.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 21/02/2025

I will never not hear someone talk about Secrets Management without immediately getting Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Secret Tunnel” stuck in my head.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 20/02/2025

Usernames I have no use for, but wish I did: Recurzion Dax

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 18/02/2025

I’ve decided: the AWS’s MWAA service is officially pronounced “Mwuah!” and is to be accompanied with a chef’s kiss hand motion. Spread the word.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 10/02/2025

Achievement unlocked: make a pun so bad that the entire office immediately puts on their noise-cancelling headphones.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 06/02/2025

Things that should 100% be national holidays: - Election Day - Junteenth - The day before a new D&D campaign starts but you haven’t finished coming up with your character concept

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 27/01/2025

More dev conferences should be sponsored by adult diaper companies. I think it'd work great - every senior engineer already knows that the answer is always "Depends"

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 26/01/2025

There’s a pattern I’ve seen where an engineer: 1. Struggles working within a given codebase 2. Vows to not repeat the mistakes made there 3. At their next company they massively over-engineer their next system to avoid the pathologies of the last one. Is there a term for this?

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 23/01/2025

Anyone want to come work at a 5-person startup with me? We're looking for a backend-leaning fullstack eng. We're super early and there's not much structure, so probably with 7-10 years of experience, though definitely 5+. We’re hybrid in our SF office 3 days/week - we’ll relocate you if you want!

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 06/01/2025

My travel hack: cleaning my house before I leave. Nothing beats arriving home at 3am after 15 hours of flying and being able to collapse into a clean bed with fresh sheets in a not-too-cluttered bedroom.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 05/01/2025

My NY resolution to rise before dawn every day has been going great. Gonna be a lot harder when I get home from my Iceland vacation and the sun no longer rises at 11am.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 30/12/2024

Going through a snowstorm in Iceland and I am reminded of a lesson from my east coast days: the line between “winter wonderland” and “frozen hellscape” is whether you have to drive in it or not.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 28/12/2024

I decide that San Francisco was just too darn pleasant and warm, so I’m spending the next week in Reykjavik, Iceland. The land where every location sounds like the name of a drug with concerning side-effects.

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Reposted by Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta)

johnny, uplifted octopus @generativist.com · 28/12/2024

the older i get the more i appreciate type systems

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 26/12/2024

The 2024 equivalent of “spending the morning putting AA batteries in the toys” is “spending the morning installing shitty IOT apps on all our phones.”

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 20/12/2024

I <3 TanstackQuery (react lib). It’s one of the few libraries that’s A) not a tiny utility and B) I love pretty much whole-heartedly. Today I was able to solve a coworker’s data-fetching problem with a one-line config change because TQ has anticipated nearly every issue you could come across.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 13/12/2024

OH: “A startup engineer is a technical debt farmer”

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 10/12/2024

Anyone know a relatively-specific kind of engineer looking for work? We’re trying to find an engineer-shaped person with solid cloud cost management experience. Probably someone who’s worked in finops at a big company or at a finops saas. careers.duckbillgroup.com/apply/CBxnyb...

careers.duckbillgroup.com

Full Stack Engineer - The Duckbill Group - Career Page

Apply to Full Stack Engineer at The Duckbill Group in San Francisco, CA.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 28/11/2024

It’s time for my favorite Thanksgiving tradition: playing Alice’s Restaurant Massacree on repeat until my wife threatens to divorce me.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 27/11/2024

I think I need a tracker for the time between thinking “I guess I’ll write a test for this even though it’s definitely overkill” and “wait, this test shouldn’t be failing, I think this is a bug.” Not sure what my lifetime minimum is, but it was definitely about 5 minutes earlier tonight.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 25/11/2024

There are a billion variants of this joke, but the one that rings most true to me is: “A developer walks into a bar. They order 1 drink, 1000 drinks, -1 drinks, NaN drinks, and so on. The bartender handles each order with aplomb. A user walks in, asks to use the bathroom, and the bar explodes.”

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 22/11/2024

One of my favorite things in typescript is making a mess writing a feature, then just following the type errors to see where 90% of the needed cleanup is.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 20/11/2024

Bluesky’s killer feature that mastodon was really missing: “a link I can click to follow someone in a couple clicks without having to copy-paste strings on my phone.”

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Reposted by Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta)

Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 20/11/2024

when you try to convert your text into smaller pieces but all it gives you is Elvish, that’s a tolkienizer

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 19/11/2024

Sure you've got a baby monitor, but what's your baby observability strategy?

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 01/11/2024

Watching my wife go through the eng interview grinder, I'm annoyed at companies on her behalf. I maintain that any candidate who takes the time to do a takehome test deserves material feedback on it if they're rejected. Yes it's a pain to write that feedback, but candidates deserve it.

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Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta) @kevinkuchta.com · 26/07/2023

this is absolutely perfect. no notes - me reading the sheet music to John Cage’s 4’33’

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Reposted by Kevin Highwater (née Kuchta)

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 07/07/2023

Is there a Matt Levine of tech? - Widely read by professionals both in and out of the industry - Informative commentary with no hustle attached - Joyously amused by nonsense without descending into toxic snark I can’t think of anyone.

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