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 · 12/11/2025

Finops X should absolutely be the 10th installment of a beloved shark-themed action movie and not a lame conference in San Diego

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

It’s a real term. I know a lot of people in that space- many of them hate that that term won out, but have generally accepted that it has.

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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

Taskwarrior seems like it has some nice support for stuff like this, but I need mobile support and the syncing story for task warrior looks pretty awful.

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

The main use case for me here is a task like “change my furnace filter,” but there are a lot of longer-term things like that that I’ll put off forever without a good system for tracking them.

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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 was worried I'd have to call the cops or something. Then I finally got close enough to hear the words. 5+ minutes of screaming heard down the street turned out to be: "I want *mommy* to do bedtime!" repeated over and over again.

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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

Decided to whip this up and polish it a bit: kttt.io I know there’s prior art at this point, but it was fun to build. I think the answer, having played a bunch of games against humans now, is: No. No it’s not. XD

kttt.io

Kriegspiel Tic Tac Toe

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

Some fun challenges included: - Getting the AI to debug multi-user socket errors - Getting the AI to debug minor UI jank (MCP + playwright was surprisingly unhelpful) - Getting the AI to stop using emojis absolutely everywhere in the UI

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

This was an experiment for me. I forced myself to "vibe code" the whole thing - I neither wrote nor read a line of code for this. I'd never want to do that for non-toy code, of course, but I think I got a much better feel for working with the AIs.

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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

Eg right now I’ve heard more Form/Structure/Meaning discussion around “AI for software engineering” than I’ve ever wanted. But I’m still searching for good sources of Cheap Turpentine discussion around it.

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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

Ok, that’s not strictly true. Sometimes I find it hard to decide *which* buttons to press.

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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

I’ve been calling it “Second System Syndrome,” but I finally checked the wikipedia page[0] and that’s apparently not quite the same thing. [0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-...

en.wikipedia.org

Second-system effect - Wikipedia

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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

Full job post here: careers.duckbillgroup.com/apply/CBxnyb... Feel free to apply there or reach out on here - I’m reading every incoming candidate’s stuff regardless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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 · 23/01/2025

I'm convinced it's a really good business - we've got great customer flow and people really want what we're showing them - but we're bottlenecked on building the damn thing. If getting deep into the weeds of something esoteric like AWS Cost+Usage Reports sounds neat, hit us up!

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

Tech-wise, we're react/typescript->flask/python->clickhouse+postgres. Product-wise, we're building a thing to help companies with implausibly-huge AWS (and later GCP/etc) bills manage their contracts + whatnot.

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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 · 10/01/2025

Sounds like you’re a fan of Fae Might Be Giants

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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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