About Me
polaroid of arie, taken upside down, which gives the illusion that he is doing a handstand on a toilet bowl.
I’m Arie, proud grug-brained trad-coder. I’m a software engineer from Sydney. I’m into coffee, cameras, running, cycling, and writing. I used to teach Les Mills classes at a few gyms in Sydney. I write about all these things.
Why I blog
I could write in a journal and never show anyone, so why do I publish? Writing something and sending it out into the world is a form of closure. It’s like taking a pile of half-baked ideas scribbled on sticky notes, and transforming it into a hefty paperback. What were once scattered thoughts is now a distinct point of view which stands on its own. Also, I hope you’re entertained, or intrigued, or otherwise get some use out of my blog.
Why I self-host
I’ve been reading Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis (as of June 2026), it puts into words what I couldn’t for a long time. Blogging platforms like Medium and Substack are “fiefdoms”—by writing on those platforms I create content for those platform owners, thereby enriching the platform owners by making their platform more valuable. They aren’t even paying me! So I self-host this blog, the difference being that I am using AWS transactionally; I pay a monthly fee for a service they provide, rather than making someone else’s platform more valuable using my unwaged labour.
About my work
I was Deputy for 5 years, working across professional services and engineering. Now I’m an engineer at Eucalyptus (Hims & Hers). I’ve worked with a lot of Go, Typescript, and PHP. Sometimes it runs on a laptop, sometimes on an EC2, and sometimes it runs in Kubernetes.
I’ve also worked with a lot of different people: product managers, designers, support agents, frontend engineers, backend engineers, mobile engineers, data engineers, platform engineers, juniors, seniors, mids, mids who should be seniors, seniors who should be mids, staff engineers who should be seniors, bad managers, good managers, pre-sales, post-sales…
Links
About this site
It’s built with the Hugo static site generator, using a theme I created called etch-less-coffee, with commenting functionality provided by gomments, my own comment server. The website also works with javascript disabled, you just won’t be able to view or add replies.