I have about six or seven backlogs full of tech debt, bugs, and other various enhancements that every team _wants_ to do, but we either don’t have the bandwidth or know-how to do right now.
I spend a lot of time at my org doing one of the following things:
1. figuring out how to onboard engineers and bootstrap them to do their own work to draw down their backlogs
2. show the team cool ideas to spark their interest or bring them from “I’m never using this useless crap AI” to “oh, wow, I never thought of that… fires up a terminal and creates own cool thing”
3. creating a backlog of other things people want to automate but never wrote down/thought through that Claude can do in short order for immediate value
1. Start with the ‘brainstorm’ session where you explain your feature or the task that you're trying to complete.
2. Allow it to write up a design doc, then an implementation plan - both saved to disk - by asking you multiple clarifying questions. Feel free to use voice transcription for this because it is probably as good as typing, if not better.
3. Open up a new Claude window and then use a git worktree with the Execute Plan command. This will essentially build out in multiple steps, committing after about three tasks. What I like to do is to have it review its work after three tasks as well so that you get easier code review and have a little bit more confidence that it's doing what you want it to do.
Overall, this hasn't really failed me yet and I've been using it now for two weeks and I've used about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 10 million tokens this week alone.
You will simply need a lot of GPU cores/VRAM. On my $4,000 Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 64GB of RAM, I can comfortably run deepseek-r1:32b, but a) load times can be annoying (i.e. if you are switching models for different tasks, or let them idle out) and b) you can certainly tell that it requires tuning of the context length, temperature, etc. based on what you need to do.
Compare that with the commercial models where a lot of that is done on a large scale for you.
Willing to relocate: Not for at least 1-2 years
Technologies: Kubernetes (cloud & bare metal), Terraform, AWS, Go, Python, Ruby on Rails, React/Next.js, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, nginx & Apache, various cloud/video streaming/realtime tech, and more
12+ years as a platform engineer -> SRE at a number of top-tier startups or PaaS companies. Currently seeking my next senior or staff level SRE/DevOps/Platform Engineer position from Chicago or beyond!
A few projects I'm proudest of recently:
* Successfully planned & executed a six-month migration to EKS most recently at Sprout Social using custom-built pipelines which improved overall reliability and scalability for 150-ish microservices.
* Achieved a 75% reduction in AWS costs for the Moovweb (now Edgio/Akamai) Mobile Edge CDN by optimizing Node.js runtimes for use with Kubernetes.
* Helped develop two internal Go web apps used by the AWS EC2 CSET team to assist with enterprise client support engagements and dependencies.
* A couple years ago, I was instrumental in iteratively upgrading Hotel Tonight's core API backend from Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 2.3 with zero downtime, reducing endpoint response times by 45% and improving overall system performance.
Looking forward to hearing about any opportunities! Thanks!
I spend a lot of time at my org doing one of the following things:
1. figuring out how to onboard engineers and bootstrap them to do their own work to draw down their backlogs
2. show the team cool ideas to spark their interest or bring them from “I’m never using this useless crap AI” to “oh, wow, I never thought of that… fires up a terminal and creates own cool thing”
3. creating a backlog of other things people want to automate but never wrote down/thought through that Claude can do in short order for immediate value