joseferben

  Location: Switzerland
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: LLMs (Anthropic, OpenAI), TypeScript, Bun, React, Remix, Next, Node, Django, Python, Tailwind, SQLite, OCaml, Nix
  Résumé/CV: https://joseferben.com/resume.en.pdf
  Email: josef@erben.systems
  Github: https://github.com/joseferben
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseferben

I have 10+ years of experience as an engineer and 2+ years as CTO. Over the past 2 years I've been shipping agents/LLM-based flows to production using Typescript, React, Bun/Node, Django and Python. I thrive in small and highly autonomous teams with a strong focus on product and go-to-market.

I run my own LLC and I'm open to contract work.

  Location: Switzerland
  Remote: Yes (hybrid or on-site for a good fit)
  Willing to relocate: If it's a a good fit
  Technologies: LLMs (Anthropic, OpenAI), TypeScript, Bun, React, Remix, Next, Node, Django, Python, Tailwind, SQLite, OCaml, Nix
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josef-erben-90a002b1/
  Email: josef@erben.systems
  Blog: https://www.joseferben.com/
  Github: https://github.com/joseferben

I have 10+ years of experience as an engineer and 2+ years as CTO. Over the past 2 years I've been shipping agents/LLM-based flows to production using Typescript, React, Bun/Node, Django and Python.

I thrive in small and highly autonomous teams with a strong focus on product and go-to-market.

If you're looking to switch from foundation models to smaller custom models for faster & cheaper inference, I have experience with fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

I run my own LLC and I'm open to contract work.

  Location: Switzerland
  Remote: Yes (hybrid or on-site for a good fit)
  Willing to relocate: If it's a a good fit
  Technologies: LLMs, TypeScript, Bun, React, Remix, Next, Node, Django, Python, Tailwind, SQLite, OCaml, Nix
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josef-erben-90a002b1/
  Email: josef@erben.systems
  Blog: https://www.joseferben.com/
  Github: https://github.com/joseferben

I am currently bootstrapping a product but I am open for employment if it's a great fit. I have over 10 years of experience as engineer and founder. As an engineer I've worked in finance, research (economics & health care), education, real estate, marketing and dev infra.

Recently, I’ve been using Typescript, React, Bun/Node, Django and Python to build web apps and agentic workflows on top of foundation models. I have some experience with fine-tuning and with reinforcement learning, so I’m also interested in work that is closer to research.

I have my own LLC and I am also open to contract work.

If you want to drive Claude Code or OpenAI Codex with code comments this is for you. Make sure to set up a good check command that takes files as arguments, such as eslint. The agent fixes issues in the changed files first, making the feedback loop tight.

the quality of the lib and the docs is really high, kinda crazy you just launched!

congrats on the launch! better-auth is a joy to use. great dx with the type-safe plugin system.

for me i figured out it’s about the body. it’s ok to be lifted up from the body into the thinking mind but i “owe” my body to spend some time there as well.

sometimes all it takes is sitting 20min in the morning just observing sensations in my body, and saying good morning to various organs haha. sounds silly but creates a solid foundation for my day.

for example:

imo it's easier to spot the authn/authz issue here

export default function handler( req: NextApiRequest, res: NextApiResponse<ResponseData> ) { // updating user details without authn/authz }

than here

"use server"

export async function updateUser(email: string, age: number) { // updating user details without authn/authz }

without having read any next docs. engineers got trained to consider authn/authz the moment they see "http route/endpoint", maybe being more explicit about what happens in the api would help?

or next could provide an authn api for server actions that authn providers would implement?

> layout, "server-only", accidentally bundling server code

the main issue i wanted to highlight is that things are not caught at type-check time. maybe vercel could provide eslint plugins? this could codify a lot of the caveats

> There's no way to get around thinking about AuthN/Z with any server APIs

very true! maybe there is a way to make the default secure somehow by making it awkward to publicly expose a POST route by accident. awesome that next.js 15 is doing things in that regard.

thanks for addressing the points leerob, shows the great governance mentioned in the end of the post :)

after building 5 apps with next.js 14 this is our review.

tl;dr

- Next.js 14 is fast, but App Router caveats increase cognitive load

- Server Actions are awesome, once secured

- Everyone is using Next.js, this is its greatest strength

- Vercel as hosting platform is a joy to use and they save us tons of time

while working on a few slack apps and llm agents i couldn't help but notice how chat platforms like slack could be to agents what message brokers (kafka, rabbitmq, sqs) are to services.

what do you think?

excellent points

so quite usable, thanks!

@simonw what is the token/s like on your 64gb m2 mbp?

looks good! how does it compare to the core of vercel ai sdk?

excellent article!

one of my favorite books about this that i can not recommend enough is “the miracle of mindfulness” by thich nhat hanh.

my read on it is that it’s liberation and freedom in a very buddhist sense.

you won’t be free from hunger, but it may reframe our relationship with food so there is less compulsion and mindless consumption.

it won’t take away fear in the face of imminent danger (that’s a good thing, we have to survive) but it may reduce background anxiety that’s present in our daily lives.

you've gained:

- fine-grained design tokens (p-63 doesn't exist)

- freedom from having to name things prematurely

- not having to jump back and forth between index.html and styles.css

for real, do you want swarms of developers to lose their jobs because software complexity collapsed?

this looks amazing!

i’m building https://www.plainweb.dev and i’m looking for the simplest way to deploy a plainweb/plainstack project.

looks like sidekick has the same spirit when it comes to simplicity.

in the plainstack docs i’ve been embracing fly.io, but reliability is an issue. and sqlite web apps (which is the core of plainstack) can’t have real zero downtime deployments, unless you count the proxy holding the pending request for 30 seconds while the fly machine is deployed.

i tried kamal but it felt like non-ruby and non-rails projects are second class citizens.

i was about to document deploying plainstack to dokku, but provisioning isn’t built-in.

my dream deployment tool would be dokku + provisioning & setup, sidekick looks very close to that.

definitely going to try this and maybe even have it in the blessed deploy path for plainstack if it works well!

really nice that you're tool focuses on removing. i've been using https://knip.dev/ for detection in monorepos, but it's cumbersome to remove manually.

those are string literals and checked by the compiler.

there is kysely-codegen which generates types based on the actual database schema.

+1 on doppler, works well so far.

it adds complexity to your build process

fun little game, very intuitive!

impressive, imagine this but photo realistic with vr goggles.

https://www.plainweb.dev is my shot at making web development simpler.

my bet is that most companies and solo devs only need a single process and sqlite to drive revenue.

i’m considering switching from tsx to bun, but i’m hesitating because of some missing node 20 api.

for typescript there is pg-boss, works great for us

excellent article! my approach is to to break down larger bits into smaller monorepo packages with turbo repo where each package builds itself and the task graph is managed by turbo. the drawback is that watching across local packages doesn’t work out of the box.