Tim Post: Engineer, Humanist, Systems Thinker

Super Powers:

• I have amazing powers of pattern recognition. I see patterns, goals and even "signs of smoke" extremely early, usually well before others.
• I am not easily offended or insulted. I can work with anyone cheerfully.
• I thrive under stress and lead in chaos; I see goals before others do.
• Storytelling & writing.
• My life challenges have given me a very unique perspective.
• I know a bunch of programming languages, some even well!

Key Areas Of Experience:

• Building, monitoring and growing technical communities. I have Experience doing this both around missions like Let's build the sum of programming knowledge! and around tools like modern JS/TS runtimes, debuggers, databases, etc.
• Creating, curating and analyzing learning paths, whether procedural (how to get your driver's permit) or technical (how to drive ).
• Identifying hard-to-define KPIs around community, trust, sentiment, knowledge alignment, process alignment and other meaningful factors that often go ignored until becoming malignant.
• Servant leadership & building healthy engineering, community and trust & safety teams.

I also have intriguing and juicy weaknesses! But, I save discussing those for job interviews. I don't shy away from discussing weakness, I just find that mine tend to almost entirely depend on what I'm doing.

If someone approached me and just asked what are your weaknesses??, other than immediately handing them my wallet, I'd probably just shrug and say "it depends, in what?".

When I was managing people and I'd ask them about what they perceived their own weaknesses to be, many would reply with a list of things they had difficulty doing. Weaknesses are things that compromise your abilities, not tasks you struggle with. They also tend to be relative.

It's more important to be good at receiving feedback, because other people will always be better at understanding your weaknesses than you are. Yeah, you're the expert on _confirming_ them, but aside from learning as they reveal themselves, being open to their existence and excited about discovering them is really where the game is.

Current open source focus:

I've got a lot of stuff on Github; my main focus right now is getting Runa into shape so that it can accept and fully-utilize any quantized model. In order to make that happen, I have to .....

• Finish Tieto for memory storage and RAG capabilities. This lets me feed a model lots of documents and helps old models get current. It also serves as a journal of conversational memory with quick semantic access to any context.
• Implement uncertainty tracing in my research-y llama fork along with command execution (web search, FS access, code tools, MCP, etc).
• Getting all components off socket I/O and wired up to my LLM-native IPC library which also serves as working short-term KV memory.

Previous open source work:

I've been using and advocating for free & open software since the mid 1990s. My philosophy is to try and leave things that have been good and kind to me better than I found them, so I try to send more fixes than reports, ideas than complaints, answers than questions and (well, you can probably extrapolate the rest).

Some contributions that are worth mentioning are:

• I used to maintain CryoPID (a process checkpointing / freezer) for Linux after Bernard Blackham could not continue with it. A few forks and even some master's thesis emerged from working on it, but the project ultimately yielded to modern kernel plumbing.
• I wrote the command shell for HelenOS, a modern microkernel operating system. Splinter's (brand new) CLI and REPL is based on the design of that shell, which is still optimal today, almost 15 years later.
• I'm the original author of Lume's SEO plugin, which is based on my experience directing the quality and SEO effort at Stack Overflow. I wrote all of my experience around helping the site outscore the swarm of scrapers in hopes that it helps Lume authors outscore the rising sea of AI-generated slop.

Hobbies and interests:

Because I have somewhat-limited mobility, I have a lot of time in front of my laptop, which happens to also be full of "droid guts" for a lack of a better phrase. When you know how this stuff works, and you have an electrical background, the lab coats come out and things get interesting!

My wife and I have what we call the _original_ American dream, which is to get ahold of a few acres nobody else wants and that suit our climate needs and set up a self-sufficient homestead. With the tech I have developed already, we could automate quite a bit of the upkeep, and building a business around producing the technology to do that really excites me. So if it's anything related to building, engineering, automating or just being on a homestead - I'm into it.

I'm also huge into history, including biblical history and religious studies. While I'm deeply spiritual, G-d-fearing and Jewish, I'm definitely _not_ religious; I just find the study fascinating. Just as I didn't allow school to interfere with my education, I don't allow organized religion to interfere with my relationship with my creator. That's not saying school and religion have no value, they do! But they require attention and consideration, not blind devotion.

Wow, you're still here? Then I guess we can talk about B-movies. I love them, when actors act just because they want to, when people film it just because they know they can nail it, and where everyone has a good time telling the story instead of selling the marketing.

Tubi is my drug and I love low-budget thrillers the most, but action and Kung Fu flicks are always in the mix. If I'm not watching something scary like "Simon Says" I'm probably watching Donnie Yen kick the crap out of someone or Jason Statham chew on power mains. I'm working on a tool to make Tubi's catalog easier to search with AI from their sitemaps which I hope to have done soon (it will be open souce).

All of this requires time and some even the occasional server rental; if you've found something I'm working on to be useful and have a few bucks to help, please click the "buy me a coffee" link at the bottom of this page, thank you! <3