Derek Reynolds

Now

BaseDash — Product and Ops Engineer, May 2023 → present

Three and a half years at BaseDash. I designed and architected much of the infrastructure behind it, including the self-hosted component.

• Shipping user-facing work in React and Node, and running what I ship: observability, incident response, and the unglamorous work of knowing what’s going on in production — plus direct customer support, learning pain points firsthand and answering questions fast.
• Helping maintain and optimize a production AI agent.
• The stack: React (Router) + Vite + Node + Postgres on DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS), provisioned with OpenTofu (Terraform), observed with Sentry + BetterStack, tested with Vitest + Playwright — plus self-hosted Docker/Helm for enterprise.

The direction I’m pointed: simple backends with fewer moving parts — Postgres earning its keep, systems a small team can reason about on call; hypermedia stacks like Datastar instead of client-side state mirroring; and ~4 years working with agents, 2 in agentic-coding practice, as leverage for small teams.

Services

Work with me

Freelance covers the full range below, React rescues included. For full-time roles, I’m looking specifically at hypermedia-oriented teams. No rates published — inquire.

• Frontend triage & rescue — messy React codebases stabilized, then steered toward simpler hypermedia architectures where it fits. Freelance.
• Harden production — observability that answers questions, incident posture, perf triage across query, event loop, and render. Lots of runtime mileage: Node.js and other JS runtimes, plus Go.
• Pragmatic AI leverage — stewarding production agents and agentic workflows a small team can operate.

Active projects

Things you can open

• yagni.club — essays and notes. A plain Go binary that syncs my ATProto repo into SQLite and renders HTML. Datastar for a clock, reading progress, and subscribe — everything else works with JS off.
• SSE Lab — a harness that reproduces a WebKit streaming-fetch delivery bug, with every knob in the URL so a shared link reproduces the run. Includes a Datastar EventSource plugin.
• dbugs — Gigabugs reimagined as Go + SQLite + Datastar: 1M issues, full-text search in ~10–20ms, realtime multiplayer, one binary on a small box.
• Hypersheets — realtime multiplayer spreadsheet with no client-side app state. Server renders HTML and patches it over SSE; invalidation follows the formula graph, not a static list.
• Largediff — GitHub-style Files-changed view that stays smooth on 100k-line diffs. Server-driven viewport windowing over one SSE stream, per-token spans rendered server-side.

Background

Earlier: NerdWallet (Node/React storefronts, Life Insurance calculator) · DIY.org · Trulia.

Full CV with dates on LinkedIn.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere

• LinkedIn — full work history
• GitHub — derekr
• Bluesky — @drk.wtf
• yagni.club — writing