I'm Parker Jones — a software and data engineer, ten-plus years in. By day I'm a Software Engineer writing Rust, TypeScript and Python for the systems behind a large slice of global retail's data ecosystems. What I keep gravitating toward is exotically simple web development and the unglamorous end of the stack: distributed systems, developer tooling, data plumbing, and the reproducible infrastructure that makes all of it boring to operate.
The path here wasn't a straight line. I began in software building wordpress websites in 2011 and came up through startups — building drone-operations and geospatial platforms, the CMS and architecture guts of a marketing platform through a multi-cloud Kubernetes migration, and game-networking and analytics pipelines before that. Somewhere along the way I stopped being a front-end developer who also did backend and became someone happiest a layer down — in Rust, in Nix, in the parts of the system most people would rather not touch. Now we're doing AI, I guess.
This blog is the after-hours version of that. It's where I build things in public and write up what actually happened — including the parts that broke, the parts I faked, and the parts an AI model talked me into before I caught it. A few throughlines:
- Local-first, reproducible systems. Context Harness, a local RAG engine in Rust; a NixOS + macOS fleet defined in one flake; the databases-in-the-browser series.
- AI in the loop, on the record. I draft with models and say so. The recurring test is whether better context produces less slop and how we can maintain the fun and systems thinking behind building great software.
- The lab. eBPF and performance work, security, homelab, ARM, network game programming, and whatever I'm nerding out on after hours.
Find me on GitHub as parallaxisjones. The opinions here are mine, not my employer's — as are the mistakes.
— Parker Jones