Like the real ones, digital clouds can take many shapes.
Sometimes it means "rented virtual resources", sometimes it means "stack of intertwined services", sometimes it means "SaaS", sometimes it means "alternatives to SaaS"...
It's also very convenient to not have to remember a bunch of extra combos or perform the gymnastics to press them, especially if you need other modifiers too like shift+pgup, shift+ctrl+pageup, etc
Tracker is a lightweight document and work-tracking system designed around three goals:
1. *Totally self-hosted and 100% private*: I run it over ZeroTier to connect my systems, but Tailscale or just your personal LAN works great as well.
2. *Flexible, immediately usable, & extensible*: It can use S3/R2/etc for the actual document storage if you want object storage, or you can just use local files. I've been running RustFS myself on a small local k8s cluster which emulates S3. It comes with migration tools to switch from one storage system to another, and it is ready to run in many different forms all designed for AI agents to be pointed at it and immediately self-bootstrapped. "Look at the tracker tool at `<ip:port>` and configure your own mcp and skill using the instructions within" is all you need to tell an agent.
3. *Very lightweight, reasonably fast, and designed more for agents to use it well rather than humans*: That being said, it does have a minimal web UI included so you can also browse your documents.
Furthermore, it has a few design quirks which I really wanted—some people will probably love them and others might hate them. You have to remember that I have a... problem? with simply loving computers, so I tend to work from several different machines simultaneously, and that's a major motivating factor here.
- *Flat structure with tags & folios*: Tracker is only slightly opinionated on document storage hierarchy. You can store a massive collection of raw docs in a flat format, or you can use *folios*—which are just documents of `kind='folio'` whose metadata tracks its files (themselves documents tagged with `folio:<slug>`). There is no other way to introduce additional hierarchy; to me, this is a major benefit—I just wanted one big flat space.
- *Explicit locking on everything*: All changes go through an explicit locking mechanism, even simple metadata edits. This is to prevent an agent from reading a stale document before taking action.
- *Strict attribution*: All edits require an actor ID (sent via `X-Actor: <role>@<hostname>/<ip>`). Because I work across Linux, macOS, and Windows simultaneously, it's critical to know exactly which coding agent is doing what, from where, and on which machine.
Duckbill is hiring three-five engineers for 3 roles with hybrid work in downtown SF. We're in-office MWF and WFH Tuesday and Thursdays. Relocation is an option but sponsorship / remote is not.
We're working on Skyway, a new kind of enterprise-grade finops tool born out of the Duckbill Group's consulting business. We're staying small (team-wise) but focusing on the largest of the SaaS spenders and their problems exclusively. We ship daily and have several unfair advantages.
1. Senior Front-end Engineer (TS/JS/React + bit of Python back-end)
2. Senior Back-end Engineer (Python + bit of front-end)
3. Senior Data Engineer (Python, airflow, duckdb, s3, bigquery)
internal reports from current AWS engineers seem to be confirming all of the speculation in this article. Shit's rotten from the inside out and you can pretty evenly blame AI, brain drain, and good old fashioned "big company politics"
There's been a massive talent exodus, especially among the principal and senior principal engineering roles, across all Amazon orgs since the RTO policies have been enforced. Its demoralizing to lose key engineers that you look up to and want to continue to learn from all because a few people far removed from the day to day make a bad call.
RTO in combination with Amazon being last place in AI innovation have led to departures of anyone that can leave, leaving.
> So they can't suggest a fix even if they know 100% what it will be. Thats exactly what happened this time. EIGHT different staff members pointed to the underlying cause and were told (some literally) to "shut the f*ck up and get back to your job"
Jesus, if even an ounce of that is true... Yes, everyone on the internet is a cat clawing on a keyboard... but if a ton of people legitimately confirmed to be ex-AWS point to similar culture issues... probably it's AWS that's rotting.
The problem is that if it was 8 in 10 suggestions or even 8 in 20, then yes, terrible. On the other hand, if it was 8 needles in a haystack of garbage, at some point you do, in fact, need to tell people to STFU so you can work.
Duckbill engineering is hiring a full-time ONSITE senior data engineer in downtown San Francisco. We WFH Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We're tackling the hardest finops challenges for the biggest enterprise customers head-on and have a killer team along with the advantage of the established and industry-leading DuckBill Group.
Help shape the leading edge of an entire industry with us while we're still just at seed stage and under 6 engineers!
Comp range is generous on the equity and between 180k and 210k base depending on seniority. We're cooking with flask, react, postgres, clickhouse, parquet and airflow on AWS at the moment.
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