I
Origin
Started writing code in Addis Ababa. Kept at it working with teams across three continents, a handful of timezones, and one stubborn refusal to settle.
Hello, traveler.
I'm Kaleab,
they call me
the Hitchhiker Dev.
“Optimistic and curious engineer wandering through codebases, building tools that make the universe slightly less indifferent.”
Coordinates⌖ Earth · Sol-3
Local time15:52:48
StatusAvailable for orbit
CurrentlyBuilding Vogon · v0.4
scroll
don't panic
§ 01 · About⌖ 09°00′N · 38°45′E
“I build software like a traveler packs a towel:
practically, stubbornly, and with a great deal
of affection.
II
The name
“Hitchhiker Dev” stuck because I travel a lot, not physically, but through international work and codebases. Every codebase feels like a strange new planet worth visiting.
III
The work
LLM runtimes in Rust. Mobile experiences in Flutter. Unglamorous backend plumbing that makes the rest of it possible.
IV
The ethic
I write in the open, ship things I'd be proud to maintain, and try to leave every project a little kinder than I found it.
Based inAddis Ababa, Ethiopia
Ships inRust · TS · Dart · Python
Years coding10+
Coffees/day3 · sometimes 4
If any of that resonates →say hello
§ 02 · Stack
Tools for the journey.
A working list of the things I reach for, ordered roughly by how often my hands type them in a given week.
TypeScript ✦ Rust ✦ Python ✦ Dart ✦ Go ✦ SQL ✦ React ✦ Next.js ✦ Tailwind ✦ Flutter ✦ SwiftUI ✦ Jetpack Compose ✦ Node.js ✦ Express ✦ FastAPI ✦ Django ✦ tRPC ✦ GraphQL ✦ LLM agents ✦ RAG pipelines ✦ PostgreSQL ✦ Redis ✦ Vector DBs ✦ AI automation ✦ AWS ✦ Docker ✦ Kubernetes ✦ Terraform ✦ CI/CD ✦ Cloudflare ✦ Flutter / Dart ✦ React Native ✦ iOS ✦ AndroidTypeScript ✦ Rust ✦ Python ✦ Dart ✦ Go ✦ SQL ✦ React ✦ Next.js ✦ Tailwind ✦ Flutter ✦ SwiftUI ✦ Jetpack Compose ✦ Node.js ✦ Express ✦ FastAPI ✦ Django ✦ tRPC ✦ GraphQL ✦ LLM agents ✦ RAG pipelines ✦ PostgreSQL ✦ Redis ✦ Vector DBs ✦ AI automation ✦ AWS ✦ Docker ✦ Kubernetes ✦ Terraform ✦ CI/CD ✦ Cloudflare ✦ Flutter / Dart ✦ React Native ✦ iOS ✦ AndroidTypeScript ✦ Rust ✦ Python ✦ Dart ✦ Go ✦ SQL ✦ React ✦ Next.js ✦ Tailwind ✦ Flutter ✦ SwiftUI ✦ Jetpack Compose ✦ Node.js ✦ Express ✦ FastAPI ✦ Django ✦ tRPC ✦ GraphQL ✦ LLM agents ✦ RAG pipelines ✦ PostgreSQL ✦ Redis ✦ Vector DBs ✦ AI automation ✦ AWS ✦ Docker ✦ Kubernetes ✦ Terraform ✦ CI/CD ✦ Cloudflare ✦ Flutter / Dart ✦ React Native ✦ iOS ✦ Android
§ 04 · Featured Work
Strange new planets.
A selection of recent projects. Each one taught me a new way to be wrong, which is the only way I know to get better.
01
Escrow Platform for Ecommerce
An escrow account platform for ecommerce, the first of its kind in Ethiopia. Buyer funds are held safely and released only when delivery is confirmed.
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02
ESX Order Management
The first BBO and order management system built for the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, covering order entry, matching, and market data.
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03
ShareOS
A shareholder operations system that companies use to manage shareholder activities, records, meetings, and communication in one place.
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04
Tarik
A digital family legacy vault, on web and mobile, for storing family history with shareable public links so the family name is remembered forever.
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05
PayPerMint
A pay per minute platform that connects experts with entrepreneur clients for on-demand, metered consultations.
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06
CultureQuest
A mobile app that supports the tourism industry in Ethiopia by giving tourists challenges to visit places and earn incentives along the way.
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07
Papal
A 3D visualizer and learning tool that renders topics in 3D so students understand real world applications, not theory alone.
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08
Government Integration SDK
SDKs for integrating with Ethiopian government systems, including the Ministry of Revenue, Ministry of Trade, Fayda national ID, and others.
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09
Medan
A medicine app that helps people find doctors based on their needs across hospitals in Addis Ababa.
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10
Vogon: LLM Orchestration
A Rust-based agent runtime that turns brittle prompt chains into deterministic, replayable workflows with first-class observability.
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11
Babel Fish
Real-time speech translation for Flutter with sub-200ms latency across 41 languages using on-device whisper variants.
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12
Magrathea
A planet-scale infra-as-code platform for spinning up bespoke developer environments. Terraform under the hood, joy on the surface.
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13
Pan-Galactic Postgres
Open-source Postgres extension for vector-aware time-series. Powers analytics for several production teams.
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14
Heart of Gold
An improbability-driven testing harness for AI agents. Fuzzes prompts, traces failures, generates regression suites automatically.
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15
Sub-Etha
A peer-to-peer mesh networking SDK for low-bandwidth regions. Deployed across three sub-Saharan field studies.
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16
Deep Thought
An internal LLM evaluation pipeline computing answers to questions you didn't know to ask. Surprisingly often: 42.
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17
Improbability Drive
A WebGL playground that visualizes high-dimensional embeddings as navigable 3D nebulae.
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18
Marvin
A pessimistic but accurate cost monitor for cloud infra. Roasts your AWS bill with citations.
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19
Trillian Search
Semantic search-as-a-service for indie product teams. Replaces 90% of Algolia tickets with one endpoint.
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§ 05 · Archive
The back catalog.
Older experiments, weekend hacks, and projects that didn't quite reach orbit. Listed for honesty.
YearProjectStackNote
2022Zaphod CLITwo-headed git workflow tool
2022Slartibartfast MapsProcedural coastline generator
2021JeltzBureaucratic email auto-responder
2021EddieCheerful onboard voice assistant
2020Bowl of PetuniasMood journal w/ probabilistic tags
202042: A REPLTeaches kids regex through poetry
2019Hyperspace BypassZero-downtime DB migration tool
2019Towel.txtMarkdown -> printable doc generator
2018Vogon ConstructorToy parser combinator library
2018Galaxy AtlasPersonal reading visualizer
§ 06 · Writing
Notes from the journey.
Essays, field reports, and the occasional opinion I'll probably outgrow. Updated when I have something honest to say.
Rust Is Not a Hammer (and Your Side Project Is Not a Nail)
On knowing when borrow-checker pain is worth it, and when reaching for Python is the senior move.
read →
The Quiet Religion of Type Safety
Why I converted, why I sometimes lapse, and why neither makes you a better engineer.
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On-Device Whisper: A Field Report
Six months of shipping speech recognition to phones in places without reliable bandwidth.
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Postgres Is the Only Database You Need (Until It Isn't)
A deeply biased love letter, followed by an honest list of when to reach for something else.
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Agentic Workflows Are Just Cron Jobs With Extra Steps
The hype is exhausting. The boring version is genuinely useful. Here's the boring version.
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Flutter at Scale: Lessons From 180k Daily Users
Memory budgets, isolate strategy, and the unglamorous work of keeping the framerate honest.
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Why I Still Read Papers (and You Probably Should Too)
A lightweight system for keeping up without drowning.
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Don't Panic: A Junior Engineer's Survival Guide
Things I wish someone had told me. Mostly: nobody knows what they're doing, but the good ones know how to find out.
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Building a Deterministic LLM Runtime in Rust
How Vogon trades latency for reproducibility, and why your eval harness will thank you.
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Tailwind Is Fine, You Are Fine, We Are All Fine
A peace treaty after a decade of CSS holy wars.
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Kubernetes for People Who Just Wanted a Server
The minimum viable mental model. Skip the certifications.
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AI Automation Is the New Spreadsheet
Both democratize work, both create a long tail of fragile artifacts. Here's how to ship the durable kind.
read →
§ 07 · Opinions, loosely held
Things I'll defend, until I learn better.
Most ‘AI agents’ are just brittle scripts wearing a frock coat. The boring abstractions will win.
Type safety is a negotiation, not a religion. The best codebases I've seen know which battles to lose.
Every senior engineer I admire reads more than they tweet. Something to think about.
Junior engineers don't need a faster horse. They need permission to be wrong out loud.
- 01Writing chapter three of a small book on building durable AI systems.
- 02Shipping v0.4 of Vogon, focused on observability and replay tooling.
- 03Mentoring two junior engineers from the Addis Ababa tech community.
- 04Re-reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications for the third time.
- 05Learning to bake bread that doesn't end in tears.
§ 10 · Bookshelf
What I'm reading.
A small, slowly-rotating library. The classics, a few new things, and the books I keep returning to.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The Pragmatic Programmer
A Philosophy of Software Design
Crafting Interpreters
The Soul of a New Machine
Working in Public
Thinking in Systems
§ 12 · Live Transmission
A terminal, in case you prefer text.
§ 14 · Guestbook
Sign the visitor's log.
An old-web tradition: leave a note, say hello, disagree with one of my opinions. I read every entry.
- ada l.2 days ago
your vogon piece changed how i think about agent runtimes. thank you.
- miguel s.1 week ago
saw you speak at rustconf, the bit about replay was gold.
- anonymous2 weeks ago
you forgot a semicolon on the about page. (jk. or am i.)
- priya k.1 month ago
the field report on whisper helped me ship our app. respect.
§ 15 · Final TransmissionLet's build
Let's build
something strange.
Open to interesting roles, contract gigs, and odd collaborations. Especially: AI infra, developer tools, and small teams shipping at high quality.
kaleab.g.zeleke@gmail.com ↗