/about

About harder.dev

A mostly harmless corner of the internet where I keep notes on what I am building and learning about. As well as the things I've broken, and the lessons I’ve learned while trying to fix them.

The Biological Entity

I'm Kevin Harder, a software engineer working out of my home office in Austin, Texas.

I have worked in software for 25 years across multiple industries, at startups and giant companies. I've taken on a variety of roles from developer to architect to engineering leader.

My current fascination involves tracking AI agents, running experiments, and trying to turn some of my ideas into actual software that just works.

For the longer personal and career story, see KevinHarder.com.

focus areas

Build things with clear architecture (and defaults that aren't insane)
Track AI and agentic releases that might help real teams
Execute practical experiments and share the outcomes
Document projects I am building or find genuinely interesting

The Engine Room

This site is static-first by design, with dynamic behavior only where it provides value. Because the best way to ensure a page works is to not make the server do anything when someone visits.

Static Stability

Built with Astro and TypeScript for static generation, clean routing, and minimal JavaScript by default. It’s fast, predictable, and doesn't load megabytes of JavaScript just to show you a sentence.

Occasional Hydration

I use Astro dynamic islands for things that actually need to move. Preact hydrates the signal widget only when you're looking at it. The rest stays peacefully still.

Feed + AI Processing Pipeline

Trusted feeds are summarized with local browser AI when possible, or Cloudflare Workers. Pretty amazing what can be done without a dedicatd server these days.

Data & Safety Controls

Feed allowlists, CORS-aware proxying, retry/backoff, relevance filtering, and layered caching (`localStorage`, edge cache, conditional `ETag` / `Last-Modified`) keep the data fresh and predictable.

Delivery Workflow

The Astro site deploys as static assets, while the worker deploys independently via GitHub Actions. It keeps updates fast and avoids coupling content deploys to edge API deploys.