Available for interesting problems
Hotdin Gurning
Software Engineer · Building things that survive production
“Professional explainer of obvious things to computers”
I build software, automate the boring parts of work, and lately I've been exploring AI—from building with it to figuring out where it confidently goes wrong. Most days I'm turning ideas into products and unexpected behavior into lessons.
A photo of me goes here, once I find one I don't actively dislike.
A bit about me
About
I'm a software engineer who spends most days explaining obvious things to computers.
Sometimes that's traditional software. Lately, it's been AI.
I enjoy building systems that are predictable in production, understandable in six months, and boring enough that nobody has to think about them twice.
My work sits somewhere between product, platform, and automation—close enough to users to understand the problem, and close enough to the code to know where the problem is hiding.
When I'm not building things, I'm usually experimenting with AI, refactoring something that works perfectly fine, or both.
A few things that are true:
- Believes every "quick fix" has a retirement plan
- Trusts logs more than memories
- Production remains the final boss.
Selected work
Things I've built
This Website, Apparently
A monorepo personal platform that's wildly over-engineered for a homepage — on purpose.
Ledgerly
A personal finance tool that judges my spending so my friends don't have to.
Deploybot 3000
A CI bot that ships on Fridays so I don't have to take the blame.
Side quests
Things I made for fun
Smaller experiments and weekend rabbit holes. Some are useful, some are just me proving a point to myself. No warranty.
Regex Dungeon
A game where the only weapon is a regular expression. Reviews are mixed.
Markdown to Mood
Sentiment analysis for your commit messages. Spoiler: you were frustrated.
Journal
Things I've written down
Half-formed thoughts on engineering, AI, and whatever I was nerd-sniped by this week.
How I Accidentally Learned LangChain and LangGraph
I thought I was learning AI. Instead, I ended up learning why software engineering principles become even more important when one of your dependencies can confidently make things up.
AI · Langchain · Langgraph · Python
Building this site, or: how I over-engineered a homepage
Why a personal site got a monorepo, two apps, a database, and a content model. Spoiler: because it was fun.
Engineering · Monorepo · Meta
I asked an LLM to name my variables. It was worse than me.
A short, mostly-true story about pair-programming with a model that confidently suggested `dataData2Final`.
AI · Developer Life · Naming
Say hello
Contact
Got an idea, a job, or a strong opinion about tabs vs spaces? My inbox is open and surprisingly responsive.
gurningku@gmail.com