> Hey, I'm @jhheider.
First engineer at
tea.xyz. Building the
pkgx
ecosystem in Rust.
I pay the cost of correctness up
front — the compiler is my first code reviewer.
# The pkgx Ecosystem
The platform I build and build with.
- pkgxdev/pantry — Top contributor (2,800+ contributions). ~1,600 package manifests powering pkgx.
- pkgxdev/pkgx — The package execution runtime. Run anything. Install nothing.
- pkgxdev/dev — Developer environment manager. Per-project toolchains, automatically.
- pkgxdev/brewkit — Build tooling for the pantry. How packages get built and tested.
- pkgxdev/mash — Scripting wrapper with auto-installing dependencies via pkgx.
# Featured Projects
Rust CLI for semantic version comparison. Originally built to interface with pkgx's semver implementation via the command line — then became the core library for the v2 Rust rewrite.
View on GitHubRust TUI for inspecting GPG messages. Built to aid key analysis for tea.xyz's blockchain — parse and explore OpenPGP packet structure interactively.
View on GitHubCLI interface for tea's GPG wallet system. Lets payees and payors interact with tea.xyz's blockchain payment infrastructure from the command line.
View on GitHub# On Software
Rust is not the devil, nor the messiah. It's a tool — a powerful, occasionally frustrating, remarkably well-designed tool. The choice isn't between safety and productivity. It's between when you pay the cost of correctness.
I reach for Rust first for anything that's going to outlive the end of my day. But I've also walked away from it when it wasn't right. The decision should be engineering, not religion.
The borrow checker doesn't teach you good architecture. It enforces certain constraints, but I've seen plenty of Rust code wrapped in so many Arc<Mutex<T>> layers that it's basically garbage collection with extra steps.
If you do it twice, script it. If you script it twice, ship it. I've been automating since a college internship in VisualBasic — I've never stopped.
Full essay: Rust is Not the Devil, Nor the Messiah
# About
I've been writing software since I found programs printed in the back of 3-2-1 Contact and typed them into an Apple ][c. Decades later, I was the first engineer hired by the founders of tea.xyz, where I helped advocate for a complete rewrite from Deno to Rust, because it was the right choice for that project.
In between: network engineering, ISP support, small businesses, and a plethora of full-stack dev. The through-line is the same: find a problem, write code, ship it.