GoKawiilFor the last several years, I’ve been building and maintaining developer tools in my spare time, chiefly mise.
What started as a simple rewrite of asdf in Rust has become an incredibly successful local dev manager. mise now has 27k+ stars on GitHub and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula. In fact, roughly 1% of users typing brew install are running brew install mise .
I’ve also watched mise show up in places I never expected, including OpenAI Codex Universal and NVIDIA OpenShell.
Alongside it I maintain aube (the newest of the bunch, which I’m really excited about), hk (git hook runner), pitchfork (process supervisor), fnox (secrets), usage, and a handful of smaller tools.
That has been incredibly rewarding. It’s also become a lot of work. For a while, I could do this alongside a full-time job. But as mise has grown, that has become less and less realistic. I have not been able to keep up with PR review the way I want to. I’ve had to declare notification bankruptcy every few weeks by deleting all of my GitHub notifications because I genuinely could not keep up.
I do not want mise to stall because I only have scraps of time left after work. I want it to keep getting better.
So I left Figma to work on these full time.
en.dev
To keep this sustainable I’m doing it under a company: en.dev. Right now that means one person — me — working full time on mise and the rest of the portfolio. If the funds grow enough, the plan is to bring on a second maintainer so mise keeps a bus factor above 1.
Money
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