Xe
Iaso

The Engineer Who Made Shitposting a Career Strategy

There is a certain type of person in tech who invents their own job title. "Archmage of Infrastructure" is not a LinkedIn-approved designation. Neither is "Senior Technophilosopher." Neither, for that matter, is "Senior Cloud Whisperer." Xe Iaso has held all three, at three different companies, and in each case the title was funnier and more accurate than anything HR would have suggested. That compression of technical depth into something ridiculous - and then delivering the technical depth for real - is the whole game with Xe Iaso.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, Xe is the CEO of Techaro, the creator of Anubis, a prolific technical blogger, a conference speaker, a Twitch streamer, a VTuber with a pink-haired orca avatar, an ordained minister, and by their own admission, someone who has "apparently shitposted their way to success." None of these facts contradict each other. They are, in fact, all the same person doing the same thing: using humor as a lens to make hard technical problems legible.

THE COMPANY THAT STARTED AS A JOKE

Techaro was not supposed to be real. Xe invented it as background scenery for a piece of dark satire - "The Layoff," a short story about a tech company that fires its employees via a poorly-trained AI chatbot named Midori Yasomi. The story, published in February 2024 after Xe was laid off from Fly.io, is a precision strike on every corporate dehumanization trend of the 2020s. The fake company in the story was called Techaro. The fake company had a fake website. Xe bought the domain for the bit.

Then, in early 2025, something happened that turned the bit into a business. Amazon's web crawler started hammering Xe's personal Git server, ignoring robots.txt, circumventing restrictions, and threatening to push the whole thing offline. Xe - being Xe - decided the correct response was not to complain about it on Bluesky. The correct response was to build a tool that weighs the "soul" of incoming HTTP requests and decides whether they deserve to pass.

They named it Anubis, after the Egyptian god of the dead who judges whether souls are worthy. They put it on GitHub under the TecharoHQ organization - the fake company - on January 19, 2025. Within days: 2,000 stars. Within weeks: UNESCO was using it. Within months: GNOME, the Linux kernel archives, FFmpeg, and Wine had all deployed it. Techaro, the joke, became the product company behind Anubis. The satire became the org chart.

THE CAREER BEFORE THE COMPANY

Xe's career reads like a tour of the infrastructure layer that makes the modern internet work. They started at Heroku as a Senior Software Engineer, maintaining the metrics processing subsystem that handled terabytes of data every week. From there, Lightspeed POS, where they maintained Kubernetes deployments and custom CI/CD systems. Then the move that would define the next chapter: Tailscale, where Xe didn't just take a job - they founded the developer relations team.

As "Archmage of Infrastructure," Xe created the technical writing program at tailscale.dev, producing articles that taught computer science fundamentals to an audience of working engineers. The impact was direct and measurable: in a company where most employees contribute to code, Xe's writing was "directly attributable to MAU growth." That's the kind of claim that sounds like marketing until you understand that Tailscale grew by tens of thousands of users during the years Xe was writing about it.

Then came Fly.io - "Senior Technophilosopher," naturally - where Xe built developer relations from scratch for the second time. Then Tigris Data, as "Senior Cloud Whisperer," doing the same thing a third time. Three companies. Three teams built from zero. Three rounds of proving that good technical writing and genuine developer education have real business value. Then Anubis happened, and Techaro stopped being the fake company.

VOICE, CODE, AND ACCESSIBILITY

Somewhere along the way, repetitive strain injury threatened to derail the whole enterprise. Xe's response was characteristic: don't stop coding, figure out how to code differently. They discovered Talon, a voice-control input system, and Cursorless, a VS Code extension that lets you manipulate code at the level of the language's syntax tree rather than character by character. Together, these tools let Xe write code by talking. They call their microphones their "0% keyboards." The setup, they say, is "insane fuckshit magic."

This is not a detour in the story - it is the story. Xe has never been primarily interested in computers for their own sake. They are interested in what computers can do when the friction is removed: when the interface gets out of the way, when the documentation is honest, when the complexity is named rather than hidden. Voice coding is just another instance of the same project: making the machine serve the human, not the other way around.

NIX, AND THE RESIGNATION

For years, xeiaso.net was regularly cited as one of the best places on the internet to learn NixOS. Xe's blog posts on Nix flakes, Nix as a Docker image builder, and the general philosophy of reproducible builds reached an audience of thousands of engineers trying to make sense of one of open source's most powerful and least approachable tools. They spoke at All Systems Go, at SCALE, at DevOpsDays. They were, in a real sense, the public face of Nix for a significant segment of the developer community.

In June 2024, Xe published what they called a resignation letter from the Nix community. The reasons were substantive - community governance, conduct, a feeling that the project's culture had drifted from the values Xe had signed up to represent. The departure was public and it was noticed: a Hacker News thread ran for hundreds of comments. It is the kind of move that only someone with genuine credibility can make and have it land. Xe had the credibility. The letter landed.

THE BLOG AS A BODY OF WORK

More than 500 articles. That is not a newsletter cadence or a content marketing strategy. That is a decade-long practice of thinking in public, of treating the blog as the primary medium for working through hard ideas. The range is unusual: deeply technical deep-dives on Kubernetes internals sit next to philosophical reflections on what it means to work in an industry obsessed with velocity. Reviews of video games appear alongside proposals for what Xe calls "humanity's final programming language." Personal health updates are written with the same precision as infrastructure post-mortems.

The effect is a portrait of a mind. Not a personal brand - a person. Xe's writing has the particular quality of someone who is genuinely trying to figure things out and doing it where you can watch. The humor is not decoration. It is how the thinking happens. The pink-haired orca avatar is not a costume. It is a consistent aesthetic choice that says: this is a person who takes the work seriously and refuses to take the pose seriously. There is a difference, and Xe knows what it is.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

In April 2026, Xe is recovering from surgery and still posting. Anubis just hit version 1.25.0 - named, per Xe's custom, after something absurd (the Necron version). The Thoth paid service - Anubis's reputation-checking layer - is expanding its geofencing and autonomous system filtering capabilities. Techaro is a real company now, with real infrastructure, real customers, and real revenue. The fake startup that started as a punchline in a satirical short story about AI layoffs has become the thing protecting the open web from AI scrapers.

The irony is not lost on Xe. It is, in fact, the entire point. The person who wrote fiction about corporate AI abuse built a real tool to fight AI abuse, named it after a death god, commissioned a European artist to draw an anime-styled mascot to replace an AI placeholder, and published the whole thing as open source so that UNESCO could use it for free. That's not a pivot. That's a consistent person doing consistent things - just at a scale that keeps surprising everyone, possibly including Xe.