I'm John Wilger, Head of Engineering at 10KR, where we build AI products and experiences. I help teams build software through disciplined engineering practices and thoughtful AI integration.
What I Do
I've spent over 25 years building software and leading engineering teams. My work brings together engineering leadership and hands-on technical practice: shaping technical direction, working directly with teams on hard problems, and mentoring engineers in the practices that make software teams thrive.
Before joining 10KR, I was VP of Engineering and a Principal Engineering Consultant at Artium, where I helped clients build sustainable engineering cultures and mentored fellow consultants.
How I Think About Software
I'm deeply invested in practices that help teams ship reliable software with confidence:
- Event Sourcing & CQRS — I design systems where state changes are explicit, auditable, and reversible. My open-source work on eventcore explores multi-stream event sourcing in Rust.
- Test-Driven Development — Not just coverage, but mutation testing as a quality gate. Tests should verify behavior, not just execute code.
- Event Modeling — Collaborative design that gives teams shared understanding before writing a single line of code.
I've found that the practices helping LLMs succeed at software engineering are the same ones that have been helping humans succeed for decades. Explicit constraints, clear boundaries, and well-defined interfaces make everyone more effective—whether carbon or silicon-based.
Technical Interests
I work primarily in Rust, Elixir, TypeScript, and Nix. My GitHub reflects my current obsessions: event-driven architectures, AI agent tooling, and infrastructure-as-code. Projects like ai-plugins encode my engineering methodology explicitly—partly for AI collaboration, but the discipline benefits my own practice too.