About

I’m Bryan McEire. I’m CTO at BoxHub now, and Positronia is where I write.

At BoxHub we run an online marketplace for buying shipping containers. People use them for storage and workshops, entrepreneurs turn them into pop-up shops and even small farms, and businesses order them in bulk. Buying one used to mean phone calls, brokers, and arranging your own trucking. We make it easy: you buy online, and the container gets delivered. The interesting part, from where I sit as CTO, is that a container is a heavy physical object with a location and a delivery truck attached to it, and making that feel as ordinary as buying anything else online is a real systems problem. That is the kind of problem I like.

I co-founded Spotahome, an online marketplace for booking mid-term and long-term rental homes. The first version was a few hundred lines of code I wrote myself, and I would have been embarrassed to show them to anyone. I did not know then where it was going. It grew into a product organization of more than 70 people, and the company raised more than €100M. I stayed through the whole arc, and the part that taught me the most was the last stretch, the part nobody really warns you about: what happens to engineering when the team triples, and then triples again. Writing the first lines is the easy part. Turning a fast, messy codebase into something with real review, real testing, and an actual on-call rotation, while dozens of people depend on it not breaking, is a different job. I got some of it right and some of it wrong. It was the steepest few years I have had as a leader. I would do it again.

Now I also teach. I’m a professor at the Startups Institute in Spain, and I collaborate with startups and with larger companies, usually on the same problem: a team that can build things but is not yet sure how to keep building them once it grows. I have mentored and taught at other institutions over the years, in the same spirit. I keep coming back to it because the question underneath is one I actually care about. How do you keep a system honest as it grows, and the team along with it?

There is more to it than the headline projects. Over the years I have worked on plenty of others, some of them my own and some corporate, ranging from small experiments to fairly large efforts. I have not written much about that yet. I think I will, here, at some point.

The other thread runs back further. When I was 14, I was part of founding Linuca, a group that set out to spread GNU/Linux and free software across the north of Spain. The conviction under it has not moved since. There is a lot of good in software that is open. You can read it, you can change it, and you do not have to take it on faith. That is not nostalgia. It is the reason this site is plain static HTML, with no framework I cannot account for and nothing tracking you.

So that is what Positronia is. I write here about systems programming, Lisp, operating systems, hardware, and the parts of AI that are actually useful rather than the parts that are merely loud. Some of it will be unfinished. I would rather think in public, and be wrong in public sometimes, than only ever publish the safe version.

You can reach me on LinkedIn.