2026-04-15
Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate
x86.lol/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.htmlWhen you build software for embedded devices (your Wi-Fi router or home automation setup on your Raspberry Pi), there is always the question how to build these images and how to update them.
2026-02-25
Tracking NixOS option values and dependencies | oddlama's blog
oddlama.org/blog/tracking-options-in-nixosThere are thousands of options in NixOS, but as users, we usually only interact with a select few of them. Despite that, a huge amount of those options does influence the final result in some way. Have you ever wondered which of them were actually relevant for your specific system?
2025-12-17
A security model for systemd
lwn.net/Articles/1042888Poettering said that he does have a vision for how all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit together. He wanted to use his talk to explain ""how the individual security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they exist in the first place"".
2025-04-28
Nick Appleton’s blog and stuff - Building a digital filter for use in synthesisers
www.appletonaudio.com/blog/2022/building-a-digital-filter-for-use-in-synthesisersThis is a tutorial on how to build a digital implementation of a 2nd-order, continuously-variable filter (i.e. one where you can change the parameters runtime) that has dynamic behaviour that mimics an analogue filter.
2025-03-10
The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux
gendignoux.com/blog/2025/03/03/rust-interning-2000x.htmlIn this deep dive post, I’ll explain how I used the interning design pattern in Rust to compress this data set by a factor of two thousand! We’ll investigate how to best structure the interner itself, how to tune our data schema to work well with it, and likewise how serialization can best leverage interning.
2025-01-22
Packer: How to Build NixOS 24 Snapshot on Hetzner Cloud - Developer Friendly Blog
developer-friendly.blog/blog/2025/01/20/packer-how-to-build-nixos-24-snapshot-on-hetzner-cloudStep-by-step guide to building a NixOS 24 snapshot on Hetzner Cloud using Packer, with complete configuration files and OpenTofu deployment examples.
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
blinry.org/tiny-linuxLast week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
2024-12-05
Optimization adventures: making a parallel Rust workload 10x faster with (or without) Rayon | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux
gendignoux.com/blog/2024/11/18/rust-rayon-optimized.htmlIn a previous post, I’ve shown how to use the rayon framework in Rust to automatically parallelize a loop computation across multiple CPU cores.
In this post, I’ll first explain which profiling tools I used to chase optimizations, before diving into how I built a faster replacement of Rayon for my use case. In the next post, I’ll describe the other optimizations that made my code much faster. Spoiler alert: copying some data sped up my code!
2024-11-27
April King — Handling Cookies is a Minefield
grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefieldDiscrepancies in how browsers and libraries handle HTTP cookies, and the problems caused by such things.
2024-11-19
Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One)
mtlynch.io/nix-fuzz-testing-1Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies.
I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command.
2024-11-07
Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx
garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpcCommentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.
2024-10-18
Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD
bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/optimizing-mandelbrot-generation-with-simd2024-09-10
What is the best pointer tagging method?
coredumped.dev/2024/09/09/what-is-the-best-pointer-tagging-methodIn this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used anywhere that additional runtime information is needed about a pointer. We will look at a handful of different ways these pointers can be encoded and see how the compiler can optimize them for different hardware.
2024-09-07
About
www.braggoscope.com/aboutExplore the In Our Time archive.
Elixir Dev Environment With Nix Flakes
www.mathiaspolligkeit.com/elixir-dev-environment-with-nix-flakesIn a previous article, I described how to set use Nix and Niv to configure an Elixir dev environment. This setup can be simplified by using Nix flakes instead of Niv.
2024-09-04
the spatula
www.thespatula.io/rust/rust_io_uring_echo_serverIn this article we build off what we’ve already learned about io_uring and extend that to build an async echo server.
2024-07-31
Build your own SQS or Kafka with Postgres
blog.sequinstream.com/build-your-own-sqs-or-kafka-with-postgresWe're Sequin, an open source message stream built on Postgres. We think Sequin's cool, but you don't need to adopt the project to get started with streaming in Postgres. In fact, you can turn Postgres into a basic queue/stream pretty easily. Below, we share what we've learned so you
2024-07-07
Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite
jtarchie.com/posts/2024-07-02-optimizing-large-scale-openstreetmap-data-with-sqlite2024-06-20
Even JSONB in Postgres needs schemas
nexteam.co.uk/posette_even_jsonb_in_postgres_needs_schemas.pdfTalk from POSETTE conference