20 random bookmarks

2026-01-09

50.

Decorative Cryptography

www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptography

Last year, I came agross a Linux kernel feature called TCG_TPM2_HMAC. It claims to detect or prevent active and passive interposer attackers.
It all sounds really great. We should care about interposer adversaries. It’s great to use the TPM features that were invented to help us with these problems.

2025-11-18

48.

Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust | corrode Rust Consulting

corrode.dev/blog/defensive-programming

[...] hard-learned patterns to write more defensive Rust code, learned throughout years of shipping Rust code to production. I’m not talking about design patterns here, but rather small idioms, which are rarely documented, but make a big difference in the overall code quality.

2025-08-27

47.

Inside Windows 3

www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html

Windows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious and advanced than that.

2025-07-07

46.

Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang

wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-Learned#Summary

Achieving high-performance asynchronous Rust projects transcends mere usage of the async/await syntax; it fundamentally relies on a deep understanding of the underlying task scheduling, lock optimization, and architecture design principles.

2025-07-03

45.

Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang

wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-Learned

Rex Wangs blog

2025-05-22

43.

Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT - Matthew Weidner

mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

This blog post describes an alternative, straightforward approach to collaborative text editing, without Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) or Operational Transformation (OT). By making text editing flexible and easy to DIY, I hope that the approach will let you create rich collaborative apps that are challenging to build on top of a black-box CRDT/OT library.

2025-03-19

40.

Comptime Zig ORM

matklad.github.io/2025/03/19/comptime-zig-orm.html

This post can be considered an advanced Zig tutorial. I will be covering some of the more unique
aspects of the language, but won't be explaining the easy part. If you haven't read the Zig
Language Reference, you might start there. Additionally,
we will also learn the foundational trick for implementing relational model.

2025-01-22

35.

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

blinry.org/tiny-linux

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

2024-11-20

31.

Why I love Rust for tokenising and parsing

xnacly.me/posts/2024/rust-pldev

Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect

2024-11-13

29.

What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres

challahscript.com/what_i_wish_someone_told_me_about_postgres

I want to try to catalog the bits that I wish someone had just told me before working with a Postgres database. Hopefully, this makes things easier for the next person going on a journey similar to mine.

2024-09-25

25.

Web Browser Engineering

browser.engineering

Web browsers are ubiquitous, but how do they work? This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python.

2024-09-12

23.

Computational Journalism | At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism

compjournalism.com

The course is a hands-on, research-level introduction to the areas of computer science that have a direct relevance to journalism, and the broader project of producing an informed and engaged public $100 installment loan. We study two big ideas: the application of computation to produce journalism (such as data science for investigative reporting), and journalism about areas that involve computation (such as the analysis of credit scoring algorithms.)

2024-09-10

22.

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar

www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods

Below is a list of some lessons I’ve learned as a distributed systems engineer that are worth being told to a new engineer. Some are subtle, and some are surprising, but none are controversial. This list is for the new distributed systems engineer to guide their thinking about the field they are taking on. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good beginning.

2024-09-07

18.

About

www.braggoscope.com/about

Explore the In Our Time archive.

17.

Elixir Dev Environment With Nix Flakes

www.mathiaspolligkeit.com/elixir-dev-environment-with-nix-flakes

In 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.

2024-07-31

11.

Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++

best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-Options-Hardening-Guide-for-C-and-C++.html

The Best Practices for OSS Developers working group is dedicated to raising awareness and education of secure code best practices for open source developers.

10.

Build your own SQS or Kafka with Postgres

blog.sequinstream.com/build-your-own-sqs-or-kafka-with-postgres

We'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

2024-07-28

8.

Windows Security best practices for integrating and managing security tools | Microsoft Security Blog

www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/07/27/windows-security-best-practices-for-integrating-and-managing-security-tools

We examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause.

2024-07-15

7.

Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data | Telesens

www.telesens.co/2017/07/17/calculating-position-from-raw-gps-data

2024-07-07

6.

Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite

jtarchie.com/posts/2024-07-02-optimizing-large-scale-openstreetmap-data-with-sqlite