20 random bookmarks

2026-02-25

52.

Tracking NixOS option values and dependencies | oddlama's blog

oddlama.org/blog/tracking-options-in-nixos

There 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

49.

A security model for systemd

lwn.net/Articles/1042888

Poettering 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"".

2025-11-18

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.

2025-06-27

44.

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html

Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux perf.

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.

2025-01-22

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

2024-11-07

28.

Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx

garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpc

Commentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.

2024-10-18

27.

Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD

bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/optimizing-mandelbrot-generation-with-simd

2024-09-19

24.

How to Build a Small Solar Power System

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system

This guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.

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.

21.

What is the best pointer tagging method?

coredumped.dev/2024/09/09/what-is-the-best-pointer-tagging-method

In 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.

2024-07-31

12.

Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens

medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7

TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…

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

2024-07-04

5.

Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash - Made of Bugs

blog.nelhage.com/post/fuzzy-dedup

2024-06-09

1.

So You Want To Build A Browser Engine

robert.ocallahan.org/2024/06/browser-engine.html