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.
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"".
2025-06-27
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.htmlPipes 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
Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT - Matthew Weidner
mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.htmlThis 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
Comptime Zig ORM
matklad.github.io/2025/03/19/comptime-zig-orm.htmlThis 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
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.
2024-11-22
Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop
cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keysThis blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.
2024-11-13
What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres
challahscript.com/what_i_wish_someone_told_me_about_postgresI 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.
2024-09-19
How to Build a Small Solar Power System
solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-systemThis guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.
2024-09-12
Computational Journalism | At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
compjournalism.comThe 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
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.
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.
2024-08-29
Overloaded fields, type safety, and you
educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safetyThe underlying problem we are facing here with all these examples is the same: having the same set of bits which can mean two different things and needing some way to distinguish those two meanings. Failure to do so leads to ambiguity at best and serious defects at worst. That's why you see so much emphasis in modern systems on type safety and on strict domain separation between different meanings.
2024-08-19
JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi - Introducing the PiFex
voidstarsec.com/blog/jtag-pifexJTAG for Reverse Engineers
2024-07-31
Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens
medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…