20 random bookmarks

2026-04-15

54.

Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate

x86.lol/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.html

When 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.

2026-04-05

53.

Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG

markgascoyne.co.uk/posts/ebpf-bng

An open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware - eliminating expensive centralised appliances

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.

2025-08-27

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.

2025-03-19

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

36.

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-cloud

Step-by-step guide to building a NixOS 24 snapshot on Hetzner Cloud using Packer, with complete configuration files and OpenTofu deployment examples.

2024-12-05

34.

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.html

In 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!

2024-11-20

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

2024-10-12

26.

Dependency Management Data

dmd.tanna.dev

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.

2024-08-29

14.

Overloaded fields, type safety, and you

educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safety

The 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

13.

JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi - Introducing the PiFex

voidstarsec.com/blog/jtag-pifex

JTAG for Reverse Engineers

2024-07-15

7.

Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data | Telesens

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

2024-07-04

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