20 random bookmarks

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

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?

51.

Finding the Bottom Turtle · blog.dave.tf

blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtle

Some reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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.

2025-07-03

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

2025-06-27

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!

2024-12-05

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!

2024-11-27

33.

April King — Handling Cookies is a Minefield

grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefield

Discrepancies in how browsers and libraries handle HTTP cookies, and the problems caused by such things.

2024-11-22

32.

Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop

cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keys

This blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.

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.

2024-10-18

27.

Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD

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

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.

2024-09-07

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

2024-07-31

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.

2024-06-09

1.

So You Want To Build A Browser Engine

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