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

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?

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.

2025-12-17

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.

2025-07-07

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.

2025-04-28

41.

Nick Appleton’s blog and stuff - Building a digital filter for use in synthesisers

www.appletonaudio.com/blog/2022/building-a-digital-filter-for-use-in-synthesisers

This is a tutorial on how to build a digital implementation of a 2nd-order, continuously-variable filter (i.e. one where you can change the parameters runtime) that has dynamic behaviour that mimics an analogue filter.

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!

2024-11-22

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.

2024-09-25

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.

2024-09-10

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.

2024-08-19

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…

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

2024-07-15

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

2024-06-20

2.

Even JSONB in Postgres needs schemas

nexteam.co.uk/posette_even_jsonb_in_postgres_needs_schemas.pdf

Talk from POSETTE conference