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?

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.

[...] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

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

Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies.
I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command.

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.

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.

JTAG for Reverse Engineers

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

The Best Practices for OSS Developers working group is dedicated to raising awareness and education of secure code best practices for open source developers.

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