2026-02-25
Tracking NixOS option values and dependencies | oddlama's blog
oddlama.org/blog/tracking-options-in-nixosThere 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
Decorative Cryptography
www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptographyLast 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
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"".
2025-11-18
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
Inside Windows 3
www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.htmlWindows 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
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-LearnedRex Wangs blog
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.
2025-04-28
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-synthesisersThis 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.
2025-03-19
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.
2025-03-10
The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux
gendignoux.com/blog/2025/03/03/rust-interning-2000x.htmlIn this deep dive post, I’ll explain how I used the interning design pattern in Rust to compress this data set by a factor of two thousand! We’ll investigate how to best structure the interner itself, how to tune our data schema to work well with it, and likewise how serialization can best leverage interning.
2025-01-22
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-cloudStep-by-step guide to building a NixOS 24 snapshot on Hetzner Cloud using Packer, with complete configuration files and OpenTofu deployment examples.
2024-11-20
Why I love Rust for tokenising and parsing
xnacly.me/posts/2024/rust-pldevMacros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect
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.
2024-10-18
Optimizing Mandelbrot Generation with SIMD
bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/01/27/optimizing-mandelbrot-generation-with-simd2024-10-12
Dependency Management Data
dmd.tanna.dev2024-09-10
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
Elixir Dev Environment With Nix Flakes
www.mathiaspolligkeit.com/elixir-dev-environment-with-nix-flakesIn 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.
2024-09-04
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.
2024-07-31
Build your own SQS or Kafka with Postgres
blog.sequinstream.com/build-your-own-sqs-or-kafka-with-postgresWe'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