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.

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

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"".

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 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.

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

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!

Commentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.

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.

Explore the In Our Time archive.

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 examine the recent CrowdStrike outage and provide a technical overview of the root cause.