2026-04-15
Immutable Systems: NixOS + systemd-repart + systemd-sysupdate
x86.lol/generic/2024/08/28/systemd-sysupdate.htmlWhen 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
Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG
markgascoyne.co.uk/posts/ebpf-bngAn open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware - eliminating expensive centralised appliances
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.
2025-11-18
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.
2025-07-07
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#SummaryAchieving 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.
2025-07-03
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
2025-05-22
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.
2025-03-19
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.
2024-12-05
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.htmlIn 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
April King — Handling Cookies is a Minefield
grayduck.mn/2024/11/21/handling-cookies-is-a-minefieldDiscrepancies in how browsers and libraries handle HTTP cookies, and the problems caused by such things.
2024-11-22
Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop
cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keysThis blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.
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.
2024-09-19
How to Build a Small Solar Power System
solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-systemThis guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.
2024-09-10
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar
www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloodsBelow 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.
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.
2024-08-29
Overloaded fields, type safety, and you
educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safetyThe 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.
2024-07-31
Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens
medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…
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