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.

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?

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"".

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.

Rex Wangs blog

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.

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.

The 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.

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.

Talk from POSETTE conference