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
2026-02-25
Finding the Bottom Turtle · blog.dave.tf
blog.dave.tf/post/finding-bottom-turtleSome reflections on trusting trust, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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.
2025-05-22
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.
2025-01-22
Building a tiny Linux from scratch
blinry.org/tiny-linuxLast week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!
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.
2024-09-12
Computational Journalism | At the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
compjournalism.comThe course is a hands-on, research-level introduction to the areas of computer science that have a direct relevance to journalism, and the broader project of producing an informed and engaged public $100 installment loan. We study two big ideas: the application of computation to produce journalism (such as data science for investigative reporting), and journalism about areas that involve computation (such as the analysis of credit scoring algorithms.)
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.
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.
2024-08-19
JTAG Hacking with a Raspberry Pi - Introducing the PiFex
voidstarsec.com/blog/jtag-pifexJTAG for Reverse Engineers
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
2024-07-07
Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite
jtarchie.com/posts/2024-07-02-optimizing-large-scale-openstreetmap-data-with-sqlite2024-06-20
Even JSONB in Postgres needs schemas
nexteam.co.uk/posette_even_jsonb_in_postgres_needs_schemas.pdfTalk from POSETTE conference