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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
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RIP Usenix ATC
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
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Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
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21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.
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Implementing a Struct of Arrays
My CppCon 2025 talk, Practical Reflection, is now online, and goes over this example in more detail and more digressions. Check it out!
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Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)
In this post I go through the journey of overusing Kubernetes and how systemd can actually do most of what I use it for.
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Load-Store Conflicts
meshoptimizer implements several geometry compression algorithms that are designed to take advantage of redundancies common in mesh data and decompress quickly - targeting many gigabytes per second in decoding throughput. One of them, index decoder, has seen a significant and unexpected variance in performance across…
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Linux Kernel Exploitation: Attack of the Vsock
What started off as casual scrolling through the KernelCTF submissions quickly spiraled into a weeks-long deep dive into a deceptively simple patch - and my first root shell from a Linux kernel exploit!
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Path Isn't Real on Linux
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
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Performance optimization is hard because it's fundamentally a brute-force task
I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization…
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I use zip bombs to protect my server
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
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ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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Bare metal printf – C standard library without OS
Guide to implementing a C standard library for bare metal hardware using Newlib, enabling powerful functions like printf and malloc without relying on an operating system. This step-by-step guide demonstrates how to configure and integrate Newlib on RISC-V architecture, showing you how to redirect standard I/O through…
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What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?
The last few days I spent some time digging into the recently announced KIP-1150 ("Diskless Kafka"), as well AutoMQ’s Kafka fork, tightly integrating Apache Kafka and object storage, such as S3. …
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Fundamental flaws of SIMD ISAs (2021)
According to Flynn’s taxonomy SIMD refers to a computer architecture that can process multiple data streams with a single instruction (i.e. “Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams”). There are different taxonomies, and within those several different sub-categories and architectures that classify as “SIMD”.
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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
After over two decades, players are now forbidden from flying a seaplane, all thanks to undefined code behavior.
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Why Does My eBPF Program Work on One Kernel but Fail on Another?
How to Build Truly Portable eBPF Programs
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Blog hosted on a Nintendo Wii
If you are reading this message, the experiment below is still ongoing. This page was served to you by a real Nintendo Wii.
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Decomposing Transactional Systems
Every transactional system must execute, order, validate, and persist transactions.
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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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What the hell is a target triple?
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
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Fun with -fsanitize=undefined and Picolibc
Both GCC and Clang support the -fsanitize=undefined flag which instruments the generated code to detect places where the program wanders into parts of the C language specification which are either undefined or implementation defined. Many of these are also common programming errors. It would be great if there were…
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Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)
I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you.
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My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules
Several years ago, I spent a serious chunk of time figuring out how to make really teensy ELF executable files. I started down this path because I was annoyed that all of my programs, no matter how short they were, never got smaller than 4k or so. I felt that was excessive, for C, and so I started looking at what ELF…
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Demystifying the (Shebang): Kernel Adventures
Clarifying the shebang (#!) mechanism: A step-by-step look using strace and kernel code shows how Linux handles script execution directly, revealing the shell isn't involved initially.
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GPD Pocket 4 Speaker DSP: Configuring PipeWire so laptop speakers sound better
Configuring PipeWire to make laptop speakers sound better (Bankstown, Convolution/FIR, etc.)