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The largest number representable in 64 bits
This post is a rewrite of my earlier blog post from Nov 2023 with new insights and updates.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,536 posts.
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My fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml
Building httpz, a high-performance HTTP/1.1 parser with zero heap allocation using OxCaml's unboxed types, local allocations, and mutable local variables.
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Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game
Recovering and preserving Crimsonland, the 2003 top-down shooter, through reverse engineering of its original binary.
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How to Scale a System from 0 to 10M+ Users
Scaling is a complex topic, but after working at big tech on services handling millions of requests and scaling my own startup (AlgoMaster.io) from scratch, I’ve realized that most systems evolve through a surprisingly similar set of stages as they grow.
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What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
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Contracts in Nix
The Nix language lacks a good type system . There are already several configuration languages that provide static and even gradual typing (see, e.g., Cue , Dhall , or Nickel ), but none offer the ability to easily annotate legacy Nix code with types.
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Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix
I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…
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Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)
From the Archive: Thoughts on Swift, while learning Rust
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In praise of –dry-run
For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have…
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Backseat Software
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:
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Ratchets in software development (2021)
So there's a thing we use at work which I call a ratchet. In our codebase, there are "patterns" which we used to use all the time, but we decided to stop using them, but removing all of the existing instances at once is too much work. We want to remove all of these instances eve...
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How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)
Let’s say you’re creating a CLI tool which has to display syntax highlighted source code. You begin by choosing some colors which look nice with your chosen terminal theme:
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Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python
Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has finally come to Python. I spent some time exploring it, and here is how it works.
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Make.ts
Up Enter Up Up Enter Up Up Up Enter
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Parametric CAD in Rust
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
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Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary
If you have Chrome Canary installed with the 'Experimental Web Platform features' flag enabled, you can now try out a new HTML meta tag:
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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce.
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I made my own Git
Personal home page of Tony
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ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was …
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AI code and software craft
Update (Feb 17, 2026)—I no longer agree with many statements made in this blog post. I am leaving it here unmodified. See my follow-up: AI can sort of code, can't write .
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Decompiling Xbox games using PDB debug info
In the world of matching decompilation, projects use a tool which consumes an input binary and lifts objects for comparison and linkage.
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Porting 100k lines from TypeScript to Rust using Claude Code in a month
I read this post “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases [from C++ to Rust]. Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.” and it got me curious, how difficult is it really?
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Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer (2024)
In the OpenGL course I'm teaching at a university, my students learn that the GPU uses something called rasterization to draw stuff on the screen. Then, I explain how — in theory — rasterization works, e.g. how would one write the code to draw a fixed triangle on screen. Of course, the GPU does that for us, but it is…
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Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems
Learn how to use PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) for event-driven systems. Case study from Wayfair showing how to handle failures in Kafka consumers with PostgreSQL.
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Memory layout in Zig with formulas
I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…
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80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…