All Posts
Long-form write-ups on systems programming, networking, and infrastructure.
A Container Is a Posture, Not a Primitive
An introduction to minicontainer: an educational Linux container runtime written in C, built one isolation boundary at a time across fifteen git tags. What the series covers, and how to check every claim in it against the source.
The Same Producer-Consumer Buffer In Three Runtimes, And What The Comparison Reveals
The same shared-state problem — many producers, one consumer, a buffer between them — appears in three of the codebases I have worked on this year. Each of them solves it differently. The primitive each one uses would be wrong for the other two contexts in ways that reveal what concurrency primitives are actually for: not a menu you choose from, but primarily a function of two things: the runtime's sleep model, and which side of the buffer fans out. A walk through one problem, three runtimes, the reasoning behind each, and the inverse case where the consumer fans out instead of the producer.
What `cloudflared` Actually Does
A tunnel-based ingress that opens zero inbound ports is not 'nginx with less work.' It is a different architectural class with different failure modes and different security guarantees. Here is what the daemon is actually doing, operating two of them on a single VPS, and what I learned from the hours where the difference mattered.
Defusing a Bomb That Wanted to Phone Home
The CS:APP bomb lab, defused off-campus: an LD_PRELOAD shim, a seventy-line fake grader, and a walk through all six phases plus the secret one.
Building This Blog
Motivation, architecture, design choices, and a handful of debugging stories from building the thing you're reading.