Writing
Notes on life, systems, and performance. Plus building things that go fast.
Essays & notes
The arc
Different topics, one line of thought: from how machines coordinate, up to how we do, and out to how we choose what to see.
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01 Foundations: how machines coordinate
The systems and performance craft. Timing, dataflow, parallelism, and the hard problem of getting many parts to agree.
10 posts
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02 Tools, languages, and the loop
What we build with. Language choices, safety, publishing, storage, and lately an AI agent kept honest by measurement.
5 posts
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03 One level up
The same architect's questions, pointed at people, media, and the societies they run on.
1 post
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04 Off the clock: how we see
The same eye turned to light, framing, and what a picture chooses to show. Llamas included.
1 post
An Abstraction Is Lossless Only If It's Context-Free
When can you abstract something away for free? The condition has two names, context-free and zero mutual information, and almost nothing in a real system meets it.
Read more →Every Abstraction Is a Debt You Haven't Been Billed For Yet
Every abstraction is borrowed complexity: a quiet debt that comes due at 3am, in the layer you chose never to learn. On staying ahead of the bill.
Read more →I Bought a Camera for a Photo Booth. Now I Photograph Llamas.
How a wedding photo booth led me to a Nikon Zf, a bag of cheap vintage glass, manual focus, and a running habit of photographing tiny plastic llamas wherever work sends me.
Read more →I Spent Years on How Machines Coordinate. Then I Started Thinking About Us.
A systems architect's questions, pointed one level up: from cores and caches to minds, institutions, and the societies they run on.
Read more →Managing Parallel, Part 4: The Machine Underneath
Managing Parallel, Part 4: The Machine Underneath. Memory ordering (x86-TSO vs Arm), NUMA topology, and cache-line atomicity
Read more →Cross-Platform Home Storage: NFS, SMB, and the UID Trap
One pool of storage that Linux, macOS, and Windows can all share: NFS for the compute nodes, SMB for the laptops, and the UID-alignment trick that stops NFS permissions from ruining your week. Built for home ML clusters and home labs.
Read more →Managing Parallel, Part 3: When Parallel Goes Wrong
Managing Parallel, Part 3: When Parallel Goes Wrong. The short list of broken contracts behind most concurrency bugs
Read more →Managing Parallel, Part 2: To thread or not to thread
Managing Parallel, Part 2
Read more →Using C++ Functions and Objects from C
A step by step guide to using C++ in C.
Read more →Managing Parallel, Part 1: Queueing, Work, Oh My!
Managing Parallel, Part 1
Read more →A short intro to stream processing
What is stream processing and how does it relate to data-flow?
Read more →C to Java Inter-Process Communication Examples
Tutorials and full code examples of how to use pipes and FIFOs to connect C/C++ compiled applications to a thread running inside a JVM using Java.
Read more →Flex and Bison in C++, a short example
How to get flex and bison to work together in C++
Read more →All About System Timing
How to time software properly: from rdtsc to clock_gettime and everything in between, plus timer synchronization.
Read more →From the archive
C++ Template Functions Based On Type Size Substitution Failure
How to use templates to build functions by type size
Read more →Hosting pages with GitHub, and More
How to host pages with GitHub pages, use jekyll and bootstrap together to make awesome pages
Read more →Secure Language
The folly of inventing secure languages
Read more →Data Wrangling
Data wrangling, why should you learn basic coding?
Read more →Do We Need More Programming Languages
A case for more programming languages
Read more →