Notes from the edge of the stack

Writings

Thoughts on systems, software, security, engineering tradeoffs, and things I learn while building.

Currently thinking about

EmergenceDistributed ConsensusInformation TheoryFailure ModesSystems Thinking

10 Articles7 Topics2025-2026

Featured Writing

The main signal

The Hidden Cost of Abstractions

Why every layer leaks eventually, and why backend engineers should care.

Systems Design 12 min read Jul 17, 2025

Networking7 min read

Subnetting Finally Clicked When I Stopped Memorizing It

For years I treated subnetting as a collection of formulas. It only started making sense when I stopped memorizing rules and started seeing address space as blocks.

Jun 17, 2026Read

Distributed Systems16 min read

How We Taught a Scheduler to Predict the Future

The engineering realities of building adaptive prioritization, predictive runtime modeling, and resilient coordination on top of PostgreSQL and why most simple queues fail under real workloads.

Jun 15, 2026Read

Distributed Systems11 min read

Lessons from My First Distributed System

The small surprises that appear when a program stops living in one process.

Jul 19, 2025Read

Engineering7 min read

Observability vs Logging

Why logs are useful, but not enough to understand a running system.

Jul 13, 2025Read

Distributed Systems14 min read

Raft Consensus and Failure

A look at why the easy part of consensus is the normal case.

Jul 11, 2025Read

Distributed Systems8 min read

Emergence in Complex Systems

Why distributed behavior can surprise you even when every local rule is simple.

Jul 9, 2025Read

Security12 min read

Building a TCP Honeypot

Notes from designing a small service that watches hostile network behavior without trusting it.

Jul 5, 2025Read

Programming8 min read

Why Rust for Systems

A practical note on why Rust changes the shape of low-level engineering work.

Jul 1, 2025Read

Systems Programming15 min read

From Discord Bots to Flirting with Kernels: My Unorthodox Path into Systems Programming

How a simple Discord bot at age 15 during lockdown taught me more about real engineering than any roadmap ever could. The story of project-driven learning, rejecting shortcuts, and ending up building Rust shells and ptrace tools.

Jun 11, 2025Read

Knowledge Graph

Areas of expertise

Research Board

Currently Thinking About

Exploring01

Emergence

How macro behavior appears from simple local rules.

Exploring02

Byzantine Fault Tolerance

What changes when nodes can lie instead of merely failing.

Exploring03

Linux I/O Paths

How syscalls, readiness, buffers, and scheduling shape latency.

Exploring04

Operational Simplicity

When the boring design is the one that survives production.

Influences

Writing Philosophy