SYSTEMS ENGINEER · OPEN TO HARD PROBLEMS

I don't guess.
I trace, profile,
and prove it.

Systems engineer who lives below the abstraction layer. Networking, kernel internals, performance engineering — I write about the things most people hand-wave past.

NETWORK ENGINEERING/KERNEL & OS INTERNALS/PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING/LOW-LEVEL DEBUGGING/DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS/SYSTEMS SECURITY/

// WHO I AM

I see the whole machine.

From registers and interrupts to APIs and browser pixels — I understand how every layer talks to the next. I choose to live at the core, but I can trace a bug from a user click down to a syscall and back.

Most engineers specialize in a layer and hand-wave the rest. I don't. That's the difference.

Full story →
▲ user-facing
07 · UI / pixelsReact, paint, layout
06 · application / APIHTTP, RPC, app logic
05 · runtime / libcallocators, threads
04 · syscallsthe boundary
03 · kernel ◂ I live hereschedulers, netfilter, mm
02 · drivers / firmwareDMA, IRQs, NIC
01 · hardware / registerssilicon, the truth
▼ the metal

// HOW I WORK

[ + ] WHAT I BELIEVE

Measure, don't guess

Opinions are cheap. Flame graphs, traces, and benchmarks are not.

Understand the layer below

You don't own your abstraction until you understand what it hides.

Simple beats clever

The best code is the code the next person can debug at 3 AM.

[ − ] WHAT I REJECT

Cargo-culting best practices

If you can't explain why you're doing it, you're not engineering — you're copying.

Abstraction worship

Wrapping complexity doesn't remove it. Someone has to understand the bottom.

"It works on my machine"

Reproduce it, isolate it, or it isn't fixed. The bug doesn't care about your laptop.

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