System Architecture

Over the past decade, Clos-based leaf-spine architectures have become the default design for data center networking. They deliver predictable latency, horizontal scalability, and clean integration …

Phil Gervasi wrote an interesting article describing Rail-Optimized Networking for AI Training Workloads. Go read it first; I’ll wait. Does it sound interesting? Were you able to see behind the curtain and figure out what it’s really about?

Express 65 packages. Next.js 644. XZ 2.5 years of social engineering, caught by 500 ms of SSH latency. The audit duty has been outsourced so many times that nobody is holding it.

AI made code free. Coordination is the bottleneck now. The distributed-systems toolkit — partition, shard, shared-nothing — turns out to describe the next decade of org design.

GUIs are dead—at least for most user experiences. This post describes a BYU capstone project where five seniors built a conversational interface for Manifold using MCP and picos. The result shows how natural language can replace a GUI entirely, letting users create, tag, and manage digital things through dialogue instead of learning a standard graphical user interface.

The subtle inventiveness that reduced cold start setup from seconds to 200μs.

Adam Silver – interaction designer – London, UK

This specification has narrow goal is to specify, from an application perspective, the interface between a FastCGI application and a Web server that supports FastCGI.

For FastCGI's 30th birthday, let's look at how it avoids the security problems inherent in HTTP reverse proxying

Stop blaming CORS. Learn how Same-Origin Policy and CORS actually work together, understand simple vs non-simple requests, and debug CORS issues step by step.

codeToC4 by Uxxu reads your Git repo and generates up-to-date C4 architecture diagrams automatically. See architecture by commit, branch, and diff.

How the smartphone transformed digital identity—through biometrics, surveillance capitalism, FIDO's password killer, and the birth of virtual identity

Personal home page of Tony

Most people think an email address is just a username and a domain. It is a lot more than that. This covers structure, rule, edge case, and security trap worth knowing about.

iSCSI was designed for the SAN inside a rack, not the open internet. Here's the pile of small decisions that makes scsipub work anyway — Ranch 2.x listeners, a BEAM process per session, COW overlays, Caddy-terminated TLS, multi-LUN + SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations for cluster software, and a handful of open-iscsi quirks that cost us a day each.

Web developers are moving away from the library wars and into a world of architectural choice. It’s about where you want the data to live.

Ever wondered why your “clean” polymorphic design underperforms in benchmarks? Virtual dispatch enables polymorphism, but it comes with hidden …

Django already knows every model in your project, every field, every relationship — down to the last on_delete. So why are you drawing it by hand?

Apple's original Human Interface Guidelines laid out Apple's vision for a set of consistent approaches for GUI applications. Even though Windows ended up with a different set than the Mac, the idea was simple and profound: create a consistent set of user expectations for all...

We built ten domain-expert subagents to manage context when working on Metabase's 500K+ line backend.

This blog post is meant to help my friends get started in reading my other blog posts, that is, this post is a crash course on the notation ...

dependency-based init system for UNIX-like operating systems

Discussion on notions of software complexity as defined by Rich Hickey, John Ousterhout and Zach Tellman.

normalizing a database design to reduce the duplication of data and ensure referential integrity

Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept...

Reconstructing a Dead USB Protocol: A Handheld's Secrets Unlocked by a Hot Knife -- A multi-disciplinary journey to reviving a forgotten USB interface - coremaze/ME2-Writeup

Transform Linux protection with real prevention capabilities

Today, our internal observability system watches 6 regions, ingesting 21 billion metric points, 14 TB of logs, and 10 TB. The story of how we got here starts with everything falling apart.