Notes from someone who spends too much time in a terminal. Low-level, practical, occasionally opinionated.
Most consumer routers report ping times that don't reflect what your traffic is actually experiencing. The issue comes down to how bufferbloat interacts with QoS settings that ship misconfigured by default. I spent a weekend with a flashed OpenWrt box figuring out what was actually happening.
Continue reading →Every explainer I've found either over-simplifies or assumes you already know what a firmware interrupt is. Here's the version I wish I'd had — starting from the first few milliseconds after you press the power button, and why UEFI Secure Boot is more interesting than annoying.
Continue reading →Certificate pinning gets recommended as a security measure for mobile apps, but the failure modes are rough. I looked at a few real cases where it created more problems than it solved, and when it actually makes sense to reach for it.
Continue reading →It wasn't the syntax. It was that every tutorial started with memory addresses before establishing a mental model of what memory actually is. Here's the explanation that finally made it click, starting from a much simpler place.
Continue reading →The mental model most people carry over from virtual machines doesn't map cleanly onto containers. The differences matter most when things go wrong — especially around networking, storage, and what "isolation" actually means in a shared kernel environment.
Continue reading →The classic interview question, but actually answered. DNS resolution, TCP handshake, TLS negotiation, HTTP request, rendering — I traced each step with Wireshark running and documented what I saw. Some of it surprised me.
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