Writing

Notes on systems programming, graphics, and things I had to actually understand before I could ship them.

Five essays, newest first

Building a container runtime from scratch 2026-09-17 · Systems programming

Writing a minimal container runtime in pure Go — PID/mount/UTS/network namespaces, pivot_root, cgroups v2, and OverlayFS — by hand, with the real debugging incidents along the way.

Why I keep building things from scratch 2026-08-26 · General

A case for hand-rolling the parts of a system that matter — minishell's process handling, a WebSocket hub, an .obj parser — and reaching for a library everywhere else.

Getting Elo leaderboard queries under 100ms 2026-08-25 · 42 Elo Leaderboard

How the 42 Elo Leaderboard hit 30ms average response times: composite indexes matched to actual query shapes, Redis for derived stats, and EXPLAIN ANALYZE over intuition.

gRPC versus REST: picking protocols at the Transcendence service boundary 2026-08-23 · Transcendence

Why Transcendence's casino uses REST/WebSocket at the browser-facing edge but a gRPC/protobuf contract between the Go backend and the C++ game engine, and what that split actually buys.

Triangulating arbitrary polygons with ear clipping 2026-08-23 · Go renderer

How the 3D Go Renderer triangulates arbitrary .obj faces — including concave, non-planar, and degenerate polygons — using ear clipping projected onto each face's Newell normal.