Programming
A nostalgic yet critical history of Borland — from the revolutionary Turbo Pascal that changed programming forever, through the glory days of Delphi, to the strategic blunders and leadership failures that destroyed one of software's most iconic companies.
History
A deep dive into the history of keygen music — from early cracktros on Apple II and Commodore 64 to the tracker and chiptune traditions that defined the sound of 2000s software piracy.
Essays
A practical guide to small-batch manufacturing of brushless electric motors, covering stator construction, winding techniques, rotor assembly with permanent magnets, and carbon fiber reinforcement for high-speed applications.
Science
When a spherical projectile hits kevlar fabric at cosmic velocities, the resulting hole is square — a counterintuitive phenomenon explained by Rakhmatulin waves and the anisotropic mechanics of woven fibers.
Essays
The popular image of the velociraptor as a towering, scaly killing machine is largely a Hollywood fabrication. Modern paleontology reveals a modest, feathered predator barely half a meter tall that hunted small prey.
Essays
A four-year longitudinal study tracking the capacity degradation of 192 AAA batteries across eight brands, revealing surprising findings about which batteries maintain their charge and which ones leak during storage.
Game Development
A game developer explains why he rejects code commits that rely on heap allocation in performance-critical game engines, and demonstrates C++ patterns like fixed-size containers, CRTP, std::variant, and object pools as alternatives.
Essays
A comprehensive guide to creating three-dimensional paper models (papercraft), using the SR-71 Blackbird at 1:50 scale as a detailed example — covering mesh modeling in Blender, unfolding, and assembly techniques.
Essays
A brutally honest account of leading a development team at a major bank, where doing things right lost to office politics, and the reward for building a successful product was a forced resignation.
Hardware
I disassembled a disposable vape, found an ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller with 24 KiB of flash and 3 KiB of RAM inside, and turned it into a working web server — using SLIP over semihosting and the uIP TCP/IP stack.
Essays
An experiment in scraping 43,000 articles and visualizing them as an Obsidian knowledge graph, revealing interesting patterns about authors, difficulty tags, and content clustering.
Essays
An exposé arguing that the SSL certificate industry built a billion-dollar business on artificial scarcity and fear, when free certificates from Let's Encrypt use identical encryption to paid alternatives costing up to $300 per year.