Essays
A deep dive into reverse engineering CardioSmart, a proprietary Holter monitor application with hardware dongle protection, revealing its clean architecture and bypassing license checks through targeted binary patching.
Essays
A veteran programmer reflects on how AI coding assistants have eliminated the creative struggle and deep cognitive engagement that once made software development deeply satisfying, leaving achievements that feel weightless and unreal.
Essays
After years of fighting tmux's mouse quirks, broken scrolling, and fragile configuration, the author built atch — a zero-config terminal session manager with transparent byte-stream proxying and persistent disk logging.
Essays
An exploration of why English IT terminology sounds so inconsistent, tracing pronunciation patterns through Germanic foundations, French administrative vocabulary, Latin-Greek scientific terms, and the Great Vowel Shift.
Essays
A detailed reverse-engineering project documenting the successful port of Doom to a Snom 360 Business VoIP telephone from 2005, involving firmware analysis, custom driver development, and creative problem-solving.
Essays
The story of the Tu-144, the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft that flew before the Concorde but was ultimately doomed by its fuel-hungry engines and the Soviet Union's lack of a market for luxury air travel.
Essays
A hackathon team exposes how a competitor won first place at a government-sponsored hackathon with a completely non-functional prototype — just a pretty frontend facade with no working backend, ML, or data processing.
Essays
An engineering analysis of why the ribosome is shockingly inefficient — burning 90% of its energy as waste heat and finding the right tRNA by brute force — and a conceptual blueprint for a redesigned protein synthesis machine that could enable 30x faster regeneration, radical intelligence enhancement, and near-instant immune response.
Essays
A deep dive into Flash's rise and fall, examining how the internet might have evolved differently if Adobe had continued developing the technology instead of abandoning it in favor of open web standards.
Essays
A satirical take on translating programming terminology into Russian, imagining what software development would look like if foreign words were banned from the industry.
Essays
A deep dive into the Linux TTY subsystem, tracing the evolution from telegraph machines and teletypes to modern virtual terminals and pseudoterminals, explaining how the kernel mediates between terminals and user processes.
Essays
A reflective essay on how AI assistants erode not our ability to think, but our desire to think — drawing parallels with how calculators killed mental arithmetic and smartphones killed our ability to memorize information.