Over the years, I’ve collected many blogs and articles I found insightful, that I keep linking people to in discussions, and that I keep losing nonetheless. I figured it’s time to start collecting these publicly. Inspired by similar sections on websites I enjoy reading.

Blogs

As a good/bad/average IT guy I consume quite a few blogs from peers in the field, but some stand out and I would like to recommend them as a whole:

  • Daniel Stenberg writes about his work on cURL and as an open source maintainer in general. Amidst all the horror stories about how things go wrong, it is nice to read someone who has done it for years, and has done so well.

  • Nicholas Nethercote has a long-running series where he details his (and others’) work on speeding up the Rust compiler that is surprisingly accessible even if you aren’t familiar with (Rust) compiler development at all.

  • Arnoud Engelfriet regularly writes short (Dutch) articles about digital law and how it shakes out in practice. Whenever I claim to understand something about compliance, it is likely because of him.

  • Ruud van Asseldonk doesn’t necessarily have a consistent through line in what he writes about (but who am I to judge) yet he has a unique perspective and insights that makes it worth reading. I recommend his “yaml document from hell” as a starting point.

Individual articles

These are articles I found myself sending to people over and over, either as useful reference or as “look at this weird thing.” This section serves more as my personal collection of bookmarks than anything else.

  • Pre-Pooping Your Pants With Rust. Quite possibly my favourite Rust article ever, and a very good explanation on the ways we must write (unsafe) Rust code in order to uphold safety guarantees in the event of panics.

  • Fast(er) binary search in Rust. A walkthrough on how to improve something I thought was already perfect: binary search.

  • IDEA — nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions. An IKEA-style manual of core cryptographic algorithms. Very useful to explain cryptography to people less technically inclined.

  • Stop using JWT for sessions. A pet peeve of mine. JWTs aren’t great for session tokens for various reasons, and this article explains why. I am however baffled by the domain “crypto.net” not supporting HTTPS.

  • BadAppleFont. At some point, HarfBuzz, the font renderer, added support for WASM inside fonts to determine rendering. This post explains how he used that to embed an entire music video (sans music) into a font and played it.

Other

I get a lot of my banner images from Pixabay, as the platform’s license allows me to use the image largely without strings attached. Nevertheless, I like to thank the authors of the picture I use for their work, their beautiful photos and the terrible puns they enable that only I will ever appreciate. The banner for this page is “Animal, Mammal, Lynx image” by Eszter Miller.