// BLOG · 92 DEEP DIVES · 22 TOPICS
Deep dives from boot sectors and kernels up through networks, databases, the web, and AI. Written to understand, not to summarize.
Search the archive →A dedicated container on my Proxmox host runs a coding agent that writes, reviews, and ships changes to this site — through the same git-push pipeline I use. The interesting engineering isn't the model; it's the guardrails around it.
No VPS, no database, no CMS bill. This site is a git repo that compiles to static files — search index, social cards, and fonts included — and Cloudflare Pages serves it for free. Here's the whole pipeline, with the actual configs.
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A dedicated container on my Proxmox host runs a coding agent that writes, reviews, and ships changes to this site — through the same git-push pipeline I use. The interesting engineering isn't the model; it's the guardrails around it.
VLANs decide which networks can talk. They say nothing about which people can. Part 5 of the homelab series: a central identity service in its own VM, Tailscale as the front door, and why the break-glass path matters more than the lock.
The plan was to consolidate everything onto one Proxmox box. Then a perf tool needed real PMU counters, a firmware flash needed a real serial port, and testing on ARM meant a phone running a custom kernel. Meet the fleet — and what each machine taught me.
Wake-on-LAN only works from inside the LAN — so I put a $5 ESP32 on the LAN. It subscribes to an MQTT topic and broadcasts magic packets on demand. The build, the failure modes, and what a hardware watchdog is really for.
The lab started as services sprawled across whatever machine was awake — until one bad upgrade took them all down at once. This is what that failure taught me: one Proxmox host, ZFS snapshots as the undo button, and a network segmented by trust.
No VPS, no database, no CMS bill. This site is a git repo that compiles to static files — search index, social cards, and fonts included — and Cloudflare Pages serves it for free. Here's the whole pipeline, with the actual configs.
A language model generates one token at a time, and each token re-reads gigabytes of weights and a growing cache. Understanding the KV cache and the memory-bandwidth wall explains latency, context limits, and every serving optimization from the last two years.
A flame graph turns thousands of stack samples into one picture where width is time and the widest boxes are your problem. How sampling profilers work, how to read the graph in ten seconds, and the traps — inlining, wait time, broken stacks — that mislead beginners.
mmap is sold as the fast way to read files, but it loses as often as it wins. The deciding factor is page faults versus syscalls — and whether you touch the data once or many times.
A context switch looks free until you profile a thread-heavy workload and watch it vanish into the kernel. Here is everything the scheduler actually does to swap one thread for another.
Every language prints 0.30000000000000004 and every newcomer files a bug report. It's not a bug — it's binary fractions doing exactly what the IEEE 754 standard says. Here's the why, and what to do about it.
A Bloom filter answers 'have I seen this before?' using a fraction of the memory a real set would need — by allowing one specific kind of wrong answer. It's the data structure behind databases skipping disk reads they don't need.