I have been working on Varnish Cache for a decade and from day one former colleagues of mine persuaded themselves that from then on I was dealing with arcane performance topics on a daily basis so explaining that it was not the case puzzled…
Note: this post was written in early March and supposed to be published then. It was extended with further observations after the closing words to make up for this unfortunate oversight. In my tsess introduction I rambled on Hare and how it…
Considering the amount of spare time I can allocate to various projects I decided early on to build my own hare package and only that to learn Hare by rewriting my long-gestated tsess project. Both qbe and harec were available on Fedora, th…
In my previous post introducing my new tsess project I spent much more time exploring the Hare language and reference implementation tool chain than the actual introduction. This was not an exploration in depth of Hare, but more like a wide…
2024 is finally here, and a new entry in this blog was long overdue. It’s not that I had nothing to write about, I always have something silly in store I could mention here. I simply had little time to spare, and chose to do other things on…
I’m a Fedora user, and Fedora is a GNU/Linux system. While GNU stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX” it is definitely a UNIX-like system and Linux is definitely a UNIX-like kernel. There are other UNIX-like systems in the wild, and there is even POSI…
I have never been a hardware person, I may find my way around software but when it comes to hardware I have forgotten most of everything I learned about materials and electronics. It’s a shame because I had a knack for the latter. And so I
After losing my annotated assembly listings, it’s been hard to find motivation to take the most complicated part of the code, reverse engineer it again and comment it here. And this is code I really want to comment because there are interes…
The word digressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. The initial thought was that it was soon be possible to play my electronic drum kit after years. Next thing I know I’m doing my first reverse engineering after years without exposure to…
My hopes to offload as much work as possible were shattered as time was running out and I wasn’t finding the right tool for the job that would be both easy, efficient and not require too much investment from me. If decompilation is not a si…
Possibly my best digression to date. Less than a year after joining Varnish Software our CTO informed me that I had volunteered to add HTTP/2 support to Varnish’s test framework. So I started reading IETF’s RFC7540 and realized that it was
This is not any project, the very day someone (LITERALLY) dumped this Varnish thing on my desk I went from WTF to a software architecture slap in the face. I remember feeling humbled when I first worked on a project used by 500 offices acro…