Intro

Hello and welcome to my website. I'm a software engineer who writes about software. I've written 159,612 words across 120 articles on this open source website. These articles have reached the front page of Hacker News 20 times.

I've worked at Vercel since 2021, mostly on the distributed build pipeline that runs untrusted customer code, as well as on the underlying ephemeral compute platform.

I enjoy understanding how things work and making them faster. Like how SIMD can make some programs orders of magnitude quicker.

I wrote one of the fastest disk-usage programs on macOS by using macOS-specific system calls, and then made it faster by reducing thread scheduling overhead and lock contention. I also showed how to beat the performance of grep by just using goroutines.

My experimental package manager uses simple concurrency patterns to be faster than every package manager aside from Bun (which is 11% faster) when cold-installing from a lockfile.

I've created a few small programming languages and related tools, including a Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler, which I turned into an optimizing compiler, and for which I wrote a bytecode VM. I also built an interpreted language with a C-style syntax, which I profiled and made faster; I later added a WebAssembly compiler and a line profiler. I also ported an expression engine to Rust.

Below, you can see my 2D programming language calculating the first ten numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.

I really enjoy games (chess, scrabble, sudoku), puzzles, and solvers. I built my own chess engine, and created visualizations for understanding how bitboards can be used to store chess game state. I wrote about building game prototypes in Lua, how to build 2D multiplayer from scratch, a daily puzzle game I designed called Queuedle, a solver for it, and some maze generation algorithms.

My favorite solver I've worked on is for Sokoban.

I'm a big fan of classic FPS games like Quake and Counter-Strike. I worked on a tool to analyze Counter-Strike demos in the browser, and a program that compresses Counter-Strike demos by 13×.

I did a six-week batch at the Recurse Center where I worked on many projects and paired with many excellent programmers. One of the projects I worked on was a text editor that I built using a game engine, and to which I added highlighting, search, and undo.

I've written about how to sandbox JavaScript using Deno, how to sandbox Python using seccomp, and how to take over the getrandom system call using ptrace.

I'd like to write more about AI. I recently created a FUSE filesystem where file operations are handled by an LLM.

I live in the UK with my wife, our three young children, and a cat called Moose.

Technical books I recommend include Crafting Interpreters and The Computational Beauty of Nature. For general fiction, I recommend the authors Patricia Lockwood and Ben Lerner. For sci-fi, I recommend the Dune series (1-6 are amazing, 7-9 are good) and the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. For non-fiction, I recommend The Orchid Thief and Nothing to Envy.

I love getting email and you can reach me by running the following code in your browser's developer console: atob('aGVhbGV5Y29kZXNAZ21haWwuY29t').