Blog

Sinners and the music of freedom

Exploring the musical and cultural connections between African rhythms, Irish folk music, and American jazz through the lens of the horror film Sinners.

Fractionalization and prioritization

Obvious in hindsight: breaking down tasks into parts improves prioritization across all tasks.

Compression ratios and speedups

Why should one care that compression ratios and speedups are similar?

Finding the one in swing music

Some thoughts on identifying the 1 when counting off swing music.

Review: Self-stabilizing Systems in Spite of Distributed Control

Breaking down one of Dijkstra’s distributed systems papers.

Review: Reflections on Trusting Trust

A reminder that you can't trust code. You can only trust people.

Making your third contribution to an open source project

People often ask me how to contribute to open-source projects. This is a younger Desmond's take on how he did it.

Review: The Role of Distributed State

An attempt to understand an old paper by John Ousterhout on distributed state.

Beyond formal education

Thoughts from my last semester of college on how to keep growing outside of school.

A primer on deadlocks

A short explanation on deadlocks I wrote for systems students.

Vignettes of a Linux Kernel Mentee

Reflections on my experience as a mentee in the Linux Kernel Mentorship Program, from how I struggled to make a commit to making dozens of bug fixes.

Building the Linux kernel with CONFIG_KASAN

A deep dive into configuring and using KASAN (Kernel Address Sanitizer) for detecting memory safety errors in the Linux kernel.

Decoding stack traces in the Linux kernel

A walkthrough of analyzing Linux kernel stack traces using decode_stacktrace.sh to investigate bugs reported by Syzbot.

Bug hunting in the Linux kernel

Strategies and techniques for finding and fixing bugs in the Linux kernel, from initial investigation to patch submission.

A novelist's lament on the loss of Japanese aesthetics

A review of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows and thoughts on traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Dynamic program analysis in the Linux kernel

Exploring dynamic program analysis techniques in Linux kernel development, including KASAN and debugging configurations for catching memory bugs.

Writing a simple REPL in Go

Building a Read-Eval-Print Loop from scratch in Go. A surprisingly fun way to learn the language.

Diving into CPython: what's in an import?

Exploring CPython's import machinery, from bytecode instructions to C source code.

A goal to dive into CPython

On following your nose and chasing large code bases.

A nostalgic cry for a country that could have been

A review of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew.

Exploring the world of small things

A review of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss and some thoughts on micro-ecology.

Going on a trip with Murakami

A review of Kafka on the Shore and some thoughts on East Asian aesthetics.

SpaceMaker: a robotics project

A cute pandemic robotics project.

You, your humanity, and technology

Reviewing You Are Not a Gadget. Essential reading for proponents of humanity.

An accountant's rise to power

Reviewing Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant. It's not fantasy because good accountants can rise to power in real life.

Small steps towards a healthy relationship with technology

An attempt at amputating the gangrene from personal computing technology.

Hiding in the index: an Easter egg from Pale Fire

Nabokov trolls you in the preface, the poem, and apparently, even in the index.