At home, ghidra-delinker-extension [1], a Ghidra extension for exporting relocatable object files (or in other words, stripping programs for parts like Doctor Frankenstein). Absurdly complex, got me a poster session at SURE workshop at ACM CCS last year, as a hobbyist.

[1] https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension

It's the vindication of Gaullism half a century after De Gaulle's death, the concept of strategic autonomy is getting traction in the rest of Europe. It's not that we can't be friends, but that we shouldn't let our future be gambled in the hands of Wisconsin voters every two years.

You don't know the pain of others, especially what others hide from you.

I recently implemented a custom C++ container for a path whose components could be iterated, backed by a std::string. I just store indices and a reference to the string, such that my iterators are not invalidated if the std::string gets reallocated after being modified. Far less error prone for little added cost.

The first two formats I've implemented as fully streaming, the serializers emit into an output iterator one character/byte at a time and the deserializers only need to hold one value at a time (mostly for strings, and not even for CBOR's byte arrays, which are streamed). BSON requires full document instantiation because of byte offsets and is genuinely anti-streaming in its design.

I happen to have implemented a serializer for YAML, fully streaming, mostly as a compact-ish human-readable debug data representation. I can scarcely think of fates worse than having to write a spec-compliant YAML parser.

I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.

Somehow, it landed me an academic poster presentation [2] at the 2025 SURE Workshop, part of ACM CCS 2025 held in Taiwan. As a hobbyist playing Doctor Frankenstein with bits instead of gibs in my spare time, that is "received an invitation from Hogwarts"-levels of impossible, given that ACM CCS is the biggest academic cybersecurity conference in the world.

It also somehow grew a small community online around it, mostly within the Windows decompilation scene. It's not finished (as it is the kind of project that is practically endless), but I don't see how I could top that.

[1] https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension

[2] https://boricj.net/2025/10/25/ghidra-delinker-extension-and-...

I used to. Back at university and at the pub. Graduated almost a decade ago and had the one drink too many a while back. The soul's too broken to draw for now. The skill's there, but the heart isn't.

Maybe I'll be able to draw again someday.

Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.

I'm working on a voxel space renderer homebrew for the PlayStation. I only have so many cycles to spend on rendering before it becomes a slideshow, so I count them in my hot rendering loop and parallelize work as much stuff as I can, even across memory load stalls from main RAM.

I've worked on a basic network accessory card with a STM32 MCU that is extremely overkill for what it needs to do. We haven't bothered making any performance or memory optimizations whatsoever, writing plain C++ almost as if we were on server-class hardware because we had such egregious margins.

The first question to ask is not whether something can leverage SIMD, it's whether the performance requirements are met or not (although it's far too easy to not care when it's not your hardware that's struggling...).

Turns out there are tons of stuff that sip power (set-up boxes, Ethernet switches, NAS...) that can either be powered directly by Power-over-Ethernet or through a splitter (DC-DC converter). That can be handled by a PoE Ethernet switch, which itself is usually powered at 54VDC, so it's also an excuse to run a homelab on 48VDC and get rid of tons of power supplies.

However, DC isn't well suited for the entire home for several reasons, mostly due to cheapness and historical reasons. For example, AC breakers are dirt cheap because arcs naturally extinguish when current crosses zero volts, whereas DC doesn't.

There are areas where DC is used. I work on telecommunication gear where nearly everything is -48VDC, but the beefy copper busbars needed to push large amounts of power through them would make a homeowner cry at the expense. Higher voltage is possible to compensate, but you enter not-safe-for-touch territory and I'm not knowledgeable about that.

I'm no Zig expert, but if you want endian-dependent semantics I'd assume either @ptrCast or a packed union would do the job.

I've had deep technical exchanges with smart people all across the world I would've never met otherwise. I've seen people using my tool for completely insane projects successfully. I've even had a data scientist from India who was inspired and motivated by my story of presenting at ACM 2025 as a hobbyist to put his work out there.

Interacting with all these people has broadened my horizons - literally going halfway across the globe in one instance. All of that happened despite me being an introvert, who hates initiating any form of social interactions with people and sounds like a raving lunatic on my blog.

Maybe I should be the one to send out more emails...