Have you ever had an idea you couldn’t quite shake? Something that worms it’s way into your brain for one reason or another and just wont leave. Always on the backburner, thinking about it in the shower every day, in the bed as you go to sleep at night, zoning out in the living room, for as long as you can remember?
I am coming off from surgery right now and have some time on my hands, so I wanted to share a story about a learning experience. This post is a bit of a dual purpose one on a teachable moment as a software engineer — a chance to offer a retrospective from bad decisions and earn penance therefor. There is one episode that sticks out in my memory with a fair bit of shame: implementing the original metric hashing for the metric family data type in Prometheus’s client metrics. This hashing was used in the internals of the client metrics, so users wouldn’t be exposed to it directly — except in terms of CPU cost!
Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.
It’s easy to set up an IDS or other infrastructure to drop packets that match rules. There are many tools for real-time inspection of connections that can handle higher level protocols like HTTP or TLS. This article aims to go a bit lower and address how to edit packets in flight. We’ll be looking at it through the lens of editing packets for a game using Golang.
Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.
To develop our own drivers for a USB device, we must first learn how it actually works. Luckily, Wireshark can help out here.
You probably do not need a preemptive RTOS as often as you think. This finale of the series shows practical IPC patterns and simple scheduler alternatives that keep code non-preemptive and race-condition free. Read for compact mailbox and queue techniques, counting semaphores, an Observer implementation, a marquee pattern, and a dispatch-queue plus EDF feasibility test to verify schedulability.
Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.
I reversed the firmware of my Garmin Forerunner 245 Music back in 2022 and found a dozen or so vulnerabilities in their support for Connect IQ applications. They can be exploited…