A portfolio · est. 2019
This is a working archive of tools, one-liners, and deliberate misuses of Unix primitives. Some of them solved a real problem. Some of them were built to find out what would happen. A few of them are still running on somebody's laptop years after I forgot about them.
Curated by an independent systems programmer. No frameworks, no telemetry, no venture funding. Written in C, Rust, POSIX sh, and whatever else the problem wanted.
Twelve projects, loosely ordered by how often I still think about them.
C · libpcre2 · 2021
A grep replacement tuned for source trees with millions of files and nothing interesting in most of them. Builds a compressed skip index on first pass, then queries against it. About 14x faster than naïve recursive grep on a typical monorepo, assuming the index isn't stale. It is almost always stale.
Rust · eBPF · 2023
A passive drift detector for long-running Linux hosts. Snapshots the state of /etc, installed packages, and a handful of runtime signals, then shows you everything that has quietly diverged from the image you think you're running. Ships as a single static binary.
POSIX sh · 2020
A 40-line shell script that draws a histogram from stdin using block-drawing characters. Does one thing, does it in a pipe, respects your terminal width. I still use it more than any other tool I've written.
Go · 2022
A tiny service mesh for people who don't have a mesh problem but like the word. Resolves service addresses through a gossiping DNS sidecar, falls back to /etc/hosts, and logs every lookup as a one-liner. About 900 lines total. Used in production by exactly one team that I know about.
C · 2020
Reads bytes from stdin and tries to tell you what they are. Uses a cascade of heuristics — entropy, byte histograms, magic numbers, linguistic frequency — to identify encodings, file formats, and plausible ciphertexts. Wrong often enough to be interesting.
Rust · 2024
Plain-text double-entry bookkeeping viewer. Takes a directory of journal files, produces balance sheets and trial balances in your terminal, never modifies anything. Written after three months of being annoyed by the alternatives. Still annoyed.
C · 2019
ICMP echo with a better histogram. Bucket sizes adapt to the observed distribution, not fixed powers of ten. Added as an afterthought, became the reason people actually use it.
Python · graphviz · 2022
Given a state machine definition in a tiny DSL, produces a diagram, a test matrix, and a dead-state report. Built for a client's billing system; the dead-state report found two bugs on day one.
Linux kernel module · 2023
An out-of-tree kernel module that exposes meaningless but internally consistent data through /proc. Built as a teaching aid for a workshop on kernel interfaces. Not recommended for production. Not recommended for anything, really.
Rust · 2024
A terminal timeline renderer. Takes events with timestamps from stdin, draws them as a horizontal ASCII chart, collapses dense regions. Good for incident postmortems when you don't feel like opening a dashboard.
C · perf_event_open · 2021
A sampling profiler that only reports the path from main() to the currently-hottest leaf. No flame graphs, no interactive UI, just a single line that updates. Useful when you want to optimize something and not think about anything else.
C · capstone · 2020
A streaming disassembler. Point it at a region of memory or a binary offset and it keeps emitting instructions until you stop reading. Mostly exists because I got tired of scrolling in other tools.
Currently serving existing clients. New consulting engagements considered through existing relationships only. If you are reading this because a former colleague sent you a link, that is the correct path.
Based in the Pacific Northwest. Remote-first.