etch
Trace ideas from physics to systems.
Recent treatises
No treatises published yet.
Frameworks
- pytest, from first principles
What the test runner actually does — collection by convention, the assert rewrite, fixtures and scopes, parametrization, and the pluggy hook system — each built up from a simple analogy with interactive figures.
Miscellaneous
- Writing a Kernel on a VLIW SIMD Accelerator
A layered ladder from the thermal voltage of a transistor up to the interview take-home — instruction packing, SIMD vectorization, software pipelining, and scratch-memory management, each forced by the layer below.
- The Coordination Ladder
How a core sleeps, wakes, and delegates — an interactive walk up the stack from the energy floor to DMA: WFI/WFE, interrupts and the GIC, ISRs, callbacks, mailboxes, SCMI, and offload.
- WFE, WFI & Spinlocks
From first principles: how a core waits without burning power — the WFE/WFI wait instructions, the event model, and the lock-free spinlock idioms built on top of them.