Chris.

I code. Sometimes, I write about systems that last.

Published: September 8, 2026

The kernel boundary and the cost you can measure but never see

A system call costs about six times what a vDSO call costs, and nothing in your source distinguishes them. The problem was never the hidden cost. It’s that somebody measured it once and never wrote the number down.

About

I’ve spent two decades working on VoIP, real-time systems, and backend architecture, building things that scale and learning the trade-offs behind them. Clear code and restrained design matter to me, and I have a weakness for deep technology that doesn’t announce itself.

This site is a record of thinking in public, written carefully. More

📌 Foundational Essay

On building software that deserves to last

A file becomes untouchable long before it becomes wrong. Nobody decides to abandon it, and everybody stops opening it.

foundational Read more

📌 Foundational Essay

On restraint, boundaries, and systems thinking

Complexity doesn’t come from the number of parts. It comes from how many of them can reach each other, and nothing in a code review shows you that number.

foundational Read more

Published: August 16, 2026

Formal verification and the cost of separation

Loop invariants are hard. Keeping a specification in one language and the program in another, in sync, for years, is what actually keeps verification out of ordinary code.

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Published: July 21, 2026

On programming language design and the problem of forgotten decisions

Version control gives perfect recall and no memory at all. It keeps every line anyone wrote, and none of the reasons they wrote it that way.

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Published: April 9, 2026

Greenfield and the cost of amnesia

Systems are not lost to failure, but to forgetting. When decisions cannot be undone, change becomes collapse, and rebuilding becomes inevitable.

architecture Read more

Published: December 31, 2025

Why most plugin systems fail quietly

Firefox, Atom, and ActiveX all kept working right up to the point where fixing them meant breaking everything built on top. Eclipse and VS Code stayed fixable by refusing more.

architecture Read more

Architecture;

On boundaries, interfaces, failure modes …

Foundational;

First principles and long-term constraints

Language Design;

The decisions compilers never forget