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Notes on backend engineering and security research — what broke, what I shipped, and what I'd do differently.

Latest · Applied crypto

The server can't read this: designing zero-knowledge sharing

How GhostShare shares notes and files in real time while making the server mathematically unable to read them — in-browser key derivation, AES-GCM, and direct-to-R2 encrypted uploads.

18 Jul 2026 · 5 min read

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Systems

A B-Tree on disk: writing a storage engine from scratch

What actually happens between INSERT and the disk — building bad-db's on-disk format, a hand-rolled B-Tree index, tombstones, and compaction in plain Java.

· 5 min read
Security

Where LLM guardrails break: notes from running a jailbreak contest

I built a prompt-injection contest and handed a few hundred people a scoreboard and a reason to break it. Here's what actually cracks an LLM's guardrails — and what it means for defending them.

· 4 min read