Latest · Backend
Building conc-qr, Social Conclave's check-in system
The system behind Social Conclave's badge scanning with role-based access, a live-editable permission matrix, and a race condition I fixed by accident while chasing latency.
All posts
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.
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.
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.