Notes from the bench.
Write-ups of each milestone: what was built, how it works, and what went wrong on the way.
Booting to a framebuffer on real hardware
Leaving QEMU behind: UEFI GOP, a stubborn ThinkPad and a week of blank screens.
Read · 12 min
Aug 30, 2026
Tessera
A TrueType rasterizer in 900 lines
Parsing glyf tables, flattening curves and computing exact pixel coverage.
18 min
Aug 02, 2026
Cutline
The decoder finally handles B-frames
Reference picture lists, reordering, and why the spec is worth reading twice.
15 min
Jul 11, 2026
Facet
Writing a shader compiler for one engine
A tiny language that lowers to WGSL, and what it replaced.
10 min
Jun 20, 2026
Ledger
Crash-safe writes with a 400-line WAL
Checksums, fsync ordering and pulling the power cable on purpose.
9 min
May 28, 2026
Ridge OS
A preemptive scheduler from the timer up
APIC timers, context switches and the first time two tasks ran at once.
14 min
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