RW

Writings

February 27, 2026 18 min read

How Software Engineers Can Prepare for Superintelligence

Three visions of 2028, the Industrial Revolution's unfinished lessons, and what the window before superintelligence demands of engineers today.

February 26, 2026 13 min read Interactive

CDC at Scale on a Budget

Content-Defined Chunking, Part 5

Cloud object storage can be expensive for CDC at scale. This post explores cost-saving alternatives: challenger storage providers with radically different pricing, and the role caching plays under Zipf access patterns to drive costs down further.

February 23, 2026 20 min read Interactive

CDC in the Cloud

Content-Defined Chunking, Part 4

CDC chunks are the right logical unit for deduplication, but storing them as individual objects is prohibitively expensive. This post explores containers, the storage abstraction that makes CDC viable at scale, and the fragmentation, garbage collection, and restore challenges they introduce.

February 16, 2026 19 min read Interactive

Deduplication in Action

Content-Defined Chunking, Part 3

See CDC-based deduplication in action, learn where CDC is deployed today, and explore the frontier of structure-aware chunking for source code.

February 09, 2026 20 min read Interactive

A Deep Dive into FastCDC

Content-Defined Chunking, Part 2

An exploration of FastCDC's Gear hash, normalized chunking with dual masks, and the 2020 two-byte-per-iteration optimization, with code in pseudocode, Rust, and TypeScript.

February 02, 2026 27 min read Interactive

From Problem to Taxonomy

Content-Defined Chunking, Part 1

An introduction to content-defined chunking: why fixed-size splitting fails, how content-aware boundaries solve the deduplication problem, and a taxonomy of three CDC algorithm families.

January 15, 2026 10 min read Interactive

Anatomy of a Line Field Animation

How a simple grid of lines evolved into an organic, wind-driven canvas animation through iterative prompting.

July 04, 2025 6 min read

10 Lessons from 10 years at GitHub

10 years. 10 lessons. The most important things I learned building developer tools at GitHub.

April 15, 2023 8 min read Interactive

Animating Generative AI Text with Promises and the Y-Combinator

Recursive promises, a Y-combinator, and an AI-generated poem walk into a browser—this post is what happens next.

February 20, 2015 6 min read

Inject and Zip with the Y-Combinator

An exploration of how Ruby's inject and zip methods can be implemented using nothing but anonymous functions and the Y-combinator. A silly, elegant, mind-bending combinator journey that is slower than you'd like.