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Engineering & Code

Engineering & Code explores the full stack of modern tech—from bits and transistors to cloud fleets and formal proofs. Here you’ll find clear, rigorous walk-throughs of software design, embedded hardware, security architecture, and the physics that underpins them, always paired with code, schematics, and reasoning you can put to work.

Understanding and Fixing my Gate

Texas introduced us to cowboy hats and electric gates, in our case a a Nice Apollo 1500LA. It’s a long-running linear actuator swing gate: simple enough to be something I can repair, but just complicated enough to be difficult. The whole gate is really two different parts: a 636 control board and a 816 actuator. […] read more

Digital Trees

This tree is in my backyard, right behind our cabana. Go ahead, move it around and I’ll explain below how an iPhone + claude + plus some cool geometry math made this happen. Loading tree… I’ve always been fascinated by trees. I love how they grow in seemingly random ways, yet also obey a fixed […] read more

Cyber Defense Is Losing

While at DARPA I once debated that Cybersecurity would at some point be solved. I argued that if we just built and implemented software correctly, DEFCON would be no more exciting than whatever the people who make bolts and hardware do for a convention. Boring, commoditized and expected. Well, I’ll concede that cyber isn’t getting […] read more

The GENIUS Act: From Crypto Experiment to National Security Infrastructure

When President Trump signed the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2025, he didn’t just regulate stablecoins—he legitimized an entire technology stack that will become core infrastructure for defense and intelligence agencies. By requiring full liquid reserves and exempting compliant stablecoins from securities regulations, the Act transforms what was once speculative technology into government-grade payment and […] read more

Chinese Researchers Break 22-Bit RSA Encryption with Quantum Computer

A Chinese research team just pushed quantum computing one step closer to breaking the encryption that secures your bank account. The security that protects your credit card, banking, and private messages relies on a simple mathematical bet: it would take classical computers longer than the age of the universe to crack a 2048-bit RSA key. […] read more

Web visualization

Communication is the most important skill to sell your ideas. If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that ideas don’t win because they’re right—they win because someone makes them impossible to ignore. The best communicators I've seen combine advanced graphics with deep understanding of a subject. I start simple and show how to get started in web graphics. read more

Let’s get Lean

(warning: I’m not trying here to explain something to folks outside computer science, but more summarize something awesome I’m learning that is changing how I write code) As software systems grow increasingly complex and automated, ensuring correctness becomes a monumental challenge. In a future of automatically generated code, certainty is both elusive and critical. Enter […] read more

hacker dad

Hacker Dad and Home Website Security

I manage my own webserver via docker and have a wordpress blog for each of my kids (eg lauren.theboohers.org) Yea dad! Well, I noticed that loading my son’s blog (david.theboohers.org) would occasionally redirect. I’m sharing how I dealt with this so you might save some time and pain. What is the problem? Over the past […] read more

The state of hardware security

You can’t build anything big and important without a solid foundation. In security, hardware acts as that unyielding foundation, the basis for all other defenses. While fancy encryption and zero-trust principles can safeguard data in an environment where software is inherently untrusted, they ultimately rely on hardware’s immutable security properties. Companies are partnering with cloud […] read more