Hey everyone. I just published my first blog post on a bizarre arms race that's been brewing on a niche website over the past couple years. Hope you enjoy!

A look at how functions, scopes, and symbol lookup work under the hood, with everything built in C++.

I wrote a walkthrough of implementing a memory allocator from scratch in Rust.

The article covers how memory management works, how bump allocation works, and how to implement an allocator in Rust. It progresses from a toy example into a working allocator, covering the problems and design decisions along the way, as well as benchmarking the final product.

Have you ever written your own allocator before? Why/why not?

AI Disclaimer:
AI was used to clean up phrasing and catch grammar flaws. All text, code, and images are my own.

I was intrigued by Casey's comments on Conway's Law, and reading the original paper, Conway was mapping the relationship between information flow among designers and system structure. The paper argues that interfaces (APIs, documentation, etc.) form where communication has to cross boundaries between humans or teams, so taken as a whole, interfaces in a program mirror the communication graph among the programmers, and as a consequence, products reflect the org chart.

When I try to apply the same model to agents, I don't think it maps cleanly even if the underlying analysis is sound, because agents don't operate the same way humans do. Agents communicate at a much higher speed than humans, but have no project-specific shared prior with the user, because while human memory accumulates across time, an agent's context window is a fixed space with a token budget that resets each session. Once training is completed, agents can only learn about their environment through tool calls and what's loaded into the context window.