Deep-dives on the
technical decisions behind my work.
Engine systems, security pipelines, audio synthesis, game design reviews, incident investigations. Some technical posts are detailed enough that I could rebuild the project from them, and that's the point!
Calibration as infrastructure: building a detonation lab
Six stages, four tensions, and the engineering decisions that determine whether a detonation lab earns its keep. How specimens enter, deploy, detonate, are observed, are analysed, and are archived, with notes on the tradeoffs that recur at every stage and the boring parts that compound over years. Architecture and decisions, not code. Engineering register, not academic.
The thermal wall: how phones and handhelds spend the same watt-budget two different ways
Mobile silicon stopped being transistor-limited and became heat-limited. This is a deep dive on what actually moves the heat (graphite, vapor chambers, fans) and the software that decides who gets throttled first, read across two device classes that answer the same thermal equation in opposite directions.
Below the burn line: the architecture of operator infrastructure
Three tiers, four attribution surfaces, and the analyst posture they are all calibrated against. Why operator infrastructure decomposes into long-haul, redirector, and staging tiers, what discipline each tier requires across DNS, TLS, behavioural, and financial surfaces, and how the operator's own workstation becomes the single point of correlation that none of the tier discipline addresses. Architecture and decisions, not configuration. Methodology, not playbook.
A signal teardown of "The World That Bears My Name"
The technical companion to the composition writeup. Same track, opposite lens: what the rendered audio measures, why a beat tracker reads the meter wrong, how the dynamics are engineered across four minutes, and the one master decision the numbers say I got wrong. The why lives in the other post; this is the how.
The World That Bears My Name: writing the voice of the one who burned the world
Ashlight's main theme is sung from inside the error the whole game is about not repeating. This is what the song means, why the melody climbs while everything beneath it falls, and how an arrangement learns to confess.
Building the inverse: the design decisions behind a three-layer dropper
The same architecture from the other direction. Why a layered .NET dropper has three layers and not two or four, what each layer is solving for, and which defender assumptions the design quietly presupposes. A composite reference design drawn from the artefact dissected in Three layers deep and adjacent commodity infostealer campaigns through 2024 and 2025. Architecture and decisions, not source. Companion to the reverse-engineering writeup.
Three layers deep: reverse-engineering a .NET RAT dropper
Three layers down into a 1.1 MB junk-padded batch script: from cmd.exe macro obfuscation through a PowerShell shellcode loader to a Donut-packed implant living inside explorer.exe. The dropper hides its payload steganographically in 3,500 lines of comments, renames powershell.exe to evade name-based detection, and uses a 7-byte memory marker for cross-reboot idempotence. Companion to the incident writeup.
The cutest trap on the internet: weaponizing Google's child-safety system as a kill switch
A fake Minecraft launcher infected my friend α's machine on a Tuesday evening. By morning, an operator had used the stolen access to upload triggering content to α's Google account, log out, and let the platform's own automated child-safety detector erase the witness. The malware is the carrier; the kill switch is the story. The technical reverse-engineering lives in the companion post.
Audio as a gameplay pillar: why Ashlight runs on FMOD instead of Unity's AudioSource
Ashlight's audio isn't decoration, it's a core gameplay pillar that has to deliver frame-aligned legendary telegraphs, an AI hearing system that reads player footsteps, and a Lucidity scheduler that fires phantom cues without ever lying to the player during real combat. Here's the middleware decision, the 10-RTPC contract that binds Unity to FMOD, and why the most interesting audio code in the game lives outside our codebase.
Picking RTDB for the auction hot path: three reasons and three regrets
Project Sato's hot path needs sub-100ms latency, atomic bid ordering, and listener cost that doesn't blow up under load. RTDB delivers two of three; Firestore delivers none. Here's why I split them, and what the split costs.
Building a real-time Saturn ephemeris in React Three Fiber
How I rebuilt a Wallpaper Engine's Saturn simulation as the hero element of a portfolio site: Keplerian propagator for the moons, procedural ring shader, and ~5000 ring particles.
Ashlight: building a horror engine layer on top of Unity
The systems work behind Ashlight: a custom render feature stack, dynamic dread budget, and the editor tooling that made it possible to ship without burning the team out.
Minecraft, 5.2 / 10: separating the product from the phenomenon
Reviewing Minecraft in 2026 as a commercial product instead of a cultural phenomenon, held against the genre specialists that overtook it (Terraria, Factorio, Valheim, Dwarf Fortress) and against Mojang's own resources. The honest score is well below consensus, and the gap between best and important is the most interesting thing about it.