Technical articles about C, Unix, and Python by a crusty Unix systems programmer who thinks you deserve better than Stack Overflow answers and LLM-generated slop.
These articles are for people who know how to program but want to understand the machine underneath. Not what C is -- how to use it to get things done. Not what Unix is -- how to think like the people who built it. The goal is to take you from "I've heard of pointers" to "I just debugged a segfault by reading the core dump" and feel good about it.
If you find a mistake, that's what issues are for. If you want to tell me I'm wrong about where the asterisk goes, you're wrong, but I admire the conviction.
| Article | Status |
|---|---|
| How To Write a Good C Program, Like Me | Published |
| Pointers: Embrace the Dark Magic | Published |
| Multi-File C Programs | Published |
| A Map of Memory: The Process Address Space | Stub |
| Pointers II: Everything Is On Fire | Stub |
| Anatomy of C Header Files | Stub |
| The Compiler Tool Chain | Stub |
| Shared Objects | Stub |
| Reading & Writing & (File Descriptor) Arithmetic | Stub |
| Names and Namespaces in C | Stub |
| The C Runtime | Planned |
| The C Standard Library | Planned |
- How To Write a Good C Program, Like Me
- Pointers: Embrace the Dark Magic
- A Map of Memory: The Process Address Space
- Multi-File C Programs
The rest can be read in any order once you have the fundamentals.
| Article | Status |
|---|---|
| The UNIX Filesystem | Stub |
| Man Pages | Stub |
| Makefiles | Stub |
| User Land | Planned |
| Kernel Land | Planned |
| Processes and Threads | Planned |
| POSIX | Planned |
| The Unix Toolbox | Planned |
| Article | Status |
|---|---|
| The Modern Python Command-Line Interface | Published |
| Python Packaging Demystified | Published |
| Packaging with uv | Planned |
| Packaging with Poetry | Draft |
| What The Heck Is Yield For? | Published |
| Why Python Is Cool | Planned |
| Article | Status |
|---|---|
| A Short Primer on Assemblers, Compilers and Interpreters | Published |
- STYLE.md -- Article style guide
- SKELETON.md -- New article template
Article prose: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 -- read it, learn from it, share it. Don't pass it off as yours.
Code examples: MIT -- use them however you like.