xity.dev
an engineering journal, glossy & translucent
software, wet and luminous
a workshop of one — written from the inside of a bubble
II · the bubble orchard
artifacts, suspended
Three-dozen capsules drift in an orbital grid. Each one holds a thing I built, broke, or thought about on a bright afternoon.
snippet · rust
ring buffer with a single atomic
pub fn push(&self, v: T) -> Result<(), T> {
let h = self.head.load(Acquire);
let t = self.tail.load(Relaxed);
if (h + 1) & self.mask == t {
return Err(v);
}
unsafe { (*self.buf[h]).write(v); }
self.head.store((h+1) & self.mask, Release);
Ok(())
}One writer, one reader, zero locks. Benched 240M ops/s on my M2.
thought
A build system is a promise that the next version of you will remember what this version meant.
— from the journal, a rainy tuesday in march
demo
color bloom
hover to bloom
diagram · svg
packet through a proxy
the packet is the mood of the wire
essay · excerpt
on making software feel wet
The dominant aesthetic of our decade is the flat rectangle. I understand why. Flatness performs well. Flatness renders in 6KB. Flatness is legible to screen readers, to CI pipelines, to quarterly reports.
But flatness is also a lie about what software is. Software is lit. It has mass, memory pressure, thermal profile, an inside and an outside. A well-made program is humid — the air around it is denser than the air around a bad one.
xity.dev is an attempt to render that density as pixels. The glass is not nostalgia; it is an honest visual metaphor for a thing that has weight.
tool
mist
a 480-line process supervisor with adjustable restart jitter. spawned ~18k children before I retired it.
mist run --jitter 1.8s ./bin/daemon
III · the instrument panel
dials that actually do things
Touch the controls. The whole page listens.
drag to adjust blur
+0°
warm or cool the sky
0
builds
click to re-run
Skeuomorphic glass on a shallow pond. Every knob is wired to a CSS variable. Nothing here is decorative.
IV · the droplet log
journal, in drops
Small entries from the workshop. Each one settles like a bead of rain.
a good error message
A good error message names the thing that went wrong, the reason it went wrong, and one action the reader can take. Three sentences at most. I rewrote every panic in the storage engine this week; the patch was +380/-112 and half of the deletions were apology.
the fsync I didn't need
Spent a full Saturday benchmarking an fsync that, it turned out, the WAL layer below me was already calling. Ninety minutes of perf record, eighty of reading kernel source, forty of staring out the window. I am paying off the compounding interest on a comment I did not write in 2021.
a toy that became real
Built mist as a weekend joke — a process supervisor whose restart interval drifted slightly, so two crashing services wouldn't synchronise their thundering herd. Three months later a coworker deploys it to production. The joke is load-bearing now. I owe it tests.
the shape of a config
A config file is a contract between two versions of the same person. One version is writing it, possibly in a hurry. The other is reading it in an incident, possibly at 3am. Every key is a sentence across time. TOML wins over YAML because it refuses to be cute.
afternoon, blue sky, b-tree
Rewrote a 2,100-line b-tree implementation down to 640. The interesting part: the rewrite is strictly slower on random inserts — but the read path is 2.4× faster, and the read path is what I care about. Sometimes a faster program is the wrong program.
pi day, quiet
Made coffee. Read an old paper on cache-oblivious algorithms (Bender et al., 2000). Started a napkin sketch of a write-optimised index. Didn't write any code. A day can be productive without producing a diff.
V · colophon
evening
xity.dev is a single HTML file. No frameworks. No analytics. No CTA. Hand-built in Space Grotesk, Lora, JetBrains Mono and Fraunces. The sky you're looking at is drawn by a canvas that re-tints itself against your scroll position — the page is a small sundial.
thanks for walking through.
built with backdrop-filter and stubborn optimism · © 2026