Writing and Research
Technical notes, research reports and selected engineering write-ups.
HeapCommit, a.k.a. Poking Windows Heaps for Fun
Engineering Article · October 2026
A reverse-engineering writeup on the Windows heap's CommitRoutine pointer, which the allocator keeps encoded with the per-process cookie. HeapCommit reproduces that xor-and-rotate encoding to swap the pointer in a target process for a small trampoline, run a payload on a worker thread and restore the original, polling the pointer to detect when the routine actually fired.
Windows · Heap Internals · Reverse Engineering · Security Research
We Don't Forget Bugs, We Forget Decisions
Engineering Article · December 2025
Small teams are good at tracking what they built but rarely keep the reasoning behind their choices. A look at decision-centric development: recording the what, the why and the expected outcome of key decisions so they can be revisited instead of re-argued.
Decision Making · Software Teams · Product
sugar-proto: Protobuf but Feels Like a Plain C++ Struct
Engineering Article · September 2025
A small tool that wraps Protocol Buffers so messages can be used with direct, struct-like field access in C++, keeping protobuf serialization while dropping the verbose getter and setter API.
C++ · Protocol Buffers · Open Source