all written video podcast

  • Supply chain nightmare: How Rust will be attacked and what we can do to mitigate the inevitable - Sylvain Kerkour

    Supply chain nightmare: How Rust will be attacked and what we can do to mitigate the inevitable - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-04-08
    An essential part of being able to say "I told you so" is in fact having told you so. Well, here we are. For those living under a rock (lucky
  • Bugs that the Rust compiler catches for you: The revolution of compiler-enforced correctness - Sylvain Kerkour

    Bugs that the Rust compiler catches for you: The revolution of compiler-enforced correctness - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-04-01
    Over the decades, Humans have proved to be pretty bad at producing bug-free software. Trying to apply our approximative, fuzzy thoughts to perfectly logical computers seems doomed. While the practice
  • Building pentest devices with Rust and ESP32-C6 microcontrollers - Sylvain Kerkour

    Building pentest devices with Rust and ESP32-C6 microcontrollers - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-25
    Growing up with James Bond, Alex Rider and Inspector gadget, I've naturally always been fascinated by gadgets that enable the hero to spy and fight the badies. Fast forward a
  • Building small and secure Docker images for Rust: scratch vs alpine vs debian - Sylvain Kerkour

    Building small and secure Docker images for Rust: scratch vs alpine vs debian - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-18
    While Docker is now the main way to distribute backend software and CLI tools, you may be wondering how to build minimal and secure Docker images for your Rust projects.
  • AI (and) Maximalism - Sylvain Kerkour

    AI (and) Maximalism - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-16
    I think I've finally understood why some people find value and love to tinker with AI assistants such as WhateverClaw while I find them (mostly) useless or even the idea
  • My best investment of the year: Potassium aluminium sulfate - Sylvain Kerkour

    My best investment of the year: Potassium aluminium sulfate - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-15
    No, I'm not talking about investing in commodities or some other trading BS! I'm talking about crystal deodorant, a.k.a. Potassium alum, a.k.a. potassium aluminium sulfate. It's a crystal than you
  • Rust is slowly but surely eating PostgreSQL: Deep dive into Neon, ParadeDB, PgDog and more - Sylvain Kerkour

    Rust is slowly but surely eating PostgreSQL: Deep dive into Neon, ParadeDB, PgDog and more - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-11
    While most people see PostgreSQL as a simple database, like MariaDB or CLickHouse, it has in fact evolved into a "data kernel", managing how data is stored and queried, in
  • Using Rust and Postgres for everything: patterns learned over the years - Sylvain Kerkour

    Using Rust and Postgres for everything: patterns learned over the years - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-03-05
    I love simple, boring and reliable tools. In the software world, the two best are without a doubt Rust and PostgreSQL. One example: a backend service I'm working on processes
  • My AI wishlist - Sylvain Kerkour

    My AI wishlist - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-25
    May the hardware shortages empower European and Chinese companies to drastically boost investments into RISC-V hardware so it could become a viable architecture for production workloads earlier than expected.
  • Breaking SHA-2: length extension attacks in practice with Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    Breaking SHA-2: length extension attacks in practice with Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-24
    Some time ago, we saw that SHA-2 (SHA-256 & SHA-512) should probably be your function of choice for 2030 and beyond, because SHA-3 is too slow and BLAKE3 is (unfortunately)
  • Is NIST's cryptography backdoored? - Sylvain Kerkour

    Is NIST's cryptography backdoored? - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-23
    While common people suffer from insecure systems (data theft, identity and financial fraud, blackmail...), governments love to be able to stick their nose wherever they want, whenever they want, something
  • How Rust and Its Compiler Have Revolutionized Software Engineering and Reliability - Sylvain Kerkour

    How Rust and Its Compiler Have Revolutionized Software Engineering and Reliability - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-18
    A lot of reasonable people may perceive my enthusiasm for Rust as misguided fanaticism, but it isn't. It's cold pragmatism. Sherlock Holmes liked to say "When you have eliminated the
  • How much time did you use your phone this weekend? - Sylvain Kerkour

    How much time did you use your phone this weekend? - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-15
    How much time (and how many times) did you use your phone this weekend? What about at this restaurant? While waiting for red lights? In bed, before sleeping and just
  • Deploying Rust to production checklist - Sylvain Kerkour

    Deploying Rust to production checklist - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-02-11
    While a lot of time is spent on design patterns and low-level tricks such as SIMD accelerations, I'm suprised that very few resources are available to actually deploy Rust software
  • Deep dive into Turso, the

    Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust" - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-28
    I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
  • Elegant and safe concurrency in Rust with async combinators - Sylvain Kerkour

    Elegant and safe concurrency in Rust with async combinators - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-21
    While combinators are a great way to make your code more functional and declarative, Rust has something even better in its sleeve: async combinators. You may be wondering: what combinators
  • Full context commitment for AES authenticated encryption - Sylvain Kerkour

    Full context commitment for AES authenticated encryption - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-16
    Cryptography is full of footguns reguraly blowing the feets of unsuspecting developers that can't believe that the algorithm supposed to secure their data are actually full of holes. One of
  • Let's Fucking Encrypt Everything - Sylvain Kerkour

    Let's Fucking Encrypt Everything - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-15
    A few years ago, I received a letter in the mail addressed to my then-toddler. It was from a company I had never heard of. Apparently, there had been a
  • Towards safe and modern cryptography: state of the Rust ecosystem in 2026 - Sylvain Kerkour

    Towards safe and modern cryptography: state of the Rust ecosystem in 2026 - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-14
    37.2% of vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries are memory safety issues, while only 27.2% are cryptographic issues, according to an empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Libraries (Jenny Blessing, Michael A.
  • ChaCha12-BLAKE3 is now ChaCha20-BLAKE3 and is stable and production-ready - Sylvain Kerkour

    ChaCha12-BLAKE3 is now ChaCha20-BLAKE3 and is stable and production-ready - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-12
    chacha12-blake3 is now chacha20-blake3 ChaCha12 vs ChaCha20 I spent a lot of time studying the ChaCha stream cipher (and its parent, Salsa) to be able to say with high confidence
  • So, you want to serialize a B-Tree (to save it to disk or send it over the network)? - Sylvain Kerkour

    So, you want to serialize a B-Tree (to save it to disk or send it over the network)? - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-09
    Most programming language haves built-in data structures such as Hash Maps and B-tree for in-memory processing, but what about serializing these data structures to save on disk or send over
  • SIMD programming in pure Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    SIMD programming in pure Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    2026-01-07
    I've recently tasted AMD Zen 5 CPUs (AWS' m8a instances) and... Whooaaa. Even before talking about GPUs and NPUs, the next 5 years of CPUs will be very exciting! For
  • Smartphones are black holes - Sylvain Kerkour

    Smartphones are black holes - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-23
    They can bend spacetime without you even realizing it. People often get offended when I tell them that I don't have a phone, thinking that I'm lying and I just
  • (Social) media manipulation in one image - Sylvain Kerkour

    (Social) media manipulation in one image - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-22
    Stop reading the News and go run this marathon.
  • Secure your Rust projects against supply chain attacks with Dev Containers - Sylvain Kerkour

    Secure your Rust projects against supply chain attacks with Dev Containers - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-17
    Another day, another successful supply chain attack that could have been easily mitigated with basic measures. As I've previously written many times, supply chain attacks are low effort / big
  • Making sense of the video formats / codecs / containers mess (and what to use for long-term video archival) - Sylvain Kerkour

    Making sense of the video formats / codecs / containers mess (and what to use for long-term video archival) - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-15
    I was wondering why sone .mkv videos can be played in web browsers, why some others can't and what would be the best format to archive videos. This led me
  • Firecracker deep dive: How Rust and microVMs are revolutionizing cloud infrastructure - Sylvain Kerkour

    Firecracker deep dive: How Rust and microVMs are revolutionizing cloud infrastructure - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-10
    The microVM revolution
  • Encryption protects AGAINST criminals - Sylvain Kerkour

    Encryption protects AGAINST criminals - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-09
    There is this weird framing floating in the media that encryption is used by criminals to commit their misdeeds and hide in the shadows. As is too often with mainstream
  • Notes on building CRDT-based local-first and end-to-end encrypted applications - Sylvain Kerkour

    Notes on building CRDT-based local-first and end-to-end encrypted applications - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-08
    Local-first vs Offline-first Found this article, from a great series about local-first applications: Local-first is not offline-first. TL;DR: local-first = the source of truth is the local state stored on
  • How CRDTs and Rust are revolutionizing distributed systems and local-first applications - Sylvain Kerkour

    How CRDTs and Rust are revolutionizing distributed systems and local-first applications - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-12-03
    There are, I believe, very few technologies that are like CRDTs, Conflict-free Replicated Data Types: very easy to use, very powerful and yet not much known, so we don't see
  • Too many people stopped learning after university. They will be the first replaced by AI. - Sylvain Kerkour

    Too many people stopped learning after university. They will be the first replaced by AI. - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-26
    Too many people stopped learning after university. They will be the first replaced by AI. One of my core beliefs is that a great amount of Humanity's miseries takes its
  • I no longer block AI bots on my website - Sylvain Kerkour

    I no longer block AI bots on my website - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-25
    It's now a common pass time for bloggers, content publishers and website administrators to share their best tips and trick on how to best block scraping bots. I've also spent
  • Entrepreneurs and athletes - Sylvain Kerkour

    Entrepreneurs and athletes - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-21
    Entrepreneurs and athletes are all the same: they find the red zone and stay there until they win... or die of exhaustion. Actually, many entrepreneurs are also athletes, as if
  • Like solar, Rust is inevitable - Sylvain Kerkour

    Like solar, Rust is inevitable - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-20
    Proofreading yesterday's analysis of Rust usage at Cloudflare made me put words on a deep feeling that I have since long time, as this blog can attest. Rust is not
  • How Cloudflare uses Rust to serve (and break) millions of websites at 50+ millions requests per second - Sylvain Kerkour

    How Cloudflare uses Rust to serve (and break) millions of websites at 50+ millions requests per second - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-19
    Yesterday, on Novemver 18, 2025, Cloudflare deployed
  • It feels good to be online when most of the internet is down 😎 - Sylvain Kerkour

    It feels good to be online when most of the internet is down 😎 - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-18
    A significant portion of the web is currently down due to a Cloudflare outage. This is the second / third time that something like that happen in less than 30
  • Rust is eating the world: From embedded firmware to cross-platform applications, databases and big servers - Sylvain Kerkour

    Rust is eating the world: From embedded firmware to cross-platform applications, databases and big servers - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-11-05
    Many reasonable people like to repeat the mantra "You should use the right tool for the job", but what if there was a single tool that enabled developers and organizations
  • How Signal uses Rust to secure the communications of millions of people - Sylvain Kerkour

    How Signal uses Rust to secure the communications of millions of people - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-29
    In an age where most companies try to steal (let's face it, you didn't really consent to this) as much data from you as possible, in order to build marketing
  • Cleanup your lifetime annotations in Rust with Rc and Arc - Sylvain Kerkour

    Cleanup your lifetime annotations in Rust with Rc and Arc - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-22
    Lifetime annotations are one of the things that distract the most new rustaceans. From my experience writing and digging into Rust codebases, lifetime (annotations) induce a cognitive load that distracts
  • I created a Mastodon account for Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    I created a Mastodon account for Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-16
    I just created a Mastodon account for Pingoo: @[email protected] Follow us to get the latest updates and technical deep dives on how we are building the fastest and most secure
  • I created a Bluesky account for Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    I created a Bluesky account for Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-15
    I just created a Bluesky account for Pingoo: @pingoo.io Follow it to get the latest updates and technical deep dives on how we are building the fastest and most secure
  • Building SQLite extensions in Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    Building SQLite extensions in Rust - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-15
    How many times have you wanted to implement a feature, only to learn that your cloud provider don't offer this or that PostgreSQL extension and thus you need to bloat
  • vCPUs in the cloud: x86-64 vs ARM64 (aarch64) - Sylvain Kerkour

    vCPUs in the cloud: x86-64 vs ARM64 (aarch64) - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-14
    When renting x86 VMs in the cloud, you generally get a single (often shared) thread per vCPU. 1 core = 2 threads = 2 vCPUs. On the other hand, ARM64
  • Behind the Scenes of Pingoo: Slashing Rust allocations with mimalloc and heapless to build the fastest reverse proxy - Sylvain Kerkour

    Behind the Scenes of Pingoo: Slashing Rust allocations with mimalloc and heapless to build the fastest reverse proxy - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-08
    One of our missions at Pingoo (the fast and secure Load Balancer / API Gateway / Reverse Proxy with built-in service discovery, GeoIP, WAF, bot protection and much more) is
  • Choosing between PostgreSQL and SQLite - Sylvain Kerkour

    Choosing between PostgreSQL and SQLite - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-07
    With the recent announcement of Litestream v0.5.0, the SQLite continuous replication tools, I thought it was the perfect time to share my decision process to choose between PostgreSQL and SQLite
  • Hosting a website with automatic HTTPS and unmetered traffic for 3 € / month with Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    Hosting a website with automatic HTTPS and unmetered traffic for 3 € / month with Pingoo - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-06
    I just shipped automatic HTTPS / TLS for Pingoo, the fast and secure Load Balancer / API Gateway / Reverse Proxy with built-in service discovery, GeoIP, WAF, bot protection and
  • Case Study: How Proton uses Rust to build secure cross-platform applications for millions of people - Sylvain Kerkour

    Case Study: How Proton uses Rust to build secure cross-platform applications for millions of people - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-01
    On September 25, 2025, Proton announced the version 7 of their ProtonMail application, built for speed and the future. One thing immediately caught my attention in the release announcement: Behind
  • Email outage - Sylvain Kerkour

    Email outage - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-10-01
    There is a problem with my email provider leading to some email not being delivered. I'm working on it, I'm sorry!
  • My GitHub account has been blocked. Edit: Solved. Thank you all! - Sylvain Kerkour

    My GitHub account has been blocked. Edit: Solved. Thank you all! - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-09-25
    Hello everyone, Today was a good day as I was happy to share the progress I made on Pingoo: Implementing automatic TLS for Pingoo: here is what it takes to
  • Implementing automatic HTTPS / TLS for Pingoo: Here is what it takes to build a secure internet - Sylvain Kerkour

    Implementing automatic HTTPS / TLS for Pingoo: Here is what it takes to build a secure internet - Sylvain Kerkour

    2025-09-24
    TL; DR: Visit the GitHub repository to get started: https://github.com/pingooio/pingoo I'm currently implementing automatic TLS certificates management for Pingoo (the fast, secure and easy-to-use Load Balancer / API Gateway /