I write the kind of code that runs on bare metal or deep inside large services and never sees the light of a browser tab. I like manual pointers, predictable latency and as few context switches as possible.
When I am not working I disappear into giant video games, read physics papers I only half understand or try to compress a feeling into a handful of words.
This site is deliberately simple. I already fight enough complexity at work.
Programming
My daily work is low-level systems and backend engineering. I have shipped networking stacks that handle millions of connections, lock-free data structures that survive real traffic, custom memory allocators because the defaults were too slow and the occasional kernel module that still runs somewhere in production.
Languages I use regularly:
- C and C++20/23. My home. I know where every byte lives and I prefer it that way.
- Rust. I admire it and steal its ideas daily, but muscle memory still picks C++.
- C# and Java. Fine when someone else pays for the garbage collector.
- Python. For anything that needs to exist before my coffee gets cold.
- TypeScript. When the frontend team points a browser at me and escape is impossible.
Favorite problems: performance engineering, concurrency, backend infrastructure, compilers and tooling, and anything that lets me fire up perf or VTune and play detective.
Physics & Astrophysics
No formal degree, just an endless arXiv refresh habit. Current obsessions include general relativity, black-hole thermodynamics, cosmological simulations and whatever JWST dropped this week.
Side projects in this area:
- Relativistic N-body integrator that only explodes half the time
- Schwarzschild and Kerr ray tracer written instead of sleeping
- Small Monte-Carlo radiative transfer toy that runs very slowly
- Notebooks full of tensor scribbles I will never show anyone
The universe is not required to make sense to me. The fact that it sometimes does is a pleasant surprise.
Video Games
I specialise in open-world RPGs that let me ignore the main quest for hundreds of hours while I alphabetise my inventory and build pointless outposts.
Permanent residents:
- Fallout 1, 2, New Vegas (the correct ones)
- Fallout 4 with a small mountain of mods
- Skyrim (multiple lifetimes lost)
- Starfield (finally a game that matches my tolerance for vast emptiness)
- Cyberpunk 2077, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate 3 and many others
I mod games the same way I write production code: obsessively, for performance and with a deep hatred of unnecessary heap allocations.
Poetry
Short, sparse, unrhymed fragments written when regular language feels too loud. Most are about entropy, dead stars, memory leaks in the soul and the particular silence of 4 a.m.
99 % stay in private repos. Every few years one escapes and I act surprised.
cache line of a life invalidated at dawn coherency lost still warm
Contact
GitHub: github.com/arpeli
Email: ab@arpeli.com
I read everything. I reply when I have something worth saying, which can take minutes or months. Pull requests get priority over small talk.