Hey, I’m Alex — a software engineer who spends most of the day somewhere between a terminal and a text editor. I build tools, break them, rebuild them properly, and write about whatever I learn along the way. Hexdump is where that process ends up.
Even the most experienced developers don’t know everything
It started with curiosity about what’s actually happening under the hood — not just calling a function, but understanding what the bytes look like once they leave your hands. That itch never really went away. I picked up Go for backend work because it stays out of your way, then Rust for the projects where I wanted the compiler to catch my mistakes before production did. Docker came along to make sure “works on my machine” stopped being a punchline.
Curiosity fuels my code, Linux keeps me grounded, and every bug is just a puzzle waiting to be solved.
Linux was the turning point that made everything else click. I started on Ubuntu because it was easy, moved to Debian because I wanted to understand what Ubuntu was hiding from me, and landed on Arch because at some point I decided I’d rather build my environment than inherit one. It’s more than an operating system — it’s a philosophy that rewards exploration. My setup is never really finished; there’s always another config file worth tuning, another workflow worth automating.
Outside of shipping code, I’m usually deep in a terminal for reasons that have nothing to do with work. Late-night live-coding sessions, writing small CLI tools nobody asked for, tearing down and rebuilding my dotfiles for the third time this month — the command line is where I go to think. There’s something honest about a blinking cursor: no distractions, no notifications, just you and the problem.
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When I step away from the keyboard, I’m usually reading about systems I don’t work with day to day, poking at cybersecurity CTFs for fun, or watching sci-fi that takes technology seriously. It’s less about escaping the work and more about feeding the same curiosity from a different angle.
The Mind Behind the Keyboard
Hexdump started as a place to dump the stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else — half-finished experiments, notes from debugging sessions that went on way too long, opinions about tooling that nobody in the group chat wanted to hear. It’s grown into something closer to a running log of how I think about building software: the systems, the workflow, the late-night decisions that seemed reasonable at 2 AM.
Every post here comes out of something I actually ran into — a deploy that went sideways, a Rust borrow-checker fight I eventually won, a Linux setup I rebuilt one config at a time. Nothing theoretical, nothing copy-pasted from a changelog. If it’s on Hexdump, I hit it first.
There’s no grand roadmap for this blog beyond staying honest about the work: what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently next time.
Automate repetitive tasks. If you find yourself doing the same task multiple times, it’s a sign you should automate it.
Thanks for stopping by. If you’re into Go, Rust, Linux, or just enjoy reading about someone else’s late-night deployments and the lessons they left behind, you’re in the right place.