About
I’m Max. I work on backend systems — the parts with no face, where the failure modes are queues, clocks and other people’s assumptions. This site is where I keep the notes that turned out to be worth keeping.
The other half of my reading is ancient: Roman engineering, inscriptions, and the surprisingly modern arguments in Vitruvius about specification and blame. Antiquity is full of people solving distributed-systems problems with stone, and hacking is mostly the same instinct — take the thing apart, find out what it actually does rather than what it claims to do.
About this site
The sun is a Roman Sol, drawn as vector art onto a canvas that is exactly as many pixels wide as the mosaic is tiles wide, then laid back down one tessera at a time from the centre outward, the way an emblema was actually set. A tessera and a pixel are the same object, so the drawing and the tiling are the same file.
It comes in two lights, and the switch is at the foot of the navigation. They are one design, not two: the same rail, the same grid, the same sun cut from the same drawing.
- Lux opus vitreum, luce — glass by daylight
- Nox opus vitreum, nocte — glass lit from behind
The site opens in Nox, and remembers whichever you pick.