yo, i'm hachem. this is where the things i make end up.

mostly, that means low-level software: compilers, debuggers, unix tools, and whatever else seems worth understanding from the bottom up. before that, though, there was music. composing since childhood, followed later by a long detour through physics, mathematics, olympiads, research, and the academic world. somehow, somewhere along the way, compilers won.

a lot of this comes from being unhappy with the software we're expected to live with. operating systems full of things i don't want, services designed around extracting value rather than serving their users, surveillance everywhere, algorithms deciding what gets put in front of us. i've never really used an operating system that felt entirely mine.

so the obvious response is to depend on less of it.

self-host what can be self-hosted. understand the software you rely on. write your own when it makes sense. not because everything needs to be reinvented, and definitely not because i think i can write better software than everyone else, but because there's something valuable about being responsible for the machine you're standing on. if the code is shit, at least i know who wrote it.

right now, that includes psi, a high-performance quantum circuit simulator in rust; donut, a real-time black hole renderer on the gpu; hsdbg, a cross-platform gui debugger built on lldb; and hdass, somewhere between c and assembly. there's more at git.hachem.wtf.

the setup is deliberately minimal. muscle memory beats convenience most of the time. macos for the desktop -- unix underneath, plus things linux never quite got right for me, like dorico and affinity -- with neovim, ghostty, agave, and rainglow doing most of the work. i've tried vscode, zed, atom, sublime, and eventually found myself back where i started.

when i'm not doing that, there's still music, and occasionally minecraft or hytale. the heavier experiments get sent elsewhere, to linux and windows machines with considerably more gpu than this one needs.

a lot of the thinking behind all this comes from the handmade crowd: casey muratori, ryan fleury, bisqwit, linus torvalds, and the general idea that understanding the machine is worth the trouble. build things yourself when you can. know what's underneath. keep the layers thin.

elsewhere: music · git · x · discord · im@hachem.wtf