Devlog #3 - 6 month update
Published date: 01-10-2026
Hi! It has been quite some time.
My plan to do a monthly devlog didn’t pan out. I was in my final semester working on my master’s thesis, so that took most of my time (I should have planned for that). I guess I could have made a devlog about that, but writing the thesis paper was already stressful enough (I almost considered dropping out of the PhD program). But I submitted it, so now I FINALLY have some free time to do other stuff.
So, here are a few cliff notes on what I did the last 6 months.
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For my thesis, I added CHERI capabilities (extended pointers with metadata such as boundary range and permission bits) to a hypervisor and wanted to investigate how much (if any?) protection could be added to a hypervisor protecting an operating system. So I spent the last 6 months struggling to do that. Who knew low-level programming was hard? Why did I choose this life? Or did this life choose me? (Vsauce music plays) But it was a great learning experience, and it has given me some direction on what to do for my PhD. The topic of memory safety in kernel space is interesting.
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I went to the Vintage Computer Festival Europa in Munich, where I got to see a lot of retro computers. I think the average attendee age there was probably 60, but don’t quote me on that. It was really nice to see how the old computers worked and made me appreciate how far we’ve come in terms of technological advancement. But I also liked the simplicity of these systems. One day, if I have enough space, I would like to own and use some of these systems like the Commodore 64.
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I went to Dresden for the Systems meetup and got to meet some interesting people. It was really fun to see people passionately argue about Computer Architecture. It felt refreshing to see, considering these days, I see people just do vibe coding without a care for what’s actually going on in the system. (A rant for another day).
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I went to Dusseldorf for the annual Dokomi event. They had a section for indie devs to show off their games. Maybe if I finish making my own game, I can present it there.
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I experimented with the Odin Programming Language a bit. It hasn’t fully convinced me to switch from C just yet, but maybe I’ll make something with it later and see if I change my mind.
Now that I’m technically done with my master’s degree (I still need to do my defense), I’ll be trying to keep up with my monthly devlogs here. I’ve learnt from writing my master’s thesis that my writing skills aren’t at the level they should be at. This may be due to years of using online chat services without a care for how I wrote messages (and now it’s starting to bite me in the ass). Therefore, I need to improve my writing skills as well. One thing I didn’t enjoy during the thesis writing part was having to be very formal, which is understandable for an academic paper. So, I want to use this devlog to let loose a bit.
My friends have been writing systems-level software like a software raytracer and a game engine and showing me their progress. I feel very inspired, but I also can’t let them one-up me. So I’m motivated to get back into writing my software again. I have some side projects that I want to get back to. Mainly, my NES emulator that I was writing. I just need to implement the PPU (Pixel Processing Unit) and joystick support, and then I should have a working emulator.