Farid Zakaria's Blog

June 15, 2026
A trillion dollars
June 08, 2026
Relocatable Derivations
June 05, 2026
The Guix Nix Abomination: Leveraging Guix derivations in Nix
June 01, 2026
Every byte matters
May 31, 2026
AI is a Boon for the Anal-Retentive
May 23, 2026
Leaving performance on the table
March 27, 2026
Does anyone actually use the large code-model?
March 07, 2026
Nix is a lie, and that's ok
February 18, 2026
Linker Pessimization
February 11, 2026
Creating massively huge fake files and binaries
February 03, 2026
Crazy shit linkers do: Common Data (COMDAT) sections
January 30, 2026
Crazy shit linkers do: Relaxation
January 01, 2026
Bespoke software is the future
December 30, 2025
Huge binaries: papercuts and limits
December 29, 2025
Huge binaries: I thunk therefore I am
December 28, 2025
Huge binaries
December 26, 2025
Failing interviews
October 29, 2025
Nix derivation madness
October 07, 2025
Fuzzing for fun and profit
September 09, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Smuggling capabilities through a tarball
September 05, 2025
Writing a protoc plugin in Java
September 02, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Testing for clean JVM shutdown
August 27, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: dive into unused_deps
August 17, 2025
Using Nix as a library
August 11, 2025
GitHub Code Search is the real MVP
August 10, 2025
Angle brackets in a Nix flake world
July 28, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Mixing and matching how to build third_party is lunacy
July 15, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Beyond _deploy.jar for OCI images
July 08, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: transition with style
July 07, 2025
home-manager is a false enlightenment
July 02, 2025
Nix S3 multi-user woes
June 22, 2025
Bazel's Original Sins
June 15, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Homonymous Bazel Modules
June 10, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Diagnostic messages only on failure
May 26, 2025
Linux cgroup from first principles
May 22, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Recursive Bazel for testing
May 20, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: A practical guide to depset
May 14, 2025
Bazel linux-sandbox and cgroups
May 08, 2025
Bazel cgroup memory investigation
May 07, 2025
Chaining Nix stores for fun
April 02, 2025
Nix that looks like Bazel
March 28, 2025
What's in a Nix store path
March 27, 2025
Nix vanity store paths
March 23, 2025
Nix derivations by hand
March 12, 2025
Nix Dynamic Derivations: A lang2nix practicum
March 11, 2025
Nix Dynamic Derivations: A practical application
March 10, 2025
An early look at Nix Dynamic Derivations
March 08, 2025
Demystifying Nix's Intensional Model
March 03, 2025
404s and updated CSS
February 28, 2025
Jekyll Git commit
February 28, 2025
Nix migraines: NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
February 26, 2025
Nix pragmatism: nix-ld and envfs
February 02, 2025
Nix: string interpolation of directories gone awry
January 28, 2025
Bazel: Build Event Protocol Viewer
January 12, 2025
Bazel Knowledge: Be mindful of Build Without the Bytes (bwob)
December 18, 2024
Faking incremental Docker loads
November 28, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: Protobuf is the worst when it should be the best
November 08, 2024
JVM boot optimization via JavaIndex
October 29, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: What's an Interface JAR?
October 23, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: mind your PATH
October 13, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: Aspects to generate Java CLASSPATH
September 26, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: reproducible outputs
September 25, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: Secret //external directory
September 23, 2024
Bazel Knowledge: Reference targets by output name
August 29, 2024
Bazel Overlay Pattern
August 29, 2024
Bazel WORKSPACE chunking
August 13, 2024
NixOS, Raspberry Pi & Me
July 31, 2024
Automatic Nix flake follows
July 29, 2024
Import but don't import your NixOS modules
July 28, 2024
NixOS Option Inspection
July 24, 2024
Management Time
July 21, 2024
Scaling past 1 million ELF symbol relocations
July 17, 2024
Fish the bash way
July 12, 2024
Nix secrets for dummies
July 10, 2024
Nix remote building with Yubikey
July 05, 2024
Learn Nix the Fun Way
July 02, 2024
Reproducibility in Disguise: Bazel, Dependencies, and the Versioning Lie
May 03, 2024
Speeding up ELF relocations for store-based systems
March 03, 2024
Visualizing GitHub workflow run length time
February 27, 2024
Hermetic, but at what cost?
January 14, 2024
Abusing GitHub as a PyPI server
September 11, 2023
Quick insights using sqlelf
March 19, 2023
sqlelf and 20 years of Nix
September 12, 2022
Making RUNPATH redundant for Nix
March 14, 2022
Shrinkwrap: Taming dynamic shared objects
January 05, 2022
Computing all output paths for every attribute in Nixpkgs
September 10, 2021
Using an overlay filesystem to improve Nix CI builds
September 02, 2021
The yak shave for reproducibility
August 12, 2021
A Nix Binary Cache Specification
August 10, 2021
Investigating hydration times with Nix
August 05, 2021
The search for a minimal nix-shell continued; mkShellMinimal
August 02, 2021
A minimal nix-shell
July 31, 2021
Eval the Nix
June 27, 2021
Java, Nix & Reproducibility
June 22, 2021
setting up a Nix Google Cloud Storage (GCS) binary cache
March 13, 2021
JRuby and Sorbet
December 01, 2020
autopatchelf - what it can look like
November 17, 2020
On-demand linked libraries for Nix
November 12, 2020
Debugging a JNR-FFI bug in Nix
November 10, 2020
Isolation using Java's ClassLoader
October 20, 2020
Nix parallelism & Import From Derivation
September 28, 2020
nix-copy-closure your nix-shell
September 23, 2020
VPNs continued
September 20, 2020
VPNs from first principles
September 17, 2020
Tailscale is magic; even more so with NixOS
September 08, 2020
NixOS; what's in a rebuild? Continued.
September 06, 2020
NixOS; what's in a rebuild?
September 04, 2020
mvn2nix; welcoming Maven into Nix's warm embrace
September 02, 2020
quassel core on NixOS with Let's Encrypt
September 02, 2020
nix coercion trick
August 11, 2020
caching your nix-shell
July 20, 2020
Packaging a Maven application with Nix
July 18, 2020
what is bundlerEnv doing?
July 15, 2020
setting up a Nix S3 binary cache
June 08, 2020
my love letter to redo
May 31, 2020
Containers from first principles
April 12, 2020
bpf_helpers and you...
April 02, 2020
Parallel Task Execution
March 31, 2020
New blog. New format.
A photo of my dog Moose

I'm a software engineer, father and wishful amateur surfer. If you've come seeking my political views, you've found the wrong Fareed.

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