Recurse: a technical journal
I'm Piyush, a software engineer who likes building things that are performant and understanding them all the way down. I tend to go deeper than a problem strictly requires and that's usually where the interesting parts are. I tend to pick the approach that actually fits than the one that's fashionable.
This is Recurse: writeups on what I build and break. No single lane, no content calendar, just the rabbit holes interesting enough to survive the 3 AM debugging session. Minus the pretense.
Archive · 13 entries
- I benchmarked my local AI memory system. The flattering score was the wrong oneI rebuilt my local AI memory system to stay under 1 GB, then a 98.2% retrieval score hid the part that was still broken. 10m
- The decisions behind a (possibly) overengineered clipboard managerThe engineering decisions, wrong turns, and benchmarks behind Yank — an offline, on-device semantic clipboard manager built with Tauri and Rust. 16m
- Finishing what we started: Audit trails, soft deletes and timeTalking about bi temporal modelling 14m
- How I built on-device semantic search into a clipboard manager using ONNX and RustBuilding an on-device semantic search into a clipboard manager using ONNX and Rust 5m
- Think before you CREATE TABLE: A relational algebra approachExploring how relational algebra can help prevent mistakes during database design 14m
- Building a Frontend Web App in Rust: The Framework-free AdventureBuilding a reactive web frontend entirely in Rust without React, Vue, or Angular — raw WebAssembly, DOM manipulation, and the lessons learned from going framework-free. 11m
- Cloud security with flaws.cloudA hands-on exploration of common AWS security misconfigurations using flaws.cloud — S3 bucket enumeration, IAM privilege escalation, and Lambda backdoor techniques. 7m
- Exploring Spring4Shell exploitA technical walkthrough of how and why the Spring4Shell zero-day vulnerability works, diving into the Java reflection and classloader mechanics behind the exploit. 2m
- Learning from HTB challengesCracking racecar challenge on HTB 3m
- Learning Binary Exploitation — Part 4Learning about format string vulnerability 2m
- Learning Binary Exploitation — Part 3Overflowing the buffer and shellcode injection 3m
- Learning Binary Exploitation — Part 2Exploring stack overflow, ASLR, stack canaries, and binary exploitation techniques 3m
- Learning Binary Exploitation — Part 1An introduction to binary exploitation, memory diagrams, and ELF file format 2m