Welcome to Understory
Hey there, I'm Brooke1, a composer-turned-programmer living in beautiful, rainy Vancouver. This is my digital garden — notes in various stages of completeness published in the spirit of working in the open. Some are polished essays, some are rough working notes, and some are mere stubs. (It's intentional).
What I Work On
My research these days centres on maturing local-first software at Ink & Switch — the hard problems around sync, security, and access control that come up when you remove the central server.
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| Keyhive | Authorisation for local-first systems like Automerge |
| Subduction | Peer-to-peer sync protocol for CRDTs |
| UCAN | Decentralised auth specs (I'm the editor) |
I also try to fix problems as they annoy me arise in my day-to-day work. Some recent examples at time of writing:
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| Surelock | Deadlock freedom in Rust |
| wasm_refgen | Removing footguns from wasm_bindgen |
| bijou64 | A fast and canonicalised varint |
Topics You'll Find Here
| Area | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Local-first / CRDTs | Sync protocols, Automerge, conflict resolution, CALM |
| Cryptography & auth | Keyhive, UCAN, WNFS, capability security |
| Wasm | Practical patterns, wasm-bindgen, wasm_refgen |
| Programming languages | Haskell, Rust, Elixir, type theory, Witchcraft |
| Distributed systems | Consensus, cloud programming, replication |
| Conferences | Notes from many events I've attended or spoken at |
About This Site
Built with Understory SSG on top of markdown files in the style of an Obsidian2 vault. Everything is heavily cross-linked — the graph view and backlinks are your friends here. If you prefer to browse by topic, the explorer sidebar and search both work well.