Notes on networks, radio and code — written from Amsterdam.
October 2026
Amsterdam in autumn is a good place to think about latency. The city is small, the fibre is fast, and the sea is always twenty minutes away. Most of what we call performance is just the distance between two points measured honestly.
This page collects observations from the quieter side of infrastructure: routing tables, weather, old terminals, the occasional train timetable.
September 2026
A packet that crosses Europe in eleven milliseconds still waits in a queue somewhere. Queues are where systems reveal their politics. The best ones are short, fair, and boring.
I keep coming back to the same rule: measure first, then argue. It applies to networks and to most other things.
August 2026
Three books about maps, two about the North Sea, one about the history of the semicolon. None of them are about computers, which is probably why they were useful.