We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took to debug it. I tried to write down relevant details as they came up, so see if you can guess what the bug is while reading along.

Interesting setup for pet computers. Debian + sway + cage

Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code

Featureful zsh prompt.

This article presents the program earlyoom to prevent a Linux system to lock up in low memory situations.