Hey, I'm pyk

A Security Researcher, which is a fancy way of saying I get paid to find bugs in smart contracts. This site is my personal notebook for things I'm learning, tools I'm building with Rust and my ongoing experiments with fuzzing.

Latest projects

This is a collection of my open-source tools and libraries. Each one started as an experiment to learn something new or to fix a problem I had. You'll find they're mostly written in Rust, simply because I enjoy building things with it.

• cmdtest: CLI testing for Zig

• xdgdir: A tiny Rust crate that finds the right directories for your app's config and data, following the XDG spec.

• envfmt: A tiny Rust crate to expand environment variables in a string, just like your shell does.

Latest posts

This blog is my public notebook. It's where I document what I'm doing, share solutions to bugs, and write down my thoughts on Rust and other tech. These are basically my notes-to-self, which I post here in case they're useful to you.

• Writing a mockable Filesystem trait in Rust without RefCell

  December 15, 2025

  I needed to test my CLI tool without writing to disk. I started with a messy RefCell setup but refactored it to use proper Rust borrowing instead.

• Trying Out SIMD & SWAR in Zig

  December 14, 2025

  Experimenting with low-level optimizations in Zig. I wrote a benchmark to race SIMD vectors against bit-twiddling hacks for skipping JSON whitespace.

• Writing a Type-Safe Linux Perf Interface in Zig

  December 11, 2025

  I'm building a benchmarking tool for Zig and needed CPU counters. This is how I wrapped Linux's perf_event_open to be type-safe with comptime.

• Fixing Zig benchmark where std.mem.doNotOptimizeAway was ignored

  December 8, 2025

  I spent a while debugging a benchmark that was impossibly fast. Turns out LLVM is too smart. I fixed it by forcing runtime reads with volatile.

• Fixing Zig Microbenchmark Accuracy

  December 7, 2025

  Measuring execution time under 1ns is hard. This post covers how I fixed accuracy issues in my Zig tool by running the function in batches.

• I Accidentally Kept a Pointer to the Stack in Zig

  November 18, 2025

  A classic stack-use-after-return bug I ran into with Zig. I was trying to be clever and pass a reader by reference, but ended up with a dangling pointer.

• Memory Allocation in Zig: Reading stdout

  November 17, 2025

  Working on cmdtest, my Zig CLI testing tool, I ran into the problem of reading stdio from long-lived processes. This is my dive into why memory allocation is key for handling program output.

• Brainstorming "Zig Object Validator" API

  November 8, 2025

  My journey designing a Zod-like validation library in Zig. A dive into comptime, type generation, and the trade-offs for good tooling support.

• cmdtest v0.2.0

  November 7, 2025

  I'm sharing my experience building cmdtest, a Zig package for testing CLI apps. This post covers Zig I/O, comptime vs runtime, and build.zig import quirks.

• Building VS Code Extensions with Bun and Mise

  October 23, 2025

  My notes on building a VS Code extension using Bun and Mise. Covers build scripts, tasks, and a macOS fix for zsh PATH issues.

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