Engineering Insights

Deep dives into modern software engineering, architecture decisions, and technical innovations from our team

9 Articles
31% Smaller and Up to 83% Faster Than LZ4
Engineering Performance Oct 11, 2026

31% Smaller and Up to 83% Faster Than LZ4

A decoder that reads liblz4's own blocks faster than liblz4 on 20 of 27 measured shapes, plus an optional native format that is 31% smaller. Adoption starts with one changed function call, benchmarked on four processors with every loss published.

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Christian Schnapka
6 min read
#compression #lz4 #rust
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The First Automated Redis Sentinel Failover Test — And It's One Annotation
Engineering Testing Sep 1, 2026

The First Automated Redis Sentinel Failover Test — And It's One Annotation

One master, two replicas, three Sentinels and a correct quorum — inside a JUnit test, from a single annotation. Layer 3 of the Macstab Chaos Stack makes the failover your cache code has never survived a deterministic assertion in CI.

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Christian Schnapka
6 min read
#redis #sentinel #junit5
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A NOP Did Not Break My YARA Rule. One Encoding Change Did.
Security Engineering Aug 9, 2026

A NOP Did Not Break My YARA Rule. One Encoding Change Did.

A byte-level investigation for detection engineers: why inserting a NOP leaves a YARA hex rule intact, while a single equivalent x86-64 encoding change defeats it — reproduced with Aether 1.0.0 as the reference implementation.

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Christian Schnapka
6 min read
#detection-engineering #yara #x86-64
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Aether: Proving Your Security Controls Stand Up to Modern Attack Variation
Featured
Security Engineering Aug 8, 2026

Aether: Proving Your Security Controls Stand Up to Modern Attack Variation

A static test sample cannot prove that a detection architecture will hold when code takes a different—but equivalent—form. Aether gives security teams a governed lab framework to generate controlled x86-64 variants, prove the variants preserve behaviour, and expose detection blind spots before attackers do.

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Macstab Security Engineering
7 min read
#detection-engineering #security-validation #x86-64
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62 JDK Interception Points: In-Process Chaos Engineering with a Java Agent
Engineering Testing Jun 26, 2026

62 JDK Interception Points: In-Process Chaos Engineering with a Java Agent

A Java agent that instruments 62 JDK call sites using ByteBuddy. Per-test session isolation, Spring Boot 3/4 auto-wiring, and near-zero JIT overhead. Chaos engineering that runs inline in your JUnit test suite and gates the build.

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Engineering Team
18 min read
#chaos-engineering #java #jvm
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From Production Incidents to JUnit 5 Annotations: A Three-Tier Chaos Testing Framework
Engineering Testing Jun 26, 2026

From Production Incidents to JUnit 5 Annotations: A Three-Tier Chaos Testing Framework

448 L1 syscall primitives. 92 L2 fault composites. 64 L3 production incident scenarios encoded as single annotations. A JUnit 5 extension framework that turns post-mortems into CI gates for Spring Boot, Quarkus, and Micronaut.

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Engineering Team
20 min read
#chaos-engineering #java #junit5
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The Fourth Phase of Testing: Why Chaos Engineering Belongs in Your CI Pipeline
Featured
Engineering Testing Jun 26, 2026

The Fourth Phase of Testing: Why Chaos Engineering Belongs in Your CI Pipeline

Unit tests, integration tests, container tests — and now chaos tests. We built a three-layer chaos engineering stack in C99, Java, and JUnit 5 that turns production incidents into reproducible CI gates.

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Engineering Team
12 min read
#chaos-engineering #testing #ci-cd
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Kernel-Real Fault Injection: A C99 LD_PRELOAD Chaos Library for Any Process
Engineering Testing Jun 26, 2026

Kernel-Real Fault Injection: A C99 LD_PRELOAD Chaos Library for Any Process

Six fault domains, zero application code changes, any ELF binary. A C99 chaos library that intercepts libc calls at the dynamic linker level — delivering kernel-real faults to Java, Go, Python, Node.js, and everything in between.

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Engineering Team
16 min read
#chaos-engineering #c99 #ldpreload
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Building Scalable Microservices: Real Patterns from the Trenches
Featured
Engineering Architecture Dec 15, 2025

Building Scalable Microservices: Real Patterns from the Trenches

A hands-on look at microservices architecture - the patterns that actually work, the pitfalls that bit us, and why sometimes a monolith isn't that bad after all.

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Engineering Team
14 min read
#microservices #kubernetes #docker
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