Nicolas Seriot

About | PostScript | Computation | Security | Drawing | Mountains | Misc

Nicolas Seriot

Unintended computations, sideways thinking, rigorous craft.

I'm a software security engineer. I love hunting for beauty and accidental logic where neither belongs. I turn printers into game consoles, specs into bugs, and Swiss mountains into GPX routes. A few featured pieces:

Drawing - Drawing with Computers

🗺️ Cartopolis (July 2026)
OpenStreetMap compiled into static binary packs that a browser rasterizes in 1999-style GIFs. No server, no post-processing. The aesthetic emerges from enforced constraints.

Computation - Turing machines where nobody meant to create one

🦄 Unicode's Transliteration Rules Are Turing-Complete (July 2026)
Just three lines of Unicode transliteration rules (UTS #35) can compute Collatz on stock ICU—which ships natively with every major OS. Featuring Rule 110 and a prime number generator.

PostScript - A programming language disguised as a document format

🖨️ Programming in PostScript (2025)
This printer language is a full programming environment. Enough to run Tetris and Sokoban.

Security - Specifications, implementations, and wrong assumptions

💣 Parsing JSON is a Minefield (2016–2018)
The spec fits on a business card, yet no two parsers agree on what valid JSON is. Widely cited since 2016.

Contact: nicolas at seriot dot ch.

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