Hi there! I’m Arya. I like programming. This is my website.
Within programming, I have three big interests:
-
Performance: Our CPUs are amazingly good at crunching numbers, but we just don’t design software to take full advantage of them. I find a lot of joy in optimizing things to the point of perfection — my dream is to write a whole compiler this way.
-
Interfaces: APIs that don’t model problems properly always lead to bigger problems for users and implementers. This is one of the main reasons I love Rust; it lets me craft expressive interfaces that don’t hinder flexibility or performance.
-
Security: I believe everybody has a right to privacy, and I believe that right extends into their use of the Internet. I’m interested in cryptography and dabble in designing simple and secure network protocols to replace things like TLS and IRC.
I post short-form content on my Fediverse account and longer-form content on my blog. On the navigation bar, you’ll find topics I commonly write about.
If you wish to contact me in the context of a specific project or topic, look for an e-mail address (e.g. in Git commit history) ending with@bal-e.org. Otherwise, reach out to me at my public address, but beware I get spam there too. Encrypt your communication to my PGP key if you can. You can also find me on IRC, as bal-e on Libera.Chat.
This website is written in Typst. The repository is not publicly available, but you can find the Typst source for any page here at ./index.typ. You can authenticate the contents of any page against my website signing key: ./index.tar.xz is a tarball of all the files associated with the current page, and ./index.tar.xz.sig is a PGP signature over it.
I have not, do not, and will not interact with LLMs or other “generative AI” systems (to the best of my ability). I don’t like sharing negative opinions publicly, and so I don’t plan to expand on my views on this matter any further.