purplesyringa

Hi! 👋 I'm Alisa Sireneva (she/her), a 19yo dev from Moscow.

Facts about me

I'm a former gifted kid who developed lots of projects in no time, but these days I'm suffering from ADHD. I used to suffer from depression, but I'm okay now. That was an interesting experience for sure.

I love inventing new stuff, which often turns out to be well-known, which in turn devastates me for days. Oopsie.

I love listening to BMTH, Badflower, and LukHash.

My favorite book is Worm (no, seriously, give it a read). My favorite modern-day author is qntm. Actually, I have a TODO list for literature pieces (I have yet to read faster than it grows).

My favorite color is #8f1fff.

Celeste helped me at a low point in my life, and I promptly forgot about it afterwards. I still haven't completed The Summit.

I don't like custom set ups, mostly because I don't have any time for that. I'm still using the same Ubuntu I set up years ago as an experiment to see if I can get myself to switch to Linux. Linux turned out to be garbage, but every other mainstream OS is even worse, so perhaps I'm stuck with it.

I'm still looking for a programming language with memory management capabilities of Rust, low-level control of C, performance of assembly, control flow guarantees of Agda, and typing system of F*. A utopia, basically.

I sometimes write about cool stuff in my Telegram channel (in Russian).

Apart from programming, I'm interested in algebra, topology, physics, and my girlfriend.

I'm nostalgic over the good old days I've never seen and love retrocomputing.

Contacts

In order of decreasing preference:

• Telegram: @purplesyringa
• E-mail: me@purplesyringa.moe
• GitHub: A repo for these purposes

If I don't answer, that's probably my ADHD acting. That doesn't mean I'm not interested, just ping me later. Sorry, I have no more control over my focus than you.

My writing

I've got a blog:

• Recovering garbled Bitcoin addresses (2024)

I also sometimes write educational material:

• Analysis of polynomial hashing, Kapun's algorithm (2022) — A syllabus on various commonly used rolling hash techniques (in English)
• Additional chapters of physics (2022) — Introduction to thermodynamics (in Russian) and a bit of special relativity (in English)
• Lambda calculus (2022) — Introduction to lambda calculus (in Russian)

My stack

I'm familiar with:

• Frontend: basics (HTML/CSS/JS), TypeScript, Vue, React (and Next.js), Webpack et al.
• Backend: Flask (i.e. Python), Rocket (i.e. Rust), Express (i.e. JS), good old PHP
• Sysadmin: mostly Linux, basic systemd, nginx, httpd stuff
• Systems programming: C/C++, Rust (including embdedded), Python, a bit of Go
• Low-level: Linux kernel & modules, x86 assembly and optimization, a bit of compiler internals
• High-performance computing: nothing to note in particular, just an unhealthy dose of attachment to performance and experience optimising code for x86
• Algorithms & data structures: programming competitions and still continuing bachelor's program
• Networking: basics and experience with ZeroNet
• Information security: mostly CTFs and high security projects
• Open-source: contributed to a few projects and released lots of my own

This isn't much, but it's honest work I'm open to learning more — I just never had the need to. It's not like anyone really knows stuff any better even if they say they do.

My main area of interest is systems programming, cryptography, HPC, and system administration.

HPC

My current main project is sunwalker, a new-gen testing system for programming contests:

• sunwalker-box (2022—2023) — An isolation box, more performant than anything anyone has ever done
• sunwalker-image (2022) — A tiny Docker-like image containing lots of runtimes, compilers, and interpreters

My former activity in the competitive programming sphere has influenced my goals and understanding of good software, which is why I love pushing the limits:

• btccaserestore (2024) — A performant brute-force utility to restore Bitcoin addresses from lowercased strings
• Feijoa (2024) — An efficient CRC-based hash-like cryptographic primitive (that's not an oxymoron!)
• blazingio (2024) — 5x faster drop-in <iostream> replacement for competitive programming
• taco (2022) — An experiment to see how well we can automatically perform domain-specific compression (decompression isn't supported though, so...)
• crossmist (2023) — Efficient (read as: 100s of unsafe) and seamless cross-process communication for Rust

This dedication has brought me to demoscene and retrocomputing. I developed stuff for Electronica BK once:

• Good Apple (2018) — A demo (see YouTube), squeezing the most out of the low-level features, manual RAM and disc control
• pdpy11 (2018—2022) — A modern PC-based macro assembler for the PDP-11 architecture with IDE integration and pretty errors
• lzsa3 (2021) — A modification of LZSA2 for faster decoding on PDP-11 with a decompressor provided

I also host a programming-related site:

• reg.algocode.ru (2021—2023) — Standings for various local programming competitions, automatically pulling results from many distinct sources (this has become the go-to site for many school students in Russia)

Cursed stuff

I've made quite a few things just for fun:

• Steam (2024) — 3 KB React-like framework with JSX-like syntax, not requiring any custom build system (similar to Preact and htm)
• docker-boot (2024) — Replace your running Linux system with a Docker container
• disas (2023) — A beautiful and slow binutils-based disassembler in Bash
• win-sudo (2017—2018) — sudo for Windows
• BatchBuilder (2018) — OOP in Batch (yes, I am mentally ill)

Cybersecurity

I sometimes take part in CTF competitions. I'm also one of the developers of UgraCTF and developed some closed-source software for it:

• kyzylborda-box (2022) — A lightweight Docker/Podman alternative for low-latency parallel deployment of 100s of containers
• kyzylborda-lib (2022—2023) — A framework for CTF tasks

Deployment

I hosted various competitive programming competitions in Moscow and got my hands dirty with mass deployment of a combined Windows + Linux image in... unpleasant conditions.

• broadband (2022) — Simple reliable broadcast over UDP (I had to develop it in a day to make the deadline)

Online services

I develop habra.chat, a traditional New Year chat for Habr. It has grown from a single SSH chat to a mirrored experience synchronized among many networks.

• ssh-chat — An extended fork of the backend that makes the chat accessible via SSH
• NickServ (2021—2022) — Nick registration
• webchat (New Year Eve of 2023) — Web frontend, see live

ZeroNet

I used to be active on the decentralized network ZeroNet as gitcenter for a large portion of my life and, among other things, developed a few services for the network, the most popular ones being:

• Git Center (2017—2018) — A decentralized GitHub alternative supporting Git and Mercurial repositories
• Kiwipedia (2018) — A wiki for ZeroNet with support of mirroring Wikipedia
• Name.YO (2019—2021) — An alternative DNS provider-like service

I was one of the lead developers of the network and developed a few plugins for it, bringing real-time communication to ZeroNet:

• 0Play (2018) — The first demonstration of the capabilities: a chat, chess and tic-tac-toe games
• Instant Messenger (2018) — An unfinished Telegram/WhatsApp-like alternative
• PeerMessage (2018—2019) — A plugin enabling decentralized real-time communication
• StreamZ (2018—2019) — A Twitch-like video streaming service
• zIRC (2019) — A simple closed-group IRC-like chat

• ZeroFile (2017) — Simple file storage
• CodeR (2017—2018) — JSFiddle/CodePen alternative with client-side CSS/JS transpiling support
• ZeroMailProxy (New Year of 2018) — A tool for sending and receiving ZeroNet mail via a local SMTP/POP server
• Zero Management System (2018) — An unfinished CMS
• /z/place (2018) — An ugly clone of r/place
• Gopher (2018) — An alternative gopher frontend to zites supporting the protocol
• ThunderProxy (2018) — A tool for accessing ThunderWave with a local IRC server
• BackgroundProcessing (2018—2020) — An attempt to enable efficient server-side computations by running user-provided Python code in a sandbox
• Ark (2019) — A plugin bringing backwards-compatible multi-cryptography capabilities to the official ZeroNet client
• ZeroTalk-Matrix (2019) — A bridge between Matrix and ZeroTalk

I also wrote a few libraries some people found useful:

• ZeroDevLib (2017—2019) — User-friendly JavaScript libraries for ZeroNet APIs
• ZeroNet-cmd-lib (2018) — Command-line utilities

And documentation, of course—I love writing:

• The Truth about ZeroNet (2018) — Various tutorials

Other projects

• My mental health
• Attempting to grow up as a man
• launch (2022) — A lightweight sandbox that kicked off the development of sunwalker-box and relies on undocumented Linux features

I developed a few more tools for Electronica BK:

• SPC to MOD (2017) — Tracker music converter
• 1801plm (unfinished) — A timing-exact emulator

I developed clones of a few existing projects due to licensing issues for ZeroNet:

• bencode-open (2019) — A bencode decoder/encoder
• sslcrypto (2019—2020) — A cryptographic library, mostly a frontend to OpenSSL and existing fallbacks. Yes, I know that's a bad idea without a PhD (you may use it if you have one though)
• gevent-ws (2020) — A clone of gevent-websocket

There's lots of uncategorized scripts:

• workerout (2017) — A simple library to run stuff in web workers asynchronously
• FCPXML to SRT (2017—2018) — A subtitle extractor from Final Cut Pro format
• clirender (2018) — HTML-like apps in terminal
• PijulGit (2019) — A mirror between Git and Pijul repositories
• Envelopster (2019) — A demotool for animated shaders, used in development of Right Hemisphere
• shell (2022) — Better PS1 for Bash
• r/place (2022) — r/place clone in Rust
• clipper (2022) — A type-safe CLI argument parser
• chronobot (2023) — Support for private discussion groups of public channels for Telegram
• hashmap (2023) — A custom hashmap implementation for the Uni