About this place

About

A little context on Marcel Meuter, the work behind this site, and what belongs here.

I’m Marcel. I build software and systems, and I’m drawn to work where the constraints have to be understood rather than hidden.

This site is my place for both finished essays and ideas that are still taking shape. The subjects move between Rust, low-level systems, tools, self-hosting, projects, and the quieter observations that happen away from a screen.

What I care about

Clear thinking, dependable tools, and technology that respects the person using it. I like understanding how things work all the way down, but the goal is not complexity for its own sake. Good systems should become calmer as they become more capable.

Things I return to

An annotated collection of writers, media, references, and tools that have earned a lasting place in my attention or daily work.

Following

Writers and publications that reliably explain how systems actually behave.

  1. Julia Evans

    Julia EvansFollowing

    Friendly, exact explanations of debugging tools, networking, and the parts of computers that are easiest to misunderstand.

  2. fasterthanli.me

    Amos WengerFollowing

    Long-form systems work that keeps the failed attempts and investigative texture instead of skipping to the answer.

  3. LWN.net

    Following

    The clearest ongoing record of Linux kernel and free-software development I know.

Reading

  1. Designing Data-Intensive Applications

    Martin Kleppmann2017Re-reading

    A durable map of storage, replication, and distributed-system tradeoffs; especially useful when a familiar design starts to look inevitable.

Watching

  1. Arrival

    Denis Villeneuve2016Watched

    Patient science fiction about language, attention, and choosing a life while knowing its shape.

Listening

  1. All Melody

    Nils Frahm2018In rotation

    Detailed enough for close listening and spacious enough to leave room for work.

  1. How SQLite Is Tested

    SQLite

    A bracing account of what serious confidence looks like: fault injection, multiple independent implementations, and an enormous test-to-code ratio.

Using

Small tools and self-hosted software that have earned a stable place.

  1. ripgrep

    Andrew GallantDaily

    Fast search with defaults that understand real source trees and an escape hatch for nearly every edge case.

  2. restic

    Backups

    Encrypted, deduplicated backups with a repository model simple enough to reason about during a restore.

  3. zoxide

    Daily

    A tiny adaptation layer between how I remember directories and how shells address them.

  4. Memos

    Self-hosted

    A calm capture surface for short notes, with the site publishing only the public subset through its API.

About this site

meuter.me is authored in Markdown and served by a small Rust application. The fonts and interface assets are local, there is no analytics or advertising code, and external media is not contacted before you choose to load it. More implementation and hosting details are collected in the Colophon.