systems engineer

Jaxon Virel
close to the metal.

I work where software meets hardware — kernels, memory, bare-metal systems, and the beautiful chaos of low-level programming.

"The best code is the code that knows exactly what the machine is doing."


Systems-focused engineer who lives at the intersection of hardware and software. Raw C, assembly, memory layouts, and building things from first principles. I care about how computers actually work: registers, caches, interrupts, the whole stack below the OS.

nerdy interests

Retro computing, emulator dev, hardware hacking, cryptography, reverse engineering, and reading CPU architecture manuals for fun.

philosophy

Complexity is the enemy. Understand the machine. Write less, mean more. Old hardware teaches you things new hardware hides.

"C is not a high-level language. It is a portable assembly language — and that is exactly why it is beautiful."
— a motto worth living by
// custom OS experiments

Bootloaders, kernel modules, memory allocators, and scheduler experiments on bare metal x86.

// low-level networking

Raw socket tools, packet crafting, and protocol implementations from scratch — no libc shortcuts.

// unix system tooling

Custom shells, process monitors, and POSIX utilities built to understand what the kernel actually does.

// performance systems

Cache-aware data structures, SIMD experiments, and profiling deep dives with perf and valgrind.

💻
daily driver
MacBook Air 2012 — Arch Linux / i3wm
📱
mobile
Google Pixel 3 — GrapheneOS
📟
tablet
iPad 2 — still kicking
⌨️
editor
Neovim + tmux — no IDE needed
🔧
toolchain
gcc / gdb / strace / ltrace
🖥️
virtualization
QEMU + bare metal experiments
C C++ x86 Assembly Linux POSIX Sockets Bash Make GDB QEMU ELF / ABI ARM RISC-V Valgrind perf
"If you don't know what your program is doing at the instruction level, you don't really know what your program is doing."
— something I remind myself daily
starter: Porygon

The only Pokémon made of pure code — a digital entity built from human-written programs. Naturally, it's the only correct choice for a systems engineer. Also: Gen 1 Pokémon Red runs on a Z80-like CPU at 4 MHz. I've read the disassembly. It's beautiful.

Blade Runner 2049

Visually perfect. The kind of film that makes you sit in silence after the credits. Villeneuve gets atmosphere like no one else.

2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL 9000 is the most compelling systems failure ever put on screen. Kubrick made a film about computers before most people had seen one.

Tron (1982)

Cheesy? Sure. But it imagined a world inside the machine decades before anyone else tried. Respect for the vision.

WarGames

A kid dials into a NORAD supercomputer through a modem. Peak 80s hacker energy — and the social engineering is still accurate.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

The philosophical backbone of every conversation about consciousness and hardware. The original, not the remake.

Hackers

Technically absurd, culturally iconic. "Hack the planet" is unironically a valid life motto.

Let's talk.