The Second Maintainer
A non-fiction book investigating the XZ Utils backdoor, open-source social engineering, and how 500 milliseconds saved the internet.
Ethan Hawksley is a Computer Science student at the University of Warwick, focusing on both systems-level programming and cybersecurity. He is also the author of The Second Maintainer.
That's me! I've built and written a few things.

A non-fiction book investigating the XZ Utils backdoor, open-source social engineering, and how 500 milliseconds saved the internet.
A browser-based NES emulator built with Rust and WebAssembly, ported from a C# WinForms desktop architecture. Implements the full 6502 instruction set, NROM mapper support, and a scanline-accurate PPU with sprite evaluation.
A real-time cooperative Minesweeper port. Built with vanilla JavaScript and PeerJS to enable low-latency, peer-to-peer (P2P) multiplayer without a backend server.
A high-performance CLI utility written in Rust that synchronises YouTube playlists to local directories. Implements a custom wrapper around yt-dlp for managing offline file storage efficiently.
Articles primarily on tech, but also whatever grabs my attention.
It only takes a few minutes to set up.
I had a great time at a 3-day hackathon