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
Ethan Hawksley is a computer science student at the University of Warwick, focusing on systems‑level programming and cybersecurity. He is also the author of the book The Second Maintainer. Outside of coding, I enjoy writing about what I make and where I visit.
Projects
Nintendrust (opens in a new tab)
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.
MineDuo (opens in a new tab)
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.
yt-play (opens in a new tab)
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.
Latest Posts
Articles primarily on tech, but also whatever grabs my attention.
How to get a free .arpa domain
It only takes a few minutes to set up.
My experience with Hack Club Horizons Europa
I had a great time at a 3-day hackathon
JSON-LD explained for personal websites
Everything you need to know about JSON-LD and how to implement it.