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 British 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. In his spare time, he loves exploring interesting tech and travelling.
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.