Mehdi Akiki
I am a software engineer. The work I value most started as an ordinary question and ended a few layers lower than I expected. Here are three of them, with the evidence underneath.
Compiler · rust-lang/rust
rustc guessed which archive members were Rust object files from their names. Four merged pull requests added a link-time metadata member that the compiler reads instead.
See the evidence →Framework · this site
Making this site faster went through bundler settings, Flight payloads and the prefetch protocol, until I reproduced a scheduler bug in Next.js. Many faster-looking changes were rejected on the way.
See the evidence →Machine · Rust
One u8 through HIR, MIR, LLVM IR and assembly, to see which parts of a type survive compilation and which only exist for the checker.
See the evidence →Professional evidence
The strongest work is not defined by a framework. It is defined by the constraints, decisions, and operational responsibility around it.
Founding engineer
Working across the core engine, the ontology system, and Relay, the data-synchronization capability I built from the ground up.
Founder
Built an open-source observability framework as a startup product and delivered it into client environments.
Consulting
Delivered latency-sensitive financial software and secure healthcare data-processing systems.
Independent validation
My open-source work includes ten merged pull requests to rust-lang/rust, contributions to Deno and rust-analyzer, and Bitarena, a data structure designed around sparse iteration, stable handles, and explicit performance tradeoffs.
rust-lang/rust: linker and crate metadata, a coherence crash fix, attribute parsing, and tooling.
Deno and rust-analyzer: runtime performance, web-platform behavior, and editor tooling.
Bitarena: original Rust systems design with documented invariants, benchmarks, and Miri in CI.
Review the contributions →Selected writing
Most WebSocket tutorials start at the API. This one starts at the wire — electrons, NIC interrupts, kernel socket buffers, the TCP state machine, the HTTP upgrade handshake, the binary frame format — and works up to what ws.send() actually does.
Rust's incremental cache is a dependency graph, not a saved compiler process. Learn what an edit dirties, how green nodes are recovered, and why Cargo may still run rustc.
A checkpoint is a claim about durable effects, not the last page fetched. Compare commit protocols and crash points so recovery repeats work instead of losing it.
When you sync two systems with webhooks, the copy slowly becomes wrong: some events are lost, some are duplicated, some arrive in the wrong order. Reconciliation is the way to make the two systems agree again. Here is how to design an API for it.
I care about clear models, measurable behavior, and systems the next engineer can still understand.