Table of Contents

  1. Technical Writing - Thomas Hintz
    1. Selected Work
      1. Nassella: Technical Architecture
      2. Profiling and Websockets: Going from 23s to 285ms
      3. Foundations of High-Performance React (Ch. 4: "Reconciliation, or How React Diffs")
      4. Security: User Choice (The 3L Project)
      5. Also: Ecological Restoration Proposal
    2. Topics I Write On
    3. Other

Technical Writing - Thomas Hintz

I write about systems, infrastructure, and software architecture. I have 24 years of experience building software with more than 26 languages including: operating systems, compilers, programming languages, database engines and web applications. I authored a book on React internals and hosted 101 episodes for a software engineering podcast.

Available for freelance technical articles and tutorials. Contact practice [at] thintz dot com.

Selected Work

Nassella: Technical Architecture

https://blog.nassella.org/technical-architecture/ | 2026 | ~1,800 words

Presents a dense overview of the Nassella self-hosting platform covering: immutable Flatcar Linux based instances, Terraform-driven idempotent deployments, application Docker network segmentation and automated Restic backup mechanism.

Topics: infrastructure, containers, Docker, Terraform, immutable deployment

Profiling and Websockets: Going from 23s to 285ms

https://thintz.com/essays/profiling-and-websockets | 2016 | ~1,600 words

Chronicles an optimization investigation that begins with library code but progresses into the language runtime and eventually into hand-written C code. It presents the case for profiling before guessing. This piece includes rejecting a faster and widely-used UTF-8 validator after finding it accepted invalid input.

Topics: performance, profiling, systems programming, C

Foundations of High-Performance React (Ch. 4: "Reconciliation, or How React Diffs")

https://www.thereactshow.com/files/foundations-high-performance-react.pdf | 2023 | book chapter, ~3,000 words

The chapter walks a user through building the React diffing algorithm, from scratch, with working code. It demonstrates what affect the key choice has and why it matters.

Topics: React, front-end performance, framework internals

Security: User Choice (The 3L Project)

https://3lproject.org/blog/security-user-choice | 2016 | ~900 words

This is an older essay that presents an argument for capability-based security at the language-runtime level as compared to existing and traditional security models. It also includes a short analysis on the cost of the trade-offs.

Topics: security, operating systems, technical opinion

Also: Ecological Restoration Proposal

https://thintz.com/bayberry-watershed-restoration-pilot-proposal.pdf | 2026 | 19 pages

A watershed restoration proposal including: citations, phased methodology, remote sensing analysis (NDVI/Sentinel-2) and a regulatory review. I include this as evidence that I can learn and operate within unfamiliar technical domain and write correctly in its conventions.

Topics I Write On

General: Operating systems, compilers, programming languages, Linux, systems programming, performance, profiling, databases, storage engines, infrastructure, containers, CI/CD, security, sandboxing, engineering processes, software engineering teams.

Technologies: Terraform, Docker, React, JavaScript front-end, NodeJS, Ruby/Rails, Lisp/Scheme, C, assembly, SQL and more.

Other