Journal
Anamnesis: Building a Solana Forensic Agent That Remembers
On-chain risk tools are amnesiac — every token gets judged cold, so a serial rugger's newest launch looks identical to a first-timer's. I built Anamnesis for the Qwen Cloud hackathon: a Solana pre-trade forensic agent with compounding bi-temporal memory, on qwen-max via DashScope. A remembered rugger's clean new token gets flagged HIGH on sight — and the memory can't be poisoned. Here's the build.
Shift+Enter in tmux, and the Flag Name tmux Silently Ignores
Shift+Enter wouldn't insert a newline in my terminal stack — WezTerm → tmux → pi. The fix was one word in my tmux config. The interesting part is the three keyboard protocols I had to understand to get there, and the naming inconsistency tmux never warned me about: the option is `extended-keys`, the feature flag is `extkeys`, and unknown flags fail silently.
June 2026 Hackathon Radar — Remote-Only Cut
The remote-only cut of June 2026: I swept all 16 platforms I ranked and kept only the hackathons you can enter without booking a flight — deadlines, fit, and the in-person ones left in so you can see the filter work.
Validate the Source: The Solana Bug Class Hiding Inside Anchor Itself
Most Solana exploits are one mistake wearing different masks — trusting a value without checking where it came from. Anchor's account constraints exist to stop exactly that. So it's worth knowing about the one path the framework's own net didn't cover: CPI return-data spoofing, CVSS 7.5, found during my 14-protocol audit.
Hackathon Platforms, Ranked: 16 Sites, Two Scores, and the Stats That Don't Hold Up
Devpost, Devfolio, DoraHacks — and thirteen more. I mapped the whole hackathon-hosting landscape, scored every platform on popularity and quality, and fact-checked the numbers each one advertises. Several didn't survive the check — including MLH's '5 million developers.' Here's the ranked list, with the receipts and a link to every platform.
From Hackathon Demo to Mainnet — Shipping ZK Privacy on Solana
SIP Protocol started as a hackathon demo with mocked proofs and a note that said 'someone could take this to production.' Six months and 1,008 commits later: real Noir circuits, two Anchor programs live on Solana mainnet, and a 3,900-test SDK. This is what the distance between a demo and a shipped protocol actually looks like.
Letting an LLM Move Real Money on Solana — Safely
Most AI agents summarize and suggest. KAMI signs real mainnet transactions on Solana from a plain-English sentence. The hard part wasn't the LLM — it was the trust boundary that lets a probabilistic model touch real money without ever holding a key.
Auditing Solana's Core: 14 Protocols, 1st of 116, and a Bug in Anchor Itself
I systematically audited 14 of the most-used open-source Solana protocols for a security competition. The result was 1st of 116 — and the worst bug wasn't in a DeFi protocol handling millions. It was in Anchor, the framework nearly everyone builds on.
June 2026 Hackathon Radar — 22, Verified
A point-in-time, individually-verified snapshot of 22 June 2026 hackathons — AI agents, Solana, security — with deadlines, fit, and the errors the viral tier list got wrong.
Understanding Vercel Usage
A line-by-line tour of every meter on the Vercel usage dashboard — what each one measures, how it's billed, and how to keep it low.