Micah's Secret Blog
That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler
10 minute read Published: 2025-10-23When Ken Thompson won the Turing Award jointly with Dennis Ritchie for their work in UNIX, he was expected like other Turing winners to write a paper that would be published in the ACM Computer Journal. What he ended up submitting was a paper about "the cutest program [he] ever wrote"-- a sneaky undetectable self-reproducing "Trojan horse" backdoor in the C compiler that would allow him to log into affected machines as any user.
Setting Up a Better tmux Configuration
13 minute read Published: 2025-08-26tmux is a beast of a tool that I found to be indispensable for my personal developer workflow, but there are a few things that I have added to my tmux configuration to enhance the out-of-the-box experience.
Git Gud: Setting Up a Better Git Config
14 minute read Published: 2025-07-23There's tons of little goodies you can add to your .gitconfig to make your life easier. From hidden gems in the git Man pages to aliases and shell functions, here's a few things I've found useful to reduce friction in my Git workflow.
Let's Build a (Mini)Shell in Rust
17 minute read Published: 2025-05-31In a little over 100 lines of Rust code, we can build a simple shell program that can execute commands, supports piping, handles signals, and maintains command history. This tutorial will guide you through the process of creating a minimal shell, which we will call "minishell", using Rust's powerful standard library and some external crates.