This is my digital workbench for deep dives into Linux internals, networking, and optimizing the engineering workflow. A personal space for projects distinct from my professional role.

Recent Technical Perspectives


Opening Up My Git Training Material

I started teaching Git back when the porcelain was thin and most workflows required you to understand what was happening underneath. Over the years the material grew into something close to a full curriculum: fundamentals, branching and merging, rebasing, hooks, submodules, subtrees, LFS. Around 300 pages total. I no longer run these trainings myself, but the content is still in use in professional settings. Releasing it under an open license seems like the right call at this point....

May 7, 2026 · 2 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer

Ai Powered Email Workflow

Background: when you’re subscribed to multiple mailing lists like the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml), bpf, dwarves, io-uring, linux-embedded, and others, the daily flood of emails makes it impossible to read everything in detail. Still, I want to keep up with ongoing development. That’s why I built a ChatGPT Summary Generator that integrates nicely with my OfflineIMAP–NeoMutt–Notmuch setup. Sorry for the clickbait — it’s just an email-to-ChatGPT fan-out. No proprietary Google/Microsoft stuff involved....

September 24, 2025 · 14 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer

Reverse Engineering and Control-Flow Analysis with Intel Processor Trace

This blog-post demostrate how Intel Processor Trace (PT) can be usable for everyday reverse-engineering and debugging tasks by showing exactly how to capture and decode real execution, not just what the program could do in theory. PT is powerful and surprisingly underused; once you see how to drive it with perf, it becomes a reliable way to cut through indirection, obfuscation, and environment-dependent behavior. Agenda We start with core notions of control-flow analysis, move to what Intel PT actually records, then work through a practical perf workflow, deal with common pitfalls, and close with limits and an appendix on correlating addresses under ASLR....

January 23, 2025 · 7 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer

RISC-V Development Board - Banana Pi F3

Banana Pi F3 Christmas project: I got a Banana Pi F3 on the cheap and used the quiet hours to power it up, take inventory, and write a technical first look. This post is deliberately terse and focused on what matters to Linux developers and performance engineers. TL;DR: Octa-core 64-bit RISC-V with RVV 1.0 (256-bit), two coherent clusters, sensible caches, usable PCIe and I/O. Treat the GPU and video items as hardware capability; the Linux userspace stacks may lag....

December 28, 2024 · 7 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer

A Breath of Fresh Air - From Vim to Neovim

tl;dr: for 25 years standard vim user, without plugins. Since two years questioned bad habits and analyzed repetitive pattern and switched to neovim with certain plugin set. Here I describe which plugins I use and why. Before I go into detail, I would like to explain my working practices in this section. This is important because my setup is tailored to my environment and may be completely different for you. Admittedly, I don’t get to do much programming....

January 12, 2024 · 10 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer

Migration to Cloudflare & Hugo

After a period of inactivity (~11 years now, with the exception of 2 posts, 7 years ago) in managing my website, it became clear that an upgrade to my web infrastructure was essential. Due to outdated scripts and other technical challenges, I’ve opted for a comprehensive overhaul of my web hosting solutions. Consequently, I am transitioning from Jekyll and Google Hosting to adopting Hugo, in combination with Cloudflare, for a more robust and updated online presence....

May 16, 2023 · 2 min · Hagen Paul Pfeifer