About Bob

If something isn’t going as fast as it possibly can, I want to know why — and then I want to fix it. That impulse is the only thread running through all of this.

Career 1.0 was compilers, operating systems, and network stacks — the layers everything else stands on.

Career 2.0 was messaging software startups and reliable multicast: getting the same data to many places at once, quickly, without losing any of it.

Career 3.0 was electronic trading and market structure research at Citadel Securities, where the question of what “fast” means gets unusually precise.

I’m retired now, and researching the limits of practically precise timekeeping — not the theoretical floor, but how close you can actually get with equipment you can buy and run yourself.

This blog is where I write down what I find out. The name plays on “think outside the box.”

Getting In Touch

LinkedIn is the best way to reach me, and I’d start there.

My address is Bob at VanValzah dot Com, but fair warning: the whitelist in front of it is short and aggressive. If we haven’t corresponded before, a message is more likely to hit the floor than my inbox. That isn’t personal — it just means LinkedIn will get you an answer and cold email probably won’t.

Colophon

Built With

Astro 7, with posts written in MDX and images resized at build time by sharp. Node 24. The whole site is static — every page is a file, generated ahead of time, with nothing assembled while you wait.

The source is on GitHub, including the scripts that generate the artwork.

Hosted On

GitHub Pages, fronted by Cloudflare.

Nothing Comes From Anywhere Else

No analytics scripts, no advertising, no webfonts, no libraries pulled from a CDN, no cookies, no trackers. Your browser fetches nothing from anyone else while reading this — until you click a link that leaves.

That isn’t an accident of a small site; it’s the thing I check before adding anything. A charting library I tried briefly would have loaded itself from a CDN on every page view, which is how I ended up publishing charts as plain images instead.

Traffic is measured at Cloudflare’s edge, which counts requests as they pass through without putting a single line of JavaScript on the page or setting anything in your browser. I get to know which posts people read. You don’t get followed around the internet. This seems like the right trade.

Typography

Body text is set in whatever sans-serif your system already has — system-ui first, then the usual fallbacks. Nothing to download, which is both faster for you and one less request leaving your machine.

The wordmark is Inter Display Black, by Rasmus Andersson, under the SIL Open Font License.

“Think” sits inside the box; “OutsideTheBob” smashes out through the right wall and climbs away, scattering fragments. The joke only works if the wall is actually broken, so it is — the box is drawn with a gap where the wordmark passes through, rather than a rectangle with something laid over it.

It’s generated rather than drawn. A script reads Inter’s glyph outlines and kerning with fontkit and converts the lettering to paths, so it renders identically everywhere instead of depending on which fonts a viewer happens to have. The debris radiates from the point of rupture at computed angles, and the script refuses to place a fragment that would collide with the lettering. The social preview card is rendered from the same file by sharp, so the two can’t drift apart.

Words

The projects are mine, and so is the voice. The writing is a collaboration: I work through the problem, then Claude turns the notes and outlines into drafts that I edit until they sound like me. Claude also built most of the machinery here — the layouts, the tag index, the image pipeline, the logo generator — with me reviewing as we went.

I mention it because some think it’s important to say so. I’ve chosen to enjoy collaborating with all forms of intelligence.