What's your favorite system?

Systems, Software, and Self

Alexander Garver: A systems engineer by trade and by passion. This website serves as a place to collect my pontifications, portfolio, and professional experience.

And yes, I like alliteration. I blame my pastors.


I’m doing a lot of work on the site right now, so I hope you’ll forgive me for the state of things – the lack of navigation links and the placeholders from this theme in particular.

Celebrated by their use of concrete and geometric forms, Some architects associated to Brutalism include:

  • Release: Tagalyzer 0.3.0

    Tagalyzer 0.3 is released! This is exciting for me because it’s the first version that I feel feels like a CLI tool. Release 0.2.0 included the functionality to parse text files and return word counts, but it’s this release that brought the interface up to par with other tools. There’s two major changes that made […]

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  • The Year of Diff

    For 2024, I want to focus my time more intentionally on developing big changes by incremental and daily disciplines. Toward that end, I’ve picked a theme: “diff”, a comparison between two states that may be nearly identical or substantially different.

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  • Devlog: Cross-Compiling Rust for Docker

    An adventure in deploying a GitLab CI configuration that cross-compiles a Rust project and deploys it to Docker.

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Where’s those pontifications?

And how about those projects?

  • The Year of Diff

    For 2024, I want to focus my time more intentionally on developing big changes by incremental and daily disciplines. Toward that end, I’ve picked a theme: “diff”, a comparison between two states that may be nearly identical or substantially different. Keep Reading

  • Devlog: Cross-Compiling Rust for Docker

    An adventure in deploying a GitLab CI configuration that cross-compiles a Rust project and deploys it to Docker. Keep Reading

  • Implied Engineers

    In literature (and generally, other forms of storytelling media), there exists a set of tools called the “implied author” and the “implied reader”. These concepts exist in the narrow space between the fourth wall and the pages of the book – that is, though they are not in the story, they are still contained within… Keep Reading

  • Oxidizing from Scratch

    As a personal project and a way to keep my skills sharp between jobs, I’ve developed Kitchen Server – just something to store recipes on a homelab server and serve them as a webpage. As I write this, I just finished the longest single-goal effort I’ve made to it: converting it from Python to Rust.… Keep Reading

  • The Year of Diff

    For 2024, I want to focus my time more intentionally on developing big changes by incremental and daily disciplines. Toward that end, I’ve picked a theme: “diff”, a comparison between two states that may be nearly identical or substantially different. Keep Reading

Brutalism in Architecture express the essential qualities of a building’s materials and structure in an honest and direct way. Architectural style emerged in mid-20s, based in raw and unadorned use of concrete.

Named by the French term béton raw, or raw concrete, Brutalism became popular in the post-WWII era, when the need for affordable housing and public buildings led to widespread use of concrete.