André Glazastov

I lead a red team and, in my spare time, I am also an independent security researcher, I write software, and I study mathematics for the pleasure of hating it. Yes, the pleasure of hating it.

Who I am

For a long time in my life I loved mathematics, and then it got complicated! (Since when does mathematics have letters in it instead of only numbers??) From that moment on, still quite young, I came to hate it. My grades fell and, well, none of it made sense to me any more.

Not for long, though. I realised there was no sense in hating something only because I did not understand it. So I decided that if I was going to hate mathematics, I would at least do it with a solid grounding in it.

Since then I try to learn more about that world of calculations whenever I can. And this blog is where I gather the subjects that will not leave my head, from distributed systems and programming languages to linear algebra and category theory, or absolutely anything that makes me want to write.

If you are like me and enjoy this sort of thing, you might want to have a look at the posts and perhaps subscribe to my newsletter. I do not publish very often (I write waaay too much in each post), so you do not have to worry about seeing my emails in your inbox all the time. Probably because they will hardly show up at all for a good part of the year!

How I write

My texts are long, and I like to go deep into every subject. I show the derivations, I test the code (when there is code) and I explain where each concept comes from. The more complex the subject, the more room I give to explaining it, and the longer my texts get.

The articles are published in English, German, Russian and Italian. Some are translations; others were written in those languages first. I am a fluent Portuguese speaker, I know enough English, I am greatly in love with Italian and, honestly, something touches my heart when I hear German. And Russian? Well, that one I leave to your imagination ;)

What I write about

Distributed systems and consensus algorithms, type systems and programming language design, numerical methods and signal processing, complexity theory. Pure mathematics has nothing to do with my work, but somehow it always finds its place here.