Ethan Higgins
I build the layer other code sits on.
Storage engines, queues, rate limiters. The unglamorous part, where the interesting problems live.
About
I’m a computer science student at the College of Charleston, and most of what I build lives below the application: databases, queues, schedulers. Things that are boring right up until they fall over.
I work mostly in Rust, Go, C++, and Python. I live in Charleston, South Carolina, and I’m open to backend and infrastructure internships.
Currently building
rsml
A low-level inference server in Rust, built from scratch with zero dependencies. So far it has tensors, row-major strides, bounds-checked indexing, and two hand-written matrix kernels.
Next up: tensor views without copying, then layers.
Selected work
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engramdb
An embedded vector database with document chunking, hybrid dense and BM25 retrieval, and a terminal RAG chat app that runs on local models.
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go-rate-limiter
A per-IP token-bucket rate limiter for HTTP servers, backed by Redis so limits survive restarts and scale across instances.
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async-job-queue
An asynchronous background job queue exploring task scheduling, retries, and worker coordination.
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minidb
An in-memory database in C++17 with its own command parser and CLI, built to see how databases work from the inside.
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Dexter
A CNN that reads the ASL alphabet from a live webcam feed, using TensorFlow for training and OpenCV for real-time prediction.
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rs-advice
A macOS menu bar app that hands you a random piece of advice. Small, useless, delightful.
Latest writing
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