Ethan Higgins — Backend & Systems

01

General notes

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.

Right now that's a vector database in Rust — chunking, hybrid retrieval, an embedded storage engine I keep tearing apart and rebuilding. Whatever the next rabbit hole is, it will probably also be something that's supposed to be someone else's problem.

Status: Sophomore · B.S. Computer Science
Writing: Rust, Go, C++, Python
Focus: Storage engines, retrieval, systems that don't fall over
Located: Charleston, SC · 32.78°N 79.93°W
Open to: Backend / infrastructure internships

02

Currently building

In progress

Active DWG 001 · Rust · Zero dependencies

rsml

A low-level inference server in Rust, written from the bottom up with an empty dependency list. Right now it's tensors, row-major strides, bounds-checked indexing, and two hand-written matrix kernels — the parts a library would have hidden.

SpecBuildTestShip

Lang: Rust 2024
Deps: None
Built: Tensor + strides, indexing, matvec, matmul
Tests: 9 passing
Next: Views without copying, then layers

03

Parts list

Selected work

Further revisions on github.com/sxtj

04

Marginalia

All notes →