42 Systems Programming
1337 curriculum — C & C++ from scratch
The systems half of the 42 curriculum, kept as one entry rather than a dozen: memory, processes, sockets, and rendering written from scratch in C and C++ before I moved to product work.
11 repos
Highlights
- C: a libc reimplementation, printf, a POSIX shell, pipes, sorting, and raycast/2D rendering
- C++: STL container reimplementations (map, set, vector) and a multi-client IRC server
- 11 public repositories built between Nov 2021 and Feb 2023
Scope
Eleven projects in C and C++ covering manual memory management, file descriptors and parsing, process control with fork/exec and pipes, algorithm work, software rendering, and TCP socket servers. Everything was built against the standard library only — no frameworks, no package manager, compiled through hand-written Makefiles.
Why it still matters
Writing malloc-backed data structures, a shell, and an IRC server by hand is where the habits behind my TypeScript work came from: reading specifications closely, reasoning about lifetimes and buffers, and debugging with the tools available rather than guessing. It is also the fastest way to explain why I am comfortable in unfamiliar codebases.