Who am I?

Hi, I'm Axel Daguerre, a software engineer passionate about understanding how software works beneath the abstraction layers.

For the past several years I've been developing backend applications professionally while spending much of my free time exploring systems programming, performance engineering, rendering, parsing and software architecture. I enjoy building software from first principles—not because existing solutions are insufficient, but because implementing them myself is one of the best ways to understand the design decisions behind them.

Most of the projects on this website started as learning exercises driven by curiosity. That curiosity led me to create an image processing engine, a configurable parser, a custom markup language, an immediate-mode UI architecture, rendering experiments, networking prototypes and numerous smaller tools. Each project teaches me something different about designing, optimizing and maintaining software.

I particularly enjoy solving problems involving multithreading, memory management, parsing, rendering, SIMD optimization and software performance. Whether I'm improving a production backend or experimenting with a new architecture, my goal is always the same: build software that is understandable, efficient and enjoyable to maintain.

This website is both a portfolio and an engineering notebook. Rather than only presenting finished software, I try to document the ideas, trade-offs and design decisions behind my projects. I believe understanding why something is built a certain way is often more valuable than simply seeing the final result.

Why isn't everything open source?

Some of the software presented here is used in client projects or may become commercial products in the future, so I cannot publish every source repository. Whenever possible, however, I intend to share source code, technical articles and implementation details that others may find useful.

I'm also cautious about publishing code on platforms whose licensing policies allow it to be used for large-scale AI training without much control from authors. I haven't yet decided whether this website will eventually host complete repositories through a self-hosted solution or simply provide downloadable snapshots of selected projects.

Where is this website going?

This website is still evolving alongside my projects. It currently serves as the primary showcase for IDK and the software I build around it, but my long-term goal is to turn it into a collection of technical articles, engineering notes and implementation write-ups.

One feature I particularly look forward to is a searchable knowledge base powered entirely by the IDK file format itself. I also plan to publish articles covering systems programming, rendering, performance optimization, parsing, networking and software architecture, documenting not only the final result but also the reasoning that led to it.

Programming is an incredibly broad field, and one of the hardest challenges when learning is understanding what to learn and why. During my own journey I found that building a mental map of the field made learning significantly easier and helped me distinguish timeless concepts from temporary trends. If documenting my own experiences can help others shorten that path, I'll consider that time well spent.

What am I programming? (updated regularly)

1. A content management system with both client and server components. The goal is to provide calendar management, media uploads, payment integration and other common features while remaining lightweight enough to keep hosting costs low and allow competitive pricing.
2. IDK and its parser. The parser already powers this website, but I'm currently redesigning its architecture to make the language easier to evolve. The goal is to increase flexibility while preserving performance through a lightweight multithread-capable parsing engine.
3. A UDP-based networking library for multiplayer games. Besides being an interesting engineering challenge, networking is a field I'd like to explore more deeply because it combines systems programming, performance and distributed software design.

What will I program? (updated regularly)

1. A simple audio player capable of reading common audio formats such as MP3 and FLAC. The objective is not to compete with existing software, but to better understand audio formats, decoding and media pipelines.
2. The graphical interface for IDK. The current implementation is command-line based, but the long-term goal is a complete desktop application featuring an immediate-mode user interface designed around simplicity, responsiveness and maintainability.
3. Additional systems programming projects exploring operating systems, rendering, networking and performance engineering. Building these projects is my preferred way of learning new concepts and continuously improving my engineering skills.

Contact

If you'd like to discuss software engineering, systems programming, performance optimization or simply one of the projects on this website, feel free to reach out on X (@AxelDaguerre).