The hard part of an SLO is deciding what does not count

The query behind an availability SLO is a one-liner. The decisions about what to leave out of it are the design, and the denominator I chose let a dead service drop out of the number instead of hurting it.

September 13, 2026 · 12 min · Minh Tran

The economics that make cryptojacking work

A miner that schedules itself onto any GPU node is a workload like any other, and its economics come down to one subtraction. Drive the cost term to zero and the answer is always yes, which is the whole reason cryptojacking exists. A qualitative argument: the original never recorded the figures.

July 25, 2021 · 11 min · Minh Tran

Mining ETH in a homelab, and the day it stopped being about mining

The goal was to make idle hardware pay the electricity bill. The route ran through IOMMU passthrough into a Windows VM, then out again into containers, and what survived the mining was the scheduling pattern underneath it. I never measured whether it paid.

April 26, 2021 · 11 min · Minh Tran