[chadcmulligan]

The first few paragraphs on the first part explains it?

Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed something else to a .exe, you'd get a neat error dialog.

Clearly, something was different about these files. Seen from notepad, they were mostly gibberish, but there had to be order in that chaos. 12-year-old me knew that, although he didn't quite know how or where to dig to make sense of it all.

So, this series is dedicated to my past self. In it we'll attempt to understand how Linux executables are organized, how they are executed, and how to make a program that takes an executable fresh off the linker and compresses it - just because we can.