So you want to serialize some DER?
So you want to serialize some DER? (Editor’s Note: My day job is at Anthropic.) This story starts where all good stories start, with ASN.1. ASN.1 is… I guess you’d call it a meta-serialization format? It’s a syntax for describing data abstractly (a notation, you might say), and then there’s a bunch of different actual encodings that you can use to turn data into bytes. There’s only one encoding I choose to acknowledge, which is DER (the Distinguished Encoding Representation, it’s got a monocle