Programming
Beware the Letter 'M': The Strangest Bug in My Life
HTTP endpoints containing the letter M returned 400 errors. The cause? A bit-shift overflow bug in Netty's HTTP codec.
Programming
Articles about programming, software development and engineering
Programming
Natural Intelligence vs Artificial: A Showdown on the Moon
Two independent research teams tried to locate the Soviet Luna-9 spacecraft on the Moon's surface using very different methods -- neural networks vs manual visual search -- and arrived at contradictory conclusions.
Programming
I Replaced Google with 50 Lines of Python
A DevOps engineer with a decade of experience built a minimal Python script that converts natural-language requests into bash commands using an LLM — and after a month of use, started forgetting how to write tar -xzf from memory. The productivity gain is real. So is the cognitive cost.
Programming
Possibly the Most Brilliant Python Code: Analyzing Andrej Karpathy's 200-Line MicroGPT
A deep dive into Andrej Karpathy's 200-line pure Python implementation of a GPT-like transformer model with no external dependencies, breaking down its autograd engine, attention mechanism, and training loop to show how the core mechanics of ChatGPT work at the smallest possible scale.
Programming
25 Iron Rules for PostgreSQL Database Design
A comprehensive guide of 25 battle-tested rules for PostgreSQL schema design, covering schema foundations, foreign keys, normalization, indexing, and migrations — each rule backed by real production incidents.
Programming
Python Antipatterns That Defeated Me
A comprehensive catalog of Python antipatterns encountered in real-world projects, covering type hinting mistakes, code complexity, architectural overengineering, error handling failures, and poor naming — with practical code examples and fixes for each.
Programming
Elite Vibe-Coding
A satirical story about a client who believed AI had made traditional software engineering obsolete — and how a development team gave him exactly what he asked for, while quietly building the real thing behind the scenes. A cautionary tale about magical thinking, vibe-coding hype, and the gap between perception and reality.
Programming
How I Took a Minimum Wage Job to Solve an Unsolvable Problem
I took a job sweeping floors at a supermarket, then spent my free time converting the floor plan into a graph, writing a C++ simulated-annealing optimizer, and learning that optimizing the wrong metric is worse than not optimizing at all.
Programming
Recovering the Source Code of a 1992 MS-DOS Game
The original source code of the 1992 Russian MS-DOS game "Pole Chudes" (a Wheel of Fortune equivalent) was lost forever — so one developer reverse-engineered the entire binary and rewrote it in C, uncovering EGA graphics tricks, RLE sprite formats, AI cheating logic, and a word list encrypted with XOR. The reconstructed source is now open on GitHub.
Programming
Skills You Lose While AI Takes Over Routine Tasks
Automation-induced skill degradation — long documented in aviation — is now quietly taking hold in software engineering. As AI tools absorb the "boring" parts of coding, the underlying cognitive muscle built through those tasks atrophies invisibly, often without the developer noticing until a crisis moment.
Programming
What Unprocessed Photos Actually Look Like
Ever wondered what a truly raw image from a camera sensor looks like before any processing? This article walks through each step -- from gray ADC data to a viewable photograph -- revealing that every 'unprocessed' photo is heavily computed.
Programming
How Apple Patched "Antennagate" in 20 Bytes
A reverse engineering investigation into how Apple fixed the infamous iPhone 4 signal bar drop by changing just 20 bytes of threshold values in the CommCenter binary between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1.