Articles about programming, software development and engineering
Programming
A blunt, frustrated takedown of every group perpetuating AI hype — from executives promising imminent AGI to managers forcing adoption, developers boasting about 10x productivity, and government officials funding data centers nobody needs. The conclusion: most people understand nothing but pretend otherwise.
Programming
A developer's 30-year journey from a university ASCII art experiment to building a custom image codec (BABE) and a peer-to-peer terminal video calling application that runs at 25 FPS over ~100 KB/s with no GUI required.
Programming
A Senior Developer with 10 years of experience discovers that knowing frameworks and libraries is not the same as understanding computation — and that a single frozen CPU fan can expose a decade of blind spots.
Programming
A close reading of Robert Martin's famous refactoring example from Clean Code reveals that the "improved" version is actually worse — introducing mutable state, hidden logic, and reduced readability — and the original method was better all along.
Programming
AI doesn't struggle with complex code — it struggles with simple things like loops, arithmetic, and array indices. That inversion makes it far more dangerous than people think.
Programming
C++ offers a bewildering variety of string types, from raw char* to std::string_view to game engine specializations like FString and StringID. This article uses animal metaphors to guide you through choosing the right string type for each situation.
Programming
A veteran Habr author with 15 years of experience and ~200 published articles breaks down four telltale patterns that expose AI-generated "slop" — and explains why letting it proliferate will drive real experts off the platform for good.
Programming
A deep look at how video codec efficiency has evolved from JPEG to AV1, with benchmark data showing modern private implementations achieving 3x better compression than x265. Includes a blunt comparison of Russian and Western video platforms that reveals a 14x quality gap.
Programming
A deep dive into reverse-engineering 1990s Apollo handheld game consoles based on Sunplus microcontrollers, building an emulator, exploiting a debug mode to run custom code on original hardware, and playing Bad Apple on a 40-segment LCD.
Programming
An experienced educator argues that programming language choice for teaching should be guided by five structural criteria — explicit compilation, static typing, visible syntax, pedagogical design, and practical relevance — and suggests Kotlin as an unexpected middle ground.
Programming
An engineer documents building a bare-metal mobile OS kernel entirely in Rust targeting a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 (ARMv8). The project achieves UART debug output and framebuffer graphics by directly programming Qualcomm hardware without any Android or Linux abstractions.
Programming
A developer shares the collection of shell scripts he has refined over a decade of daily use, covering clipboard management, file operations, internet tools, text processing, media handling, and process management.