Blog

Random UUIDs scatter writes across an index. Time-ordered v7 fixes that, at the cost of revealing creation time — how to choose between them.

Why length beats complexity, what entropy in bits actually measures, and why the old advice about special characters made passwords worse.

What it means for a hash to be broken, why fast hashes are the wrong tool for passwords, and how to verify a downloaded file properly.

Base64 is an encoding, not encryption. What it actually solves, why it makes data a third larger, and when embedding a data URI is a mistake.

The difference between encoding a whole URL and a single value, why spaces sometimes become + and sometimes %20, and how to fix a link that broke on encoding.

Why the same timestamp shows two different dates in two systems, how to tell seconds from milliseconds at a glance, and what the 2038 problem actually is.

A JWT is three Base64url segments anyone can read. What each part holds, what the signature does and doesn't prove, and the mistakes that follow.

Deeply nested API responses are hard to hold in your head. How to navigate JSON structurally, and what the three most common parse errors actually mean.

Why design systems number their shades 50 to 950, how to keep a ramp looking even, and what contrast ratios you actually need to hit.

Regex looks like line noise until you know the four things it is made of. A practical guide to reading any pattern, plus the mistakes that waste the most time.

Why resizing beats quality tuning, what WebP actually buys you, and how to tell lossy from lossless choices when preparing images for the web.

A short guide to the naming conventions you meet daily, which language expects which, and why acronyms break so many automatic converters.

What the patterns in a QR code mean, why error correction lets you cover part of it, and the practical mistakes that stop a printed code scanning.

Why two tools disagree on the same text, where reading-time estimates come from, and how much keyword density actually matters.