The Best Monitors for Programming: PPI Over Size
A 27-inch 4K panel is 163 PPI; 1440p at the same size is 109. Why that gap decides text quality on macOS, plus five panels worth the money.
· 6 min read
Dev Knowledge
Developer common knowledge, explained — CS fundamentals, the "why" behind everyday tools, and terms worth knowing.
23 articles
The Best Mechanical Keyboards for Developers
Five keyboards ranked by the firmware you can actually remap — QMK, VIA, ZMK — plus the free software fix that makes buying one unnecessary.
· 6 min read
The Best Coding Interview Books: What to Buy in Order
Cracking the Coding Interview hasn't been revised since 2015. What still earns shelf space, which job each book does, and the order to buy them in.
· 6 min read
Your Bot Filter Misses Crawlers That Send a Referer
A no-referer heuristic passed 234 of 506 affiliate clicks as human. A country exclusion cut the same set to 117.
· 6 min read
Zero Social Referrers in 30 Days Across 35 Browser Games
Two causes: referrer stripping made the loop unmeasurable, and an await before navigator.share() failed silently on iOS Safari.
· 6 min read
A Jaccard Gate at 0.50 Before the Model Runs
Why we strip year tokens before scoring, what the length>2 rule silently breaks, and when to switch to embeddings.
· 6 min read
Spotting Datacentre Traffic in RUM: 4,940 Views, 100% Direct
How country, referer and device class separate scraper fleets from readers when you have no server logs, plus where the method stops working.
· 6 min read
Agent Experience (AX): When Your User Is an AI Agent
What breaks when AI agents use your product: auth, docs, error messages, and state handling - and the order to fix them.
· 7 min read
Segment Tree vs Prefix Sum Array: When O(log n) Wins
Prefix sums answer range queries in two reads but cost O(n) per update. Here is the arithmetic for when a segment tree's O(log n) update pays off.
· 6 min read
What a JIT Compiler Actually Does at Runtime
Profiling, tiering, speculation, inlining, and deoptimization in V8 and HotSpot, plus when a JIT loses to a plain interpreter.
· 7 min read
Virtual Memory and Page Faults: When RAM Runs Out
Minor faults, major faults, thrashing, and the OOM killer -- what the kernel does when a container exits 137, and the counters that tell you which one hit.
· 7 min read
How Agent Tool-Use Loops Work
AI coding agents follow a loop of planning, reading, editing, and verifying. Understanding that loop helps you write prompts that get better results.
· 6 min read
Context Windows in AI Coding Agents Explained
A context window caps how much code an agent sees at once, which is why agents miss files, repeat work, and lose track of the task.
· 5 min read
How AI Coding Agents Read and Index Your Codebase
AI agents do not magically understand your project. They use a mix of file listing, search, and context loading to find relevant code. Here is how it works.
· 6 min read
Inline Completion vs Agentic Coding: What Is the Difference?
Inline completion and agentic coding are both AI-assisted development, but they solve different problems. Here is how to tell which one you need.
· 5 min read
Why Terminal-Based AI Agents Use Text In, Text Out
The terminal seems old-fashioned, but its text-based interface is exactly why AI coding agents work there. Here is the engineering reason behind the trend.
· 5 min read
TCP vs UDP: What Breaks When You Pick Wrong
Head-of-line blocking, silent packet loss, Nagle delays -- the exact failure modes that show up when you choose the wrong transport.
· 7 min read
Write-Ahead Logging: How Databases Survive a Power Cut
The log-first rule, fsync, and checkpoints explained, plus why PostgreSQL and SQLite both rely on it to keep committed data safe.
· 7 min read
Backpressure, Explained Through a Queue That Won't Fall Over
What backpressure actually is, why an unbounded queue is a memory leak in disguise, and the four strategies a producer can take when a consumer falls behind.
· 8 min read
What a Bloom Filter Actually Saves You
It trades a small false-positive rate for big memory savings. The math behind that trade, where it pays off, and the failure mode that bites people.
· 7 min read
Idempotency: The Retry That Doesn't Double-Charge
How idempotency keys stop a retried payment from charging a card twice, and where the pattern quietly breaks in production.
· 7 min read
Copy-on-Write, Explained Through fork() and Snapshots
Copy-on-write defers copying until a write actually happens. The page-table and page-fault mechanism behind it, and why database MVCC relies on it too.
· 8 min read
The Best Webcams and Mics for Remote Developers in 2026
On a remote team, sounding clear matters more than looking sharp. Picks for stand-ups and pairing sessions, with no hype.
· 7 min read