The archive
Every technical post on the site, newest first. Filter by category to focus on a specific topic, or use the author pages to read a single voice.
Every service that survives contact with the real internet eventually needs rate limiting. It is the quiet mechanism that keeps an API from being drowned by a runaway client, a sc…
Of all the professions disrupted by constant interruption, programming may be among the most damaged by it. Writing software is not the kind of work that can be done in scattered…
You tap play, and within a second or two a high-definition video begins, smooth and uninterrupted, with no sense of the enormous machinery working on your behalf. It is easy to ta…
In an age of fast connections and powerful devices, it is tempting to assume that web performance has stopped mattering. Surely, the thinking goes, with broadband everywhere and p…
AI coding assistants have moved, in a remarkably short time, from novelty to daily tool. For a great many developers they are now simply part of the workflow, suggesting completio…
Long before neon façades and tournament floors, the gambling culture of Europe was incubated in small, candlelit rooms scattered across the cities of the north. In Venice, Turin a…
Every programmer has written a line of code they were a little too proud of. A dense, elegant expression that does in one breath what lesser mortals would spread across ten lines,…
For about a decade, the personal website looked like a relic. Why bother maintaining your own little domain when the platforms offered everything for free — an audience already as…
There is a particular kind of afternoon every working programmer knows. You sit down at nine with a clear problem and a clean head. By noon you have touched eleven browser tabs, t…
Modern web applications rarely behave like isolated systems anymore. What once was a simple request-response model between client and server has evolved into distributed ecosystem…
Trust boundaries in web architecture Traditional web applications implicitly assume a trusted backend. The server computes results, and the client consumes them. This model is suf…
Anyone who has worked on the web for more than five years has seen at least one pendulum swing. The most recent one, which is still in motion, is interesting because almost nobody…
