// TRENDING
What devs are reading right now
// DEV
V8 doesn't run your JavaScript. It replaces it.
Most devs think V8 'runs' their JavaScript. It doesn't. It reads your code, throws most of it away, and rebuilds something completely different. Here's what's actually happening inside the engine that runs half the internet.
// DEV
TypeScript 5.5 broke my assumptions (in a good way)
TypeScript 5.5 shipped features that eliminate entire categories of bugs I've been writing defensive code around for years. Most people are sleeping on the inferred type predicate change. That one alone would have saved us 3 weeks of debugging in 2023.
// DEV
$5 VPS, Zero Downtime, No DevOps Team Needed
Most devs spin up a $50 Vercel plan without thinking. Here's how to run a production Next.js app on a $5 Hetzner box with zero downtime deploys, proper process management, and Nginx doing the heavy lifting — the same setup that handled 2M monthly visits without breaking a sweat.
// SYSTEM DESIGN
Design YouTube in 45 Minutes Without Dying
Most candidates spend 20 minutes on video encoding and fail the interview. Here's the actual framework I've used to pass every system design round at Google, Netflix, and Stripe — and why your instinct to start with the database schema is killing you.
// DEV
TCP/IP Isn't Magic. It's Just Lying to You.
Everyone acts like TCP gives you a reliable stream. It doesn't. It gives you the illusion of one, and that illusion has a price. I watched that price hit $340k in a single weekend at a 60-person startup in 2021.
// SYSTEM DESIGN
Design YouTube in 45 Minutes Without Embarrassing Yourself
Most candidates spend 20 minutes drawing boxes and never touch the hard parts. Here's the exact order of operations that actually impresses staff engineers at FAANG, and why starting with video upload is wrong.
// DEV
Websites Can't Block You If You Think Like Them
Most scraping tutorials teach you to hide. That's backwards. The sites that blocked me 40 times taught me the real lesson: don't disguise your bot, make your bot indistinguishable from a bored human at 2am. Here's what that actually looks like in code.
// DEV
German TV killed intros. Your codebase should too.
ARD just announced they're cutting TV show intro sequences to save broadcast time. Most engineers laughed at the news. The ones who didn't are probably the ones shipping faster than you right now.
// DEV
How the military knows who fired what, in real time
Trump claims Iran shot down a US helicopter. Whether that's true or not isn't my department. But the sensor fusion, signals intelligence, and attribution systems that produce that kind of battlefield claim in minutes? That's genuinely wild engineering. Here's what's actually running.
// AI
RAG with Pinecone + Claude: What Nobody Tells You
Everyone's RAG demo works. Everyone's RAG production system is a disaster. Here's the actual implementation with Pinecone and Claude that handles the edge cases the tutorials skip, including the chunking bug that cost one team 3 weeks of debugging.
// SYSTEM DESIGN
URL Shorteners Aren't Simple. Here's What Breaks.
Everyone thinks a URL shortener is a toy problem. It's not. Here's what actually happens when you hit 10 billion redirects a day and why the 'obvious' database choice will destroy you at scale.
// DEV
Your Rate Limiter Is Lying To You
Most rate limiters fail under the exact conditions they exist to prevent. Here's what actually happens at 50k RPS when your Redis cluster hiccups, and why the algorithm you chose in 2019 is probably wrong for 2024.
// CAREER
Mock Interviews Are Lying To You (Here's How)
Most candidates tank their real interviews doing exactly what their mock sessions trained them to do. The feedback loop is broken and nobody's telling you. Here's what actually costs people the offer.
// DATABASES
Postgres is all you need. I know because we learned it the hard way.
In 2021, our team ripped out MongoDB after 18 months and $340k in engineering time. We replaced it with Postgres. The system got faster, the team got saner, and I stopped getting paged at 2am about schema drift.
// WORLD NEWS
How Engineers Know a Missile Hit Its Target
Ukraine claims missiles struck a defense plant 1,200km inside Russia. Here's the thing: before any government statement, open-source analysts already had the answer. The data pipeline behind modern strike verification is more sophisticated than most production monitoring stacks I've worked on.
// DATABASES
Redis at 1M ops/sec: What Nobody Tells You
Everyone benchmarks Redis on a laptop and thinks they're ready for production. They're not. Here's what actually happens when you push Redis past 500k ops/sec and why your single-threaded assumptions will destroy you at scale.
// DEV
Iran Sanctions Just Broke Your Supply Chain
The US weapons/money shipment news out of Iran isn't geopolitics background noise. It's a direct hit on how software gets built, deployed, and paid for globally. Here's what's actually happening to your stack right now.
// AI
18 AI Coding Agents Ranked By Someone Who Actually Pays For Them
I've spent $2,400 testing AI coding agents in 2026 so you don't have to. Some of these will 10x your shipping speed. A few are genuinely scams with good marketing. Here's the real breakdown.
// SYSTEM DESIGN
Distributed systems interviews aren't about systems
Most engineers study CAP theorem for weeks and still bomb the interview. The problem isn't your knowledge — it's that interviewers aren't actually testing what you think they're testing. Here's what's really happening in that room.
// CAREER
LeetCode Won't Save You. Here's What Actually Will.
Everyone's grinding medium array problems at 11pm like that's what gets you hired. It's not. The interview is testing something completely different and most people never figure it out until they've already failed 20 of them.
// WORLD NEWS
How do you know a missile hit 700 miles away?
Ukraine claims a strike on a defense plant deep inside Russia. The interesting part isn't the politics — it's the sensor fusion, satellite imagery pipelines, and open-source intelligence systems that confirmed it within hours. This is what modern battlefield damage assessment actually looks like under the hood.
// DEV
They offered $180k. I got $230k. Here's the exact script.
Most engineers leave $20-50k on the table because they treat salary negotiation like a technical interview — trying to give the right answer instead of having the right conversation. I've watched this happen to brilliant engineers on my own team, and I used to do it myself.
// DEV
Your PM tool is making engineers 23% slower
Most teams pick their project tool based on demos and vibes. Then they spend 18 months wondering why sprints keep slipping. I've watched this happen at three companies, and the root cause is always the same thing nobody talks about.
// DEV
Git aliases that deleted my 3am oncall shifts
I've been doing this for 12 years and most engineers are still typing 'git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all' by hand. That's not discipline. That's self-harm. Here are the aliases that actually live in my .gitconfig.
// DEV
10x Traffic Doesn't Kill You. Your Assumptions Do.
Most engineers think scaling means rewriting everything. It doesn't. The bottlenecks that murder you at 10x traffic are almost never where you think they are, and I have the PagerDuty receipts to prove it.
// DEV
UK's Cost Crisis Will Rewrite How Devs Ship
Energy bills, business rates, and HS2 cancellations aren't just political noise. They're already changing infrastructure decisions, office footprints, and build-vs-buy calls for every UK tech team right now. Here's what that actually looks like in your codebase.
// AI
The AI Newsletter You Forward Is Lying To You
Every 'weekly AI digest' hitting your inbox is the same 12 vendors repackaged with different gradients. I've spent 6 months auditing which ones actually matter for engineers who ship things, and the answer is brutal.
// DATABASES
SQL interview questions that actually get asked in 2025
Most SQL interview prep is teaching you syntax from 2012. In 2025, companies are asking about query execution plans, window function internals, and why your index isn't being used. Here's what the real questions look like and why most candidates bomb them.
// DEV
The monitoring stack we wished we had on day one
Most teams build their observability stack backwards — they add monitoring after the fire, not before it. Here's the exact stack I wish we'd had in 2021 when a missing p99 metric cost us 11 hours of downtime and $340k in SLA credits.
// AI
Your LLM isn't thinking. It's guessing. Repeatedly.
Everyone explains transformers with matrix math and attention diagrams. Nobody explains what's actually happening when GPT-4 writes code that almost works. Let's fix that — internals first, no calculus required.