// 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.
// 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
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.
// 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.
// 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.
// 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.
// 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.
// 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.
// AI
Your HTTPS is lying to you. Here's what's actually happening
Every dev thinks they know how HTTPS works. They know just enough to be dangerously wrong. Here's what TLS 1.3 is actually doing while your users are connecting — and why the old way was quietly bleeding you.
// AI
NASA's Artemis crew selection runs on this stack
NASA just named the next astronauts heading to the Moon. The selection process isn't clipboard paperwork — it's a data pipeline that would make most Fortune 500 HR systems look like Excel macros. Here's what actually runs under the hood when you're filtering humans for space.
// WORLD NEWS
When Minutes Kill: ML Systems for Mass Casualty Response
12 people were killed in a Johannesburg mass shooting and a manhunt is now active. Most cities are running gunshot detection and crowd anomaly systems that were architected a decade ago. Here's what modern ML-powered public safety infrastructure actually looks like, and where it still catastrophically fails.
// CAREER
Mock Interview Mistakes That Kill Your Offer
Most candidates fail mock interviews the same way bad code fails in production: not during the happy path, but when something unexpected happens. Here's what I've watched senior engineers get wrong, over and over, that has nothing to do with algorithm knowledge.
// AI
Build an AI code reviewer in 100 lines of Python
Your PR review process is broken and you know it. Here's the 100-line script I built at Stripe that catches real bugs before they hit production — not style nitpicks, actual logic errors that cost money.
// WORLD NEWS
How Ukraine Finds Targets 800 Miles Inside Russia
Ukraine struck a military plant deep inside Russia this week. The targeting didn't come from a spy on the ground. It came from open-source satellite imagery, RF signal analysis, and data pipelines that any senior engineer would recognize. Here's what that system actually looks like.
// DEV
We Had 14 Microservices. We Rebuilt It as a Monolith.
In 2021 we were spending $4,200/month on infrastructure for an app with 800 users. Turns out microservices don't solve problems at your scale — they create them. Here's exactly what broke and what we did about it.
// DEV
The Kill Chain Is Software Now
The US struck Iran after a helicopter was downed. Most people are arguing about geopolitics. I'm looking at the targeting systems, the sensor fusion pipelines, and the latency requirements that make a strike decision in 2025 look more like a distributed system than a war movie. The engineering here is genuinely insane.
// AI
100,000 AI Agents Just Built a Society. Watch Out.
HKUST just launched a sandbox where 100,000 AI agents build governments, economies, and friendships — and you can steer one of them. This isn't a research paper. It's a living experiment in what happens when AI scales past individual tools into entire civilizations.
// CAREER
Mock Interview Mistakes That'll Tank Your Offer
Most candidates bomb interviews they were technically qualified for. Not because they didn't know the material — because they practiced wrong and nobody told them the difference. Here's what's actually killing your chances.
// CAREER
System design interviews broke me — until I found this framework
I failed three system design rounds before I cracked the pattern. The secret isn't memorizing architectures, it's having a consistent mental model.
// DEV
The real reason your React app is slow
It's probably not what you think. Most React performance problems I've seen in production have nothing to do with re-renders.
// AI
Claude vs GPT-4o for code: 6 months of daily use
I've been using both as primary coding assistants since early this year. My take might surprise you.