Developer Guides

A no-hype guide to prompt engineering for real LLM apps: roles, few-shot, chain-of-thought, structured output, RAG, and evaluation patterns that work.

A practical guide to email authentication: how SPF, DKIM, and DMARC work together to stop spoofing and improve deliverability — with real DNS examples.

Comparing client-side browser storage: quotas, synchronous blocking, XSS exposure, and persistence across localStorage, IndexedDB, and cookies.

How to store passwords securely: compare Argon2id, bcrypt, scrypt, and PBKDF2, understand salts, peppers, and work factors, and what OWASP recommends.

AES-256 encrypts (reversible with the key). SHA-256 hashes (one-way). Base64 only encodes. Which one to use for passwords, tokens, and file checksums.

A practical guide to Unicode and UTF-8: code points, encodings, grapheme clusters, normalization, and why string.length lies about emoji and accents.

A practical guide to Core Web Vitals now that INP replaced FID: what LCP, INP, and CLS measure, the thresholds that matter, and how to pass each one.

A practical guide to OKLCH and perceptually uniform color in CSS: why HSL lies about brightness, and how OKLCH fixes palettes, gradients, and wide-gamut.

CSS Flexbox vs Grid: one-dimensional vs two-dimensional layout, alignment algorithms, painting performance, and exactly when to reach for each.

A practical guide to Generative Engine Optimization: how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity pick and cite sources — and how to earn the citation.

PDF vs DOCX architecture: fixed-layout coordinate systems vs reflowable XML text nodes, plus font embedding — and what each format is really for.

JSON vs CSV vs XML data formats compared: parsing speed, payload size, structure and nesting, and schema validation — and when to use each.