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: Argon2id vs bcrypt vs scrypt vs PBKDF2, salts, peppers and work factors, plus password entropy, CSPRNG generation and the NIST SP 800-63B policy rules that replaced complexity requirements.

Encryption, hashing and encoding solve three different problems, and picking the wrong one is the actual security bug. Work out which you need for passwords, API 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- vs two-dimensional layout, the distribution maths, the five bugs the distinction actually causes (min-width:0, equal-height cards, flex-grow, auto-fit, centering), and 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.