Articles
Notes, guides, and explainers on the topics behind the tools.
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Catastrophic regex backtracking, explained
How a one-line regex can take a server down for hours. The cause is backtracking on nested quantifiers — and the fix is usually one character.
· 7 min read
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What X / Twitter actually counts as a character
X's 280-character limit is not a count of letters. It is a weighted score over codepoints, with CJK and Cyrillic each worth two. Here is the full algorithm.
· 6 min read
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How to read WCAG contrast ratios
What 4.5:1 actually means, why the thresholds are the numbers they are, and how to judge a real contrast result against the WCAG 2.x standards.
· 6 min read
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Why MD5 is broken but still useful
MD5 has had practical collision attacks for over twenty years. It is also still appropriate for a surprising number of jobs. Here is the line between the two.
· 7 min read
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camelCase vs snake_case: which one and when?
A practical guide to identifier naming conventions across mainstream programming languages — and how to pick the right one for your codebase.
· 6 min read