Nobody writes.
Engineering notes, how-tos and ideas from a nerdy engineer who builds software you only pay for when it delivers.
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How Postgres 19 checks foreign keys without running SQL
Postgres 19 skips the SQL layer when it checks a foreign key, and bulk inserts get about 1.7x faster. I read the code, benchmarked 18.6 against 19, and found out why the batching on top of it only helps some workloads.
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How Fillable finds the blanks in a flat PDF form
A flat PDF form is just lines, boxes and text. Here's how Fillable reads the drawing operators to find the fields, what changes for scanned pages, and why a quarter of a degree of tilt broke my first version.
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How a PNG becomes a cut file: image tracing, step by step
A cutting machine needs closed outlines, not pixels. I walk through how my tracer turns a 900 px badge with 220 distinct colors into 4 vinyl layers and 203 nodes, and the hairline gap bug I had to fix on the way.
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Why your SQLite WAL file never shrinks
With readers that always overlap, SQLite's WAL grows by 11.9 MiB a second under a 2,000 commit/s writer and keeps its size after the readers leave. I read wal.c to see why, then measured what journal_size_limit and TRUNCATE checkpoints actually fix.
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How a Word file becomes a printed book: line breaks, widows and the KDP gutter
I wrote a small book typesetter that runs in the browser. Here is how it breaks lines, why hyphenation mattered more than the clever algorithm on a 5 x 8 page, how it keeps single lines off the top of a page, and why the inside margin depends on a page count you don't know yet.
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Why a Google Photos Takeout scrambles your timeline, and how the dates get back in
Google Takeout hands you your photos with their capture dates, places and captions in separate JSON files whose names keep changing, and every file dated the day you exported. Here is what is in those files, why Apple Photos and friends put so many photos on export day, and what it takes to write the dates back in a browser.
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Rendering MP4 video entirely in the browser
How to turn animated SVG scenes into a real MP4 without a render server, using deterministic frames, canvas, WebCodecs and Web Audio. With the actual code.
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Why easing makes animation feel alive
The difference between motion that feels robotic and motion that feels natural is one small function. Easing curves explained, with the exact math and when to use each one.
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What verified revenue from thousands of startups taught me before I wrote any code
Before building anything, I dug through TrustMRR's verified-revenue data on thousands of startups. Here is what it says about what earns money.
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How a video editor actually works
Frames, timelines, compositing, codecs and containers, explained with diagrams. What really happens between pressing Play and getting an MP4.