Tag: #fundamentals
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 19 posts
19 posts are tagged #fundamentals; the most recent was published on 2026-08-15.
Often tagged together: #engineering 3 #culture 2 #datetime 2 #git 2 #systems 2
Most read in the last 90 days:
Learning How to Learn — Telling Fundamentals From Fashion, and Choosing One Thing to Go Deep On
A learning strategy usually arrives as a list of things to learn, when what is actually needed is a criterion for what not to learn. This piece covers the single question that separates fundamentals from fashion, the rul
2026-08-15 · 7 min read #career#skills#learning#fundamentals#deliberate-practiceReading Git commands through its internals — reset and rebase seen as objects, refs and the index
Memorizing Git commands means searching for them again every time, but knowing the data model lets you deduce what a command does. This post opens up the four object types (blob, tree, commit, tag), content addressing in
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #git#internals#git-objects#fundamentals#version-controlDebugging Like a Scientist: Hypothesis-Driven Debugging
Instead of staring at code and changing things at random, debug like a scientist: form a hypothesis, make a prediction, and test it. Binary-search the problem space, build a minimal reproducible example, hunt the culprit
2026-07-03 · 14 min read #debugging#engineering#productivity#fundamentalsConcurrency vs Parallelism — Dealing With vs Doing Many Things
Rob Pike's famous distinction — concurrency is about "dealing with" many things, parallelism is about "doing" many things at once. This post walks through threads and event loops, race conditions and data races, mutexes
2026-07-03 · 12 min read #concurrency#systems#fundamentalsWhat Happens When You Type a URL and Hit Enter: A Full-Stack Tour from Browser to Pixel
How much really happens in the one second between typing a URL and seeing a page? URL parsing, DNS resolution with recursive queries and caches, the TCP three-way handshake, the TLS handshake, the HTTP request and respon
2026-07-02 · 11 min read #networking#web#fundamentalsHow to Read Code You Didn't Write
Developers spend far more time reading code than writing it, yet nobody teaches code reading. Find the entry point, follow the data instead of every line, treat tests and types as documentation, draw call graphs with gre
2026-07-01 · 11 min read #code-reading#engineering#onboarding#fundamentalsNaming Things: The Hardest Easy Skill in Code
The joke that "there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things" is only half a joke. Why a good name reveals intent rather than implementation, how name length scales with scope,
2026-06-30 · 8 min read #clean-code#engineering#fundamentalsRegex From Zero to Confident: Character Classes, Quantifiers, Anchors, Groups, Lookarounds, and ReDoS
If regular expressions have always looked like line noise, let this post fix that. We build up the pieces one at a time — character classes, quantifiers, anchors, groups, alternation, lookarounds — then cover greedy vers
2026-06-29 · 10 min read #regex#programming#fundamentalsThe Birthday Paradox and Hash Collisions — Why 23 People Means a 50% Match
Just 23 people in a room, and the odds that two share a birthday cross 50%. At the root of this counterintuitive result is a √N approximation, and the same math runs through UUID and hash collision probability, why 128 b
2026-06-27 · 11 min read #math#hashing#fundamentalsStack vs Heap: How Memory Really Works
The stack and the heap are not just "two regions of memory." One is a fast, fixed, LIFO world of frames; the other is a dynamic space ruled by malloc and garbage collectors. This post digs from the ground up into pointer
2026-06-24 · 16 min read #systems#memory#fundamentalsBig-O in Practice: Complexity Without the Math Anxiety
What O() actually means, the common complexity classes with real-world examples, when constants win because n is small or the cache matters, the O(n squared) that hides in nested loops and N+1 queries, space complexity,
2026-06-22 · 11 min read #algorithms#performance#fundamentalsFloating Point: Why 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3
In almost every language, 0.1 + 0.2 produces something that is not 0.3. It is not a bug; it is the designed behavior of IEEE 754. This post unpacks the truth about floating point from the ground up: how binary floating p
2026-06-20 · 12 min read #floating-point#ieee754#fundamentals#numericsSelf-Directed Learning Is What Grows Me — Turning Career Hunger into Fuel ♪ Listenable
The anxiety you feel before LeetCode and job postings is actually a good sign. In the end, what grew me was not study someone assigned but study I sought out myself. Here is how to turn career hunger into fuel, and how n
2026-06-19 · 37 min read #culture#self-directed-learning#career-growth#fundamentals#motivationFollowing the Essence — A Life Built on What Does Not Change ♪ Listenable
A reflection on spending your time on fundamentals and essence instead of chasing trends. It covers how to separate what changes from what stays the same, how to reason from first principles, and how to make choices your
2026-06-19 · 28 min read #culture#first-principles#essence#long-term-thinking#self-improvementReading Financial Statements — Income, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow
A beginner-friendly walkthrough of the three core financial statements, the starting point for understanding a company. It covers revenue and profit on the income statement, debt and equity on the balance sheet, operatin
2026-06-18 · 18 min read #finance#financial-statements#accounting#investing#fundamentalsUnicode and UTF-8: The Text Encoding Minefield
Bytes, code points, and grapheme clusters are three different layers. Why the length of a single emoji lies, what separates UTF-8 from UTF-16 and UTF-32, NFC/NFD normalization and the é problem, ZWJ-joined emoji, surroga
2026-06-16 · 11 min read #unicode#text#fundamentalsTimestamps and Time Zones, Done Right
Store UTC, display local. The epoch vs ISO 8601, the crucial difference between an offset and a time zone (the IANA tz database), the gaps and overlaps DST creates, leap seconds, why you must never trust the client clock
2026-06-14 · 12 min read #datetime#timezone#fundamentalsHow Git Actually Stores Your Data
Most of us use Git every day without knowing what its insides look like. A ground-up tour of the object model (blob, tree, commit, tag), content addressing by SHA hash, the commit DAG, the fact that branches are just poi
2026-06-13 · 14 min read #git#version-control#fundamentalsFalsehoods Programmers Believe About Time
A day has 24 hours, a minute has 60 seconds, the clock only moves forward, a time zone is a fixed offset. Every one of these propositions that programmers take for granted about time is false. We walk the famous "falseho
2026-06-12 · 9 min read #datetime#timezone#fundamentals