Long-form, example-driven posts on the tools you actually use. Updated regularly.
When working with JSON data, I often find myself dealing with large, unreadable blobs of text that make it difficult to understand the structure and content of the data. For instan
When working with authentication systems, I often encounter JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) that need to be decoded and verified. A JWT is a compact, URL-safe means of representing claims t
I've seen many cases where a simple API request fails due to incorrect URL encoding. For instance, when sending a GET request with a query parameter that contains special character
When working on a project, I often find myself needing to validate user input, such as email addresses or phone numbers. One way to do this is by using regex patterns. For example,
When working with web applications, I often encounter situations where I need to transfer binary data, such as images, over a text-based protocol like HTTP. One common approach to
When working on a project that involves validating user input, I often find myself writing regex patterns to match specific formats such as email addresses, UUIDs, and URLs. For in
When working with low-level system programming or embedded systems, I often encounter hexadecimal dumps of memory or binary data. For instance, while debugging a network protocol i
I've worked on numerous web applications, and one common issue that I've encountered is the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. XSS occurs when an attacker injects maliciou
When working with large log files or configuration files, I often find myself dealing with a mess of unsorted and duplicate lines. This can make it difficult to triage issues or un
When working with low-level system programming or embedded systems, I often encounter hexadecimal dumps that need to be deciphered. A common task is to convert these hex strings in
When working on a recent project, I encountered a situation where I had to transmit a large amount of JSON data over the network. The payload size was significant, and I was concer
I've seen my share of API integration issues, but one that still manages to trip up many developers is URL encoding. It's a subtle problem that can cause a lot of headaches, especi
When working on a recent project, I encountered a bug that took hours to track down, all because of a mismatch in naming conventions. The API I was using expected parameters in sna
When working with JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs, I often find myself needing to decode them to understand their contents. A JWT is essentially a compact, URL-safe means of representing
I've encountered numerous instances where a poorly designed password generator has led to security breaches. A recent example that comes to mind is a web application that used a si
I recently worked on a project where we were receiving Unix timestamps from an API and needed to convert them to a human-readable format. The problem was that the timestamps were i
I've lost count of how many times I've written a regex pattern to validate an email address. It's one of those tasks that seems simple at first, but can quickly become complex. For
When working on a web application, I often need to transfer binary data, such as images, over text-based protocols like HTTP. One common approach to achieve this is by using a Base
When working with unique identifiers in applications, developers often reach for UUIDs. I've encountered situations where the choice between UUID v4 and UUID v7 was not clear-cut.
I've lost count of how many times I've seen developers manually construct SQL IN clauses from lists of values. It's a common task, but doing it by hand is error-prone and can lead
I've lost count of the number of weekends I've spent wrestling with JSON to CSV conversions. It usually starts with a simple task, like extracting data from a JSON file for analysi
When working with JSON data, I often find myself dealing with large, unformatted blobs of text that are difficult to read and understand. This can make it hard to identify errors,
Base64 is everywhere — data URIs, JWTs, email attachments, API signatures — but half the bugs around it come from people treating it like encryption. Here's the real picture.
A working developer's guide to formatting JSON — when to indent with 2 or 4 spaces, when to minify, how to validate as you format, and the gotchas that break diffs and APIs.
A JWT looks random, but anyone can decode it. A practical breakdown of what JWTs protect, what they don't, and the mistakes that lead to breaches.
Seconds vs. milliseconds, UTC vs. local, leap seconds, the 2038 problem — a practical field guide for developers who deal with timestamps every day.