Tech Disaster Files 💥
Explore the most infamous software bugs in history. Learn from the catastrophic mistakes that shaped modern technology, so you don't have to repeat them.
The Ariane 5 Bug
How a 64-bit to 16-bit conversion error destroyed a $370 million rocket, teaching a permanent lesson about integer overflows.
The Knight Capital Glitch
Discover how a single dead feature, improperly deployed, wiped out $440 million and nearly collapsed a financial firm in 45 minutes.
The Mars Climate Orbiter
A $125 million lesson in unit conversion, where a simple mix-up between metric and imperial units caused a NASA orbiter to burn up.
The Therac-25 Disaster
A sobering look at how a software race condition in a medical device led to massive radiation overdoses, highlighting the life-or-death stakes of code.
AT&T's Network Collapse
Uncover how one misplaced `break` statement in C code brought down the entire AT&T long-distance network for nine hours in 1990.
The Equifax Breach
A modern cautionary tale of how failing to patch a single server dependency led to one of the largest data breaches in history.
Code Quick Wins 🚀
A collection of actionable tips, tricks, and modern best practices. Implement these small changes for major gains in security, performance, and code quality.
Security
Use `SameSite=Strict` Cookies
Implement this modern browser standard to protect your users' sessions from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) with a single attribute.
Upgrade to Argon2 Hashing
Learn why Argon2 is the 2025 gold standard for protecting user passwords against powerful GPU cracking rigs.
Set `HttpOnly` Cookie Flag
A foundational security measure that prevents client-side scripts from accessing session tokens, mitigating a huge class of XSS attacks.
Add a Content-Security-Policy
Define a whitelist of trusted content sources to prevent cross-site scripting and data injection before they happen.
Use `rel='noopener noreferrer'`
A simple but crucial HTML attribute that prevents newly opened tabs from gaining malicious access to the original page's `window` object.
Implement `Permissions-Policy`
Explicitly declare which browser APIs (camera, microphone, etc.) your page can use, enhancing user privacy and security.
Performance
Use AVIF & WebP Images
Cut your image sizes by more than 50% without losing quality, drastically improving your site's load time.
Master `async` and `defer`
Understand the crucial difference between these two attributes to ensure your scripts don't slow down your page load.
Native Image Lazy Loading
A one-attribute change (`loading='lazy'`) that defers loading off-screen images, dramatically speeding up initial page loads.
Use `font-display: swap`
Ensure users can read your content immediately, even before a custom web font has finished downloading.
Set `Cache-Control` Headers
Tell browsers to cache your static assets for up to a year, making repeat visits lightning-fast.
Enable Brotli Compression
Enable this modern compression algorithm, which outperforms Gzip, to significantly reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JS files.
Database
Fix the N+1 Query Problem
Uncover and fix the most common database performance pitfall where a simple loop triggers hundreds of unnecessary queries.
Master Database Indexing
Turn a 5-second query into a 50-millisecond one by learning the fundamental concept of database indexing.
Use `COUNT(*)` vs `COUNT(id)`
Learn which count method is faster and why it matters for optimizing your database performance at scale.
DevOps & Cloud
Use Git Hooks to Lint Code
Automatically check your code for errors *before* it gets committed, saving your team from broken builds.
Enable Cloudflare DDoS Protection
Add a powerful layer of defense to your website in 10 minutes to protect against attacks that could take it offline.
Use `.nvmrc` / `.tool-versions`
Ensure every developer on your team is using the exact same tool versions, eliminating "works on my machine" errors.
Tag Your Cloud Resources
Organize your cloud resources with tags to track costs by project and environment, preventing billing nightmares.
Code & API Design
Use `console.table()`
Stop squinting at messy `console.log` outputs and start printing your arrays of objects in a clean, readable table format.
Prevent Silent Failures
Learn the right way to use `try...catch` and proper error logging so you're immediately alerted to problems.
Make Your APIs Idempotent
Design your requests so they can be safely retried without creating duplicate orders, users, or payments.
Use Proper HTTP Status Codes
Go beyond `200 OK` and `500 Error` to provide meaningful, machine-readable responses that make your API easier to use.
Technical Deep Dives 💡
Go beyond the surface and master the core concepts. These in-depth articles and tutorials explain the 'why' behind the code, turning you into an expert.
The JavaScript Event Loop
Finally understand how JavaScript handles asynchronous operations, callbacks, and promises under the hood to write better, non-blocking code.
Web Authentication Explained
A complete guide to Cookies vs. Tokens (JWT) vs. Passkeys, and how to choose the right strategy for your 2025 application.
Modern CSS Layouts
Stop fighting with CSS. This guide breaks down the essential layout models—from Flexbox and Grid to Container Queries—you need to build any responsive interface.
Blue-Green vs. Canary Deployments
Go beyond theory and learn the practical pros, cons, and use cases for the two most popular zero-downtime deployment strategies.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Learn why you should ditch the UI and use a tool like Terraform to manage your cloud infrastructure, making it versionable and repeatable.
Monolith vs. Microservices
A pragmatic guide to help you decide which architectural pattern actually makes sense for your project, without the hype.