lcanello

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tag: software-engineering

Understanding JPEG

A detailed walkthrough of how JPEG compression works under the hood, covering discrete cosine transforms, quantization, and Huffman encoding to explain how images get compressed.

Caveman

Claude Code skill/plugin and Codex plugin that makes the agent talk like caveman, cutting output tokens while preserving technical accuracy; includes a companion tool to compress memory files and reduce input tokens.

EUDI wallet issue #2

Discussion about Android app attestation requirements for the German EUDI Wallet, including Play Integrity, key attestation, GrapheneOS compatibility, platform independence, and the trade-offs of relying on Google or Apple services for LoA high.

Hunk

Review-first terminal diff viewer for agent-authored changesets — multi-file review stream, inline AI/agent annotations, split/stack/responsive auto layouts, watch mode, integrates with Git/Jujtuu. Built on OpenTUI and Pierre diffs, MIT license

Just Fucking Use Go

Blaine Smith's satirical manifesto on using Go — boring by design, standard library is deep, goroutines for concurrency, no build step, deployment is a copy command, monoliths are fine, generics (1.18+), no try/catch hellscape, CC-BY-SA / GPL

rustinel

Rust implementation of INI file parser and validator. Zero dependencies, no unsafe code, no unsafe Rust. Supports INI4 and INI5 formats, includes CLI tool for validation, streaming parsing, error recovery, comments and whitespace handling, documentation and examples

Nibble

Nibble — C-like systems programming language written in 3000 lines of C. Demonstrates LLVM IR generation without malloc or external dependencies. Supports defer, recursion, structs, pointers, type checking, GLSL-like operators

The C10K Problem — Dan Kegel

Landmark 1999 essay arguing web servers should handle 10,000 simultaneous clients. Covers I/O strategies: select/poll, /dev/poll, kqueue, epoll, async I/O, threading models (1:1 vs M:N), zero-copy networking, and userspace TCP stacks. Spawned decades of research into scalable server architecture

ClickHouse Query Plan Contention — Cloudflare Billing Pipeline

Cloudflare's petabyte-scale ClickHouse billing pipeline slowed after migrating from (day) to (namespace, day) partitioning. Hidden bottleneck: 45% CPU + 50% wall-clock spent waiting on MergeTreeData mutex. Three upstream patches: shared lock instead of exclusive, deferred vector copy via read-through cache, binary search on sorted namespace key. Stable at 160k parts/replica. PR #85535 merged in ClickHouse 25.11

Six SQL Patterns to Catch Transaction Fraud

Practical fraud detection using SQL — velocity checks, impossible travel (haversine >600mph), amount anomalies ($99.50-$100 ID thresholds, round card tests), suspicious merchants (spike ratio vs 7-day baseline), off-hours spending, and window-function primitives for composable fraud rules. Works for credit cards, healthcare claims, e-commerce, benefits programs

Which Programming Languages Are Most Token-Efficient?

Analysis of 19 languages using RosettaCode dataset and GPT-4 tokenizer — dynamic languages most efficient (no type declarations), Haskell/F# surprisingly compact via type inference, C least efficient. 2.6x gap between C and Clojure. J (ASCII array language) dominates at 70 tokens avg vs C at 182. Token efficiency could become a factor in language selection for LLM coding agents

AI Is a Mirror of Our Engineering Culture

A blog post arguing that AI didn't create the software quality crisis — it held up a mirror. Trained on 518M GitHub repos (mostly mediocre), AI reproduces the most probable patterns: technical debt, copy-paste, vague specs. AI-generated code entering codebases triggers recursive data collapse.

ChiWriter

Wikipedia article about ChiWriter — a scientific WYSIWYG word processor for MS-DOS created by Cay Horstmann in 1986, one of the first capable of writing mathematical formulas on IBM PC XT, discontinued in 1996 and placed in the public domain.

jqwik

Property-Based Testing test engine for the JUnit 5 platform — alternative to QuickCheck-style testing for Java/Kotlin, with an Anti-AI Usage Clause. In maintenance mode. 797 stars.