I am a first-year CS student and I recently made a decision that most people around me think is unnecessary — I am building a relational database storage engine from scratch in raw C++, with zero STL dependency. No std::vector. No std::string. No iostream. Nothing. The Problem With How I Was Learning For a long time I was writing code that worked but I had no idea why it worked. I used abstraction
April is one of those months where the tool discovery inbox fills up faster than usual. Partly it's spring project energy, partly it's that the no-account tools space keeps expanding in genuinely interesting directions. This month's picks share a pattern: they're not stripped-down versions of paid products. They're tools where removing the account requirement made them better — faster to access, s