A LinkedIn recruiter pitched me a remote "Software Engineer at a DEX" project this week. Reasonable comp range, tech stack squarely in my wheelhouse. After a couple of friendly exchanges, she asked me to "review the codebase before the technical interview" and sent me a GitHub repo link plus a Calendly invite for the call. The repo was malware. It didn't get me, but it's something developers shoul
TL;DR: I built ChessDada — a free multiplayer chess platform inspired by old Yahoo Chess. No signup, no download, just instant browser-based chess. Built with Node.js, Socket.IO, and chess.js. Modern chess sites are bloated. Chess.com forces you through signup. Lichess defaults to account creation. The "5-second click and play" experience that made Yahoo Chess legendary in the 2000s is essentially
This section is the map for the rest of the book. The five stages introduced in the 1.1 chapter overview (parse, analyze/rewrite, plan, portal, execute) are traced here through the actual code: which functions implement each stage, and in what order they get called. The mechanics of each of the five stages are unpacked in later chapters. Here, only the skeleton matters: how a backend starts up, ho
PostgreSQL Internals · Chapter 1 Query Processing Suppose a client sends SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1. The path that single line travels before coming back as a result row is longer than you might expect. Inside the PostgreSQL backend, that SQL goes through a five-stage pipeline. Backend entry and dispatch. The backend receives the message from the client and decides which processing path it s
The EU's Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirement is moving from regulatory text to technical reality. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), products sold in the EU must carry a DPP—a machine-readable identifier linking to standardized lifecycle data. For developers and compliance teams, 2026 marks the year where pilot programs transition to real deployments. Here's wha
TL;DR: I built a P2P file transfer tool that runs entirely in the browser. No install, no server relay, no account. Here's what I learned about WebRTC data channels, resumable transfers, and the browser storage mess along the way. Most file transfer tools follow the same pattern: upload to a server, get a link, the recipient downloads from that server. Your file sits on someone else's infrastructu
Live: https://nulkratos-core.web.app GitHub: https://github.com/nulkratos/nulkratos-core Every "private" messenger I found had the same tradeoffs: Signal → needs your phone number. That's an identity anchor. Telegram → not E2E by default. Server-side messages. WhatsApp → Meta. Enough said. Matrix/Element → self-host complexity, still needs an account. Briar → great, but mobile-only and requires i
The problem we kept seeing Product, marketing, and CX teams want on-site feedback, NPS, and lightweight announcements (changelog nudges, maintenance banners, promos) on real pages—marketing sites, docs, and product surfaces. another heavy client SDK or a multi-week integration just to ship those surfaces. a small script + a widget on the page. Saytics—what we optimized for, the tradeoffs that fa