Blog & guides
Practical explanations of the formats and standards behind everyday development work, written to be read in one sitting.
How Long Should a Password Be in 2026?
What password entropy means, why length beats complexity, how attackers actually crack passwords, what current NIST guidance says, and practical lengths for different accounts.
UUID v4 vs v7: Which One Should Your Database Use?
Random UUID v4 versus time-ordered UUID v7: how they are built, why v7 makes better primary keys, when v4 is still the right choice, and how they compare to auto-increment IDs.
Unix Timestamps, Time Zones and the Seconds-vs-Milliseconds Bug
How Unix time works, why storing UTC saves you pain, the classic seconds/milliseconds mix-up, daylight saving traps and the year 2038 problem.
What's Actually Inside a JWT (and What You Shouldn't Put There)
A plain-language tour of JSON Web Tokens: the header, payload and signature, the standard claims, why decoding is not verifying, and common security mistakes.
A Practical Regex Primer for People Who Keep Forgetting the Syntax
The regular expression features you actually use, explained with real examples: character classes, quantifiers, groups, anchors, lookarounds, and the mistakes that cause slow or wrong matches.
Base64 Is Not Encryption (and Other Things Worth Knowing About It)
What Base64 actually is, why it makes data 33% larger, where it is genuinely useful, and why encoded secrets in config files are not protected.
URL Encoding Explained: encodeURIComponent vs encodeURI (and %20 vs +)
A practical explanation of percent-encoding, when to use encodeURIComponent versus encodeURI, why spaces sometimes become plus signs, and how double encoding happens.
Why Your JSON Won't Parse: 8 Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Trailing commas, single quotes, comments, NaN and more. The JSON errors that waste the most time, what the error messages really mean, and how to fix each one.