Page 15
Prompt Engineering: The 'Director & Actor' Mental Model
Why does 'be concise' produce worse results than '3 bullet points'? A mastery guide to system prompts, few-shot examples, and chain-of-thought.
Rate Limiting & Circuit Breaker: The 'Traffic Light & Fuse Box' Mental Model
How do you stop one bad client from taking down your entire API? A mastery guide to rate limiting strategies, circuit breakers, and resilience patterns.
Why Cheap Hardware Won't Make Redis Replace a Core Database
As hardware gets cheaper, why not use Redis as the main database? The short answer: because the limitation isn't speed. It's guarantees and data semantics.
REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC: The 'Restaurant Menu' Mental Model
Why does GraphQL exist if REST works fine? A mastery guide to API protocols, when to use each, and how gRPC changes the game for internal services.
Vector Databases & Embeddings: The 'Semantic Atlas' Mental Model
How does Spotify know you'll like this song? A mastery guide to embeddings, cosine similarity, and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector).
When to Use Classes vs. Functions in Python: A Design Checklist
A repeatable mental checklist for Python developers to decide when to use classes, functions, instance state, and dependency injection.
When to Use Dataclasses, Generators, and Try/Except in Python
Phase 2 of the mental checklist for Python developers. Navigating dictionaries vs dataclasses, eager evaluation vs lazy execution, and error handling philosophies.
I Built a Tool to Migrate 500+ Images to WebP in One Hour
My Lighthouse score was crying because of heavy images. So I wrote a Python ETL to bulk-convert everything to WebP and update all the URLs automatically. Here's how.
Why Is Production Still Running My Old Code?
Deployed your latest changes but still seeing the ghost of the old version? Let's talk about the aggressive memory of browsers and how to fix it.