Articles
Long-form pieces about the boring fundamentals — file formats, encoding, hashing, image processing. Written by the person who built the tools they reference.
Compress, downsample, or convert: a decision tree for image files
Three operations, three different problems they solve. Pick the right one and you'll stop accidentally producing 800 KB JPEGs of a 32 px icon.
· 7 min read
Hashing in 2026: when MD5 is fine, when it's a vulnerability
MD5 is broken for cryptography. It's still fine for a lot of things, and it's been fine for those things since the 1990s.
· 7 min read
Markdown is good enough — and Notion isn't
Plain text wins because it is the only document format you'll still be able to open in 2040. An opinionated argument.
· 8 min read
The three encodings every web dev should know cold: Base64, URL-encoding, JWT
What each one is for, when each one is wrong, and the bug stories that prove it.
· 8 min read
Why your designer's PDFs are 50 MB
Scanned vs vector PDFs, font embedding, and image downsampling — a practical guide to where the bytes actually go.
· 6 min read