Do it right, with real numbers

A pair of small craft scissors with zigzag blades lying open on a plain white background

ASEAN Tech 6 min

What a Character Limit Does to Khmer

Truncation looks like the simplest thing a program does, until the same twenty-character limit hands an English reader n...

Sarah Chew

A handwritten ledger open at a page of ruled columns filled with row after row of entries

Developer Tools 5 min

Your Scheduler Has Never Reported a Failure

Fifty-nine thousand runs, forty-four commands, zero failures — because for background tasks the failure path ran in a pr...

Four wall clocks in a row labelled London, New York, Tokyo and Moscow, each showing a different time

Your Daily Report Is Counting the Wrong Day

A naive date filter and a timezone-aware one disagreed on twelve of twenty-one days, once reporting six items on a day t...

Several small sand timers in different colours arranged on a plain white surface

How to Behave When You Are Rate Limited

Five clients, one job, one throttle. Hammering issued 553 requests to fetch 40 things and finished behind the client tha...

Pub. 22 Aug

A row of metro fare gates, some displaying a green tick and others a red cross, beneath station departure signage

What Your Rate Limit Actually Limits

A route limited to 30 a minute and one limited to 60 turned out to share a single counter, because the framework keys it...

Pub. 22 Aug

A desk calendar standing on a pale surface, shot from a low angle. Its wire spiral binding runs along the top edge and the month name FEVEREIRO — February in Portuguese — is printed vertically down the left side in white on grey. The date grid beside it is faint and almost empty.

Consumer Tech 9 min

What Is One Month After 31 January?

28 February or 3 March — both are in daily use, and your date calculator probably will not tell you which one it picked....

Amelia Wong

Pub. 16 Aug

A dense tangle of network cables and connectors filling a rack, layered and unlabelled.

Cyber Threat Intel 6 min

What "Known Exploited" Actually Means

There is a free, public list of the software flaws attackers are genuinely using, and its shape is not what the phrase s...

Cyber Team

Pub. 12 Aug

A portable solid-state drive and a small USB stick on a wooden desk beside a keyboard.

Developer Tools 7 min

Can a Deleted File Be Recovered? We Erased the Whole Volume and Read It Back

We wrote a file marked so it could not be mistaken for anything else, deleted it, then erased the entire volume the way...

Two orange fibre optic patch cables with their connectors in the foreground.

Latency vs Bandwidth: Which One Are You Actually Waiting For?

Internet plans are sold in one number, and for most of what you do all day it is the smaller half of the answer. Asking...

A white office multifunction printer and scanner standing against a grey wall.

Why Is My PDF So Big? It Is Probably a Picture of Text

We built one A4 page both ways and weighed them. As text: 8,256 bytes, with 4,791 searchable characters. The same page s...

A hand holding an opened mechanical hard drive with its platter and read head exposed.

Why Is My Disk Full? Every Tool Is Answering a Different Question

The same 494 GB drive reports 6 per cent used, 53 per cent used and 56.3 per cent used depending on what you ask — and a...