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...
Guides & How-tos · Worked examples · Real numbers
Do it right, with real numbers
Step-by-step how-tos, head-to-head comparisons and honest roundups — every guide worked through with current figures, then backed by a RECATOOLS calculator or AI-directory entry so you can act on it.
299 guides published
17 topic areas
Latest guide Sep 2026
Health & Wellness
12
Statistics
12
ASEAN Tech
11
Privacy & Data
10
Personality
7
Cloud & Infra
7
Home & Living
7
Consumer Tech
6
Cyber Threat Intel
6
Business
5
Sustainability
4
Advertisement
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...
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...
A 200 Is Not a Success
With the database stopped the homepage still returned 200, at a fifth of its normal text with none of its articles. Find...
What Your Health Check Does Not Check
Four dependencies stopped one at a time on a running stack. Two of the outages left the health check, the status code an...
What a Database Backup Does Not Contain
The media on one real system is larger than the dump that is supposed to protect it — 66 MB across 2,765 files against a...
How to Prove Your Backup Actually Restores
A real 156-table database dumped, loaded into a throwaway server and compared. The backup was fine. The check reported 6...
How to Stop an Agent Returning Documents the User Should Not See
A vector search scoped three ways, and measured each time. Unfiltered, four in five results belonged to another team; fi...
How to Measure Whether Your RAG Is Retrieving the Right Documents
Twenty questions with known answers, run over 205 real documents. Prefixing titles to chunks raised hit@1 from 14 to 17...
How to Give an Agent Search Over Your Own Documents
Seventy-eight lines with no dependencies join a local embedding model, a vector store and MCP. The interesting part is n...
How to Write an MCP Server Without a Framework
MCP is JSON-RPC over a pipe. Sixty-two lines of dependency-free code, driven directly with the protocol — the handshake,...
How to Generate Embeddings Locally
A 46 MB model, running on your laptop, turns text into positions in space. The demonstration: a query whose only content...
Advertisement