Dealing with minified XML from third-party APIs is painful. Most online tools are either bloated or can’t handle special nodes like CDATA and comme…

Writing articles, tweets, documentation—you always need to count words. Many word counters exist, but when mixing Chinese and English, the results …

Recently, I was developing a real-time chat feature with WebSocket on the backend. Debugging was painful—browser DevTools’ Network panel shows WebS…

I recently built a web screenshot tool, thinking it’d be straightforward. Spoiler: I hit several gotchas. Here’s what I learned, in case you’re tac…

Building a distributed system recently, I needed globally unique IDs. Started with auto-increment database IDs, then hit a wall with sharding—diffe…

Last week, I was debugging a payment callback where URL parameters were double-encoded, causing order ID parsing failures. It turned out many devel…

I recently needed to convert between inches and centimeters for a project. Wrote a quick formula, but the result didn’t match the design specs—that…

Every time you call a GPT or Claude API, you’re paying by the token. But what exactly is a token, and how do you estimate token counts without load…

Recently built a cross-timezone meeting scheduler and stepped into quite a few timezone pitfalls. Let me share what I learned about JavaScript time…

Last week, I was debugging a production issue. The logs were filled with numbers like 1745678901. Our new intern looked confused: “What are these…