Blog

Docker containers aren't tiny VMs. They're Linux processes wrapped in namespaces, cgroups, and OverlayFS — here's how the kernel primitives actually fit together.

One binary and one config against six packages and a decade of plugins. The gap is real but narrower than the write-ups claim — Biome has had React Hooks rules since v1.0.0, and its v2 config drops the field most tutorials still tell you to set.

Express has the ecosystem, Fastify has the schema validation, and Hono runs everywhere. Here's the practical breakdown of all three so you can actually make the call.

PostgreSQL trades storage space for concurrency — MVCC, WAL, and vacuum aren't quirks, they're the design. Understanding this explains most performance mysteries.

Measured: pnpm cut three projects' node_modules from 132 MB to 42 MB and blocked a phantom import npm let through. The real difference is what that single architectural choice compounds into at scale.

Cypress runs inside the browser; Playwright runs outside it. That one architectural split explains the debugging experience, the WebKit story, and why parallelism costs money on one and nothing on the other.

Redis is fast because of specific design decisions — a reactor-pattern event loop, copy-on-write snapshots, compact in-memory encodings — not just because it's in-memory.

Kafka is a distributed commit log, not a message queue. Segments on disk, the ISR, the KRaft controller quorum and zero-copy fetches — and how each one explains a config option you've had to set.

From BGP Anycast routing to tiered cache hierarchies and Surrogate-Key purge — how CDNs actually move traffic from your origin to the nearest edge server.