Blog · page 8
Notes on engineering, design, and everything in between.
git bisect: turn which commit broke it into one command
The hard part of regression hunting is not the binary search, it is defining what counts as broken. Write a script that answers that, and bisect compresses n builds into log n.
Gomoku AI: splitting threat detection from search
Plain alpha-beta misses forced wins in gomoku. I split the decision into three layers — win, block, forced-win patterns — and only then hand the rest to iterative deepening.
Graceful shutdown: the exit sequence decides between 502s and clean responses
Exiting immediately on a termination signal cuts in-flight requests. The order is stop accepting, drain what is running, release resources, then exit.
HTTP caching: Cache-Control and ETag each own half
Cache-Control decides whether a request happens; ETag decides whether the response body can be skipped. Mixing them is why cache bugs persist: changing one never fixes the other half.
Idempotency keys: the one write that makes retries safe
A network timeout does not mean the server did nothing. An idempotency key identifies the same request so the server replays the first result instead of executing again.
JSON canonicalization: why the same object hashes two ways
Key order, number formatting and escape style all change the bytes. A stable hash has to pin those rules at serialization, not hope JSON.stringify is deterministic.