Technology
17 min read
Follow one request from a phone to a database and back: DNS lookup, TCP and TLS handshakes, HTTP, the edge, the load balancer, the application and the data stores. Learn where the time goes, why round trips and distance dominate latency, and where requests fail.
Technology
19 min read
How to turn a vague prompt such as "design a photo app" into requirements you can design for: functional requirements, clarifying questions, and non-functional requirements stated as numbers, including latency percentiles, throughput, availability nines, durability and consistency.
Technology
18 min read
What system design actually is, why interviews test it, the components you will meet and the problem each one solves, and the seven-phase method this 45-article course uses for every design, from a first single-server app to large distributed systems.
CourseTechnology
6 min read
A free, 45-article course that takes you from basic web and backend ideas to designing and defending real systems in SDE-1 and SDE-2 interviews. It teaches a repeatable method (requirements, estimation, APIs, data, baseline, scaling, hardening), the building blocks and distributed-systems fundamentals behind it, and 15 progressively harder case studies.
Technology
13 min read
A realistic 30-day plan to put this course into practice with free tools and 30 to 45 minutes a day, followed by a long-term roadmap that builds durable skills such as verification, workflow design and evaluation, and a way to keep up as AI changes without chasing every announcement.
Technology
13 min read
Fourteen compact, tool-independent recipe cards you can copy into your playbook: study, developer, career, research, productivity and automation. Each card gives the goal, the steps, a prompt template, the checks and the risk level, and links back to the article that explains why it works.
Technology
10 min read
By now you have habits, prompts and rules scattered across a course. This article turns them into one personal AI operating system: your principles, privacy boundaries, verification rules, tool-selection criteria, a playbook of reusable workflows and a review routine, captured in a one-page manual you can keep and update. No paid tools required.
Technology
12 min read
Agents and AI workflows fail in predictable ways: wrong tools, compounding errors, endless loops, confident 'done' messages that are not true and hostile content. This article lists the failure modes, then shows how to design for reliability with validation, escalation, approval gates, evaluation sets and staged rollout, including a runnable approval-gate example.
Technology
11 min read
How can a language model that only produces text check a calendar, search a database or edit a file? Through tool calling: the model asks, your program acts. This article explains function calling, the Model Context Protocol and the agent loop, with a runnable toy loop that shows allowed tools, step limits and what the model never does itself.
Technology
10 min read
Chatbot, workflow, automation, AI-assisted workflow and agent are often used as if they mean the same thing. They differ in who decides the next step, and that difference drives reliability, cost and risk. This article defines each, compares them on one task and gives a decision method built on one rule: use the simplest system that reliably works.
Technology
12 min read
Responsible AI use is more than accuracy and privacy. This article explains where AI bias comes from and how to test for it, the main copyright and attribution questions for what you put in and what you publish, why disclosure matters and what human judgment and accountability mean in practice.
Technology
14 min read
Everything you paste into an AI tool goes somewhere, and everything an AI tool reads can try to steer it. This article covers what never to paste, how to tell consumer from business tools, how to redact, how connected tools widen the risk, and what prompt injection is and how to limit it, with a small runnable illustration.
Technology
11 min read
A reliable research process uses AI for the parts it does well, such as mapping a topic, suggesting search terms and explaining difficult sources, and keeps you in charge of finding, reading and comparing real sources. This article gives an eight-stage workflow, a source matrix and a citation-checking routine.
Technology
12 min read
Fluent AI output is not proof of truth. This article gives you a practical verification routine: split an answer into claims, decide which need checking, find primary sources, compare independent ones, check dates, context and numbers, record the source and decide how far to trust it, with special care for health, law, money and statistics.
Career
10 min read
An AI assistant can be a patient, always-available interviewer: asking questions, probing your answers and giving feedback on structure and clarity. It can also flatter you and mark wrong answers right. This article gives a mock-interview protocol for behavioural and technical rounds, and clear rules about not using AI in the real interview.
Career
11 min read
Job postings are data. This article shows how to turn a handful of them into a requirements table, compare it honestly with what you can already show, plan a realistic learning path and choose portfolio projects that prove real skills, with AI doing the sorting and you doing the judging and the learning.
Career
10 min read
AI can sharpen vague resume bullets, point out what is unclear and tailor your wording to a role. It can also invent achievements that you will be asked about in an interview. This article gives a fact-first method for resumes, LinkedIn profiles and applications, with firm lines you should not cross.
Technology
10 min read
Vibe coding means accepting AI-generated code without reading it, which is fine for a weekend toy and risky for anything that has users, data, money or a future. This article gives a fair account of both ends of the spectrum and a project workflow that keeps the speed while preserving your understanding.
