Databases access patterns are common throughout many applications, because most applications have similar requirements; some data should be accessed a lot, and some data should barely be accessed. How do you go about optimizing a system for this when you usually don't explicitly state where the boundary is? In this informative article, Arpit Bhayani presents the caching system used by Postgres to solve common database access patterns using multiple queues.

Understanding the limitations and possible issues with a database isn't always easy. It not only requires a solid grasp of how queries work, but also knowledge about the inner workings of the black boxes that databases can be. Adrian Colyer has written an article summarizing a paper on database snapshot isolation states. There's an explanation for the motivation, an example, and plenty of definitions to get you up to speed with the important, but jargon heavy topic.

A common issue in programming is the formation of data races in asynchronous code. This often comes up when you're sharing data between threads. One approach in solving these issues is akin to Japanese carpentry without nails; lock-free concurrency programming. In this instructive article, Bruce Dawson introduces an example problem with cross thread data access, underlines some of the issues it could lead to, explains why a potential solution isn't in fact a solution, and finally offers a more reliable alternative, all in C++.

If you play with technology long enough, you start seeing patterns in numbers. 256, 1024, 0x15, or 420. Well in this article, Rachel lists out a plethora of magical numbers you might run into when dabbling with computers and the web. Along the way she points out some useful information from all across the number spectrum.

Hardware has been developing at such an accelerated rate performance wise, that many of modern optimization problems are mostly a result of software not catching up. One such example is I/O processes. In this informative article, Glauber Costa uses his expertise to dispel some common misconceptions about the time cost of interacting with I/O, and highlighting the real culprit; poorly written APIs.

Refactoring is a big part of any kind of programming, because any project you'll work on will have some sort of technical debt. We all sometimes take shortcuts. Well Pablo Aguiar has taken a great meme, good ol' Karen, and put her to work rewriting unit tests for lazy Python devs that used time.sleep on asynchronous functions.

This is more of a philosophical article, where Jonathan Goodwin explores the nuances of what a programming paradigm is, very much in a Theory of Knowledge-esque essay for anyone who did the IB. Jonathan first looks at the "unhelpful" Wikipedia definition, then Thomas Kuhn's, ultimately ending with an analysis of George Floyd thought and the relevance of both opinions in the 21st century.

There isn't always a good reason for doing something. Sometimes, you do it just because you feel like it. That can lead to great, or terrible results, but either way you use usually learn something useful. In this article, Erik Winter discusses why he chose to very much reinvent the wheel from a web development perspective. Erik covers the limitations of available static site generators and the impact choosing an existing tool has on your creativity and design choices. It's a casual article, but I connected with it because I like to build things from scratch, sometimes even when it's not justifiable with anything other than I wanna know how it works :)

Conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but did you know that over 80% of GIFs online have some sort of secret message encoded in them? Naah just joking, but that would be cool. Or am I? In this concise article, Calder White presents an algorithm for how messages can be encoded into GIFs using the global palette and rearranging elements in patterns. The end result is that your memes could all be secret messages from aliens.PS. I was definitely kidding. Or was I?