Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display

A build write-up of an audio-reactive LED sculpture that maps Fibonacci phyllotaxis onto a physical light array—math, fabrication, and real-time reactive firmware.

Tutorial · Hardware · Programming · Open Source · Engineering

Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

Julia Evans walks through repairing decade-old rechargeable bike lights by replacing the battery at a makerspace—opening the case, identifying the cell, soldering a replacement, and what she learned as a non-electronics expert.

Tutorial · Hardware · Tutorials · Engineering · Education

Postgres AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' does NOT do what you think it does

A practical Postgres footgun: AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' converts timestamptz to timestamp without time zone—so month math and equality break unless you apply AT TIME ZONE twice.

Tutorial · Databases · Programming · Tutorials · Engineering

Mixture of Experts (MoE) for Backend Engineers

A detailed visual guide to token routing, expert batching, weighted combination, and the memory and communication tradeoffs of MoE serving. Suppose a model has dozens of feed-forward subnetworks, but each token uses only two of them. The arithmetic per token can stay modest while the total weight set grows. Now place that model on eight GPUs. If every GPU stores all experts, memory can become the limit; if experts are split across GPUs, token activations must travel to whichever GPU owns their…

Tutorial · AI · LLMs · Machine Learning · Engineering

Retry vs Circuit Breaker vs Fallback

Retries, circuit breakers, and fallbacks solve different failure modes in backend integrations. Using the wrong one can amplify outages—here is when each pattern helps and when it hurts.

Tutorial · Engineering · Infrastructure · Software Engineering

Extending Scapy for Hardware Reverse Engineering

VoidStar Security shows how to use Scapy as a binary protocol framework to dissect SPI/QSPI logic-analyzer captures, trace flash erase/program cycles, and reconstruct firmware without desoldering the chip.

Tutorial · Security · Hardware · Programming · Engineering

Writing Rust code that's faster than state-of-the-art libraries by asking agents to make the code faster

Max Woolf shows how iterative agentic coding—prompting agents to repeatedly speed up Rust code—produced solutions faster than established libraries, with concrete methodology and caveats.

Tutorial · Rust · Programming · AI Agents · Performance

Build Your Own AI Agent Harness in C#, the MafClaw Live Series

Bruno Capuano’s four-part .NET / Microsoft Reactor series builds a finance-education agent on the Microsoft Agent Framework harness—tools, file boundaries, approvals, skills, shell, CodeAct, observability, and Foundry hosting.

Tutorial · AI Agents · Programming · Engineering · LLMs

Divide by depth for instant 3D

Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan peels open how 3D cameras work: perspective divide by depth, projection matrices, and building intuition beyond black-box game engines.

Tutorial · Programming · Engineering · Graphics

How sparse resources helped my GPU-driven renderer memory usage

A deep dive into using sparse/reserved GPU resources (D3D12-focused) to manage memory for GPU-driven renderer data structures like dynamic and bit arrays.

Tutorial · Programming · Hardware · Performance · Engineering

The PAOVR Loop: The Real Agent Loop That Actually Finishes Jobs

Eduard Tymchenko's production field guide to Plan→Act→Observe→Verify→Repair: JSON contracts, independent verification, local repair, circuit breakers, and vector memory for agents that prove completion.

Tutorial · AI Agents · AI · Programming · Engineering

Is my agent secure?

Benoît Devilliers hardens a Hermes assistant for client data: Tailscale-only VPS, least-privilege bot accounts, spending caps, per-user agents, and Infisical Agent Vault so credentials never sit in the model context.

Tutorial · Security · AI Agents · Infrastructure · Engineering

Understanding Cyclomatic Complexity

Erik Dietrich explains cyclomatic complexity in C#: how McCabe’s metric counts independent paths, why scores above ~10 hurt readability and testing, and how to use it without cargo-culting thresholds.

Tutorial · Programming · Engineering · C

Solving Factorio Quality

Simon Sapin models Factorio Space Age quality upcycling with transition matrices and equilibrium equations, then builds an interactive TypeScript calculator for gambling, washing, upcycling, and asteroid reprocessing loops.

Tutorial · Mathematics · Programming · Tutorials · Games

How Your Code Runs: The Journey of a Program Through the CPU

A clear walkthrough of CPU architecture—control unit, ALU, registers, and memory—and how a simple program is compiled, loaded, and executed instruction by instruction.

Tutorial · Programming · Engineering · Education · Hardware