Blog · page 20
Notes on engineering, design, and everything in between.
Semantic versioning: a major bump promises no silent behavior change
MAJOR does not mean big. It means breaking. Using it for refactors and hiding breaks in minor releases turns your downstream automatic upgrades into outages.
SQLite indexes: the leftmost prefix is a consequence of sorting
A composite index (a, b) can only order by b within equal a, so skipping a and filtering on b has nothing to use. See it as sorting and the mnemonic stops being a rule to memorize.
What technical debt interest actually looks like
Debt is not ugly code; it is the extra cost every future change pays. The test is measurable: files touched per edit, test runtime, places that must change together.
Time zones and DST: store UTC, or daylight saving will bite
A DST day has 23 or 25 hours, and local times near the switch may not exist or may happen twice. Storing UTC timestamps and converting at display is the only model that holds.
Turning an AI search into a tree you can page through
Visualising a search is not mainly about drawing the tree. The data has to be real, the panel must not shove the board around, and it must load only for people who click the button.
Unicode normalization: why two identical-looking strings differ
An e-acute can be one code point or a base letter plus a combining mark. Normalize to NFC before comparing, storing or indexing, or duplicates quietly slip through.