Small programming tricks

Small programming tricks
4 minutes by Will Keleher

Small tricks and shortcuts add up to meaningful gains in engineering productivity. Things like fuzzy shell history search, git pickaxe, or knowing a single command to spin up a local server can save real time without requiring deep background knowledge. The same applies inside companies, where knowing who to ask or where to find a doc can be just as valuable. Sharing one tip a day with your team is a simple way to spread this kind of knowledge.

Share your AI agent's work with your team
sponsored by Display

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When ‘if’ slows you down, avoid it
4 minutes by Christof Kaser

Branch mispredictions slow CPUs down because they force the processor to discard queued work and start over. Writing branchless code removes unpredictable jumps and lets the CPU run at full speed. A simple filter loop rewritten to use a conditional increment instead of an if statement ran nearly 10 times faster on an Apple M1. Compilers cannot make this change automatically because they cannot safely assume unconditional memory writes are always allowed.

Running an obfuscated bash script from Uniqlo's tee
6 minutes by Tristan Sherliker

A Uniqlo t-shirt made in partnership with Akamai contains a real bash script printed on the back, encoded in base64. After carefully transcribing and decoding it, the script turns out to be a harmless Easter egg that displays a colorful animated "Peace for All" message in the terminal. Akamai designed the shirt as a nod to the early internet era, with the code serving as a reference to Linux.

Virtual memory from first principles
about 1 hour by Abhinav Upadhyay

Abhinav provides a practical introduction to virtual memory, explaining its core mechanisms, including address translation, demand paging, copy-on-write, memory mapping, and page reclaim. He also explores their impact on system performance, memory management, and observability, equipping readers with a mental model for building and debugging data-intensive systems.

Advice to new grads: Take any job you can get in the industry
4 minutes by Jim Grey

Getting into the software industry matters more than getting the perfect role right away. Taking jobs in support, QA, or technical writing puts you close to real problems and real people. Relationships built through good work open doors that portfolios alone cannot. Proximity to the right people and problems is what moves careers forward.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• CORS: What is it protecting?