Guides

15 guides. Not news-driven like Posts: these get revised in place as the thing they explain changes.

7 min read

Augmented Engineering vs Agentic Engineering: What Each Term Means and How to Choose

Augmented engineering has no standard definition, while agentic engineering does. This guide sorts out the usages, compares the two working styles side by side, and says when each one fits.

8 min read

Claude Duet Explained, and How It Compares with Meta Muse and OpenAI dots

Claude Duet is Anthropic's proactive personal agent. This guide explains what it does, how it asks for approval, and how it differs from Meta Muse and OpenAI dots, using the vendors' own pages.

10 min read

SLI vs SLO vs SLA: What Each One Is, Who Owns It, and How They Fit Together

A beginner-friendly SRE guide to service level indicators, objectives and agreements, with a comparison table, the downtime each "nine" allows, and a real cloud SLA read line by line.

7 min read

RDF vs Property Graphs, Step by Step: One Fact, Two Models, and What Each Costs

A beginner-friendly comparison of RDF triples (SPARQL, OWL) and property graphs (Cypher), checked on one fact, one class hierarchy and a 1M-edge graph, with runnable code.

8 min read

robots.txt Explained: How Crawlers Read It, Where Python Gets It Wrong, and Its Limits

A reference for robots.txt: the syntax, how a crawler picks a group and a rule, what happens when the file fails to load, how to write rules for AI bots, and what it cannot enforce.

11 min read

How an LLM Answers One Prompt: Tokens, the KV Cache and the Decode Loop, Measured

A beginner-friendly walk through what happens between pressing send and seeing the first word, checked with a 135M-parameter NumPy model and real tokenizer counts.

7 min read

Baalda vs Obsidian: What Baalda Is and Where the Two Actually Differ

Baalda is a new open-source notes app that also keeps plain Markdown files on your disk. A source-checked comparison with Obsidian on collaboration, AI access, price, plugins and maturity.

9 min read

Git Partial Clone and Sparse Checkout, Step by Step: What Each Flag Downloads, What Breaks

How to clone a huge repository without downloading all of it, step by step, with the measured cost of every command and the history commands that quietly download more than a full clone.

13 min read

gRPC Load Balancing, Step by Step: Why One Connection Sends Every Call to One Server

How gRPC decides which backend gets each call, why a TCP-level load balancer leaves servers idle, and four ways to fix it. Every distribution number comes from a local experiment you can rerun.

13 min read

REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC vs OData: What Each Is, What It Costs, and How to Choose

Four ways to build an API, compared on who decides the response shape, what the contract looks like, how errors and caching work, and how big the bytes are, with a size measurement you can rerun.

8 min read

Git SHA-256 Repositories, Step by Step: Create One, Migrate History, and What Breaks

How to create a SHA-256 Git repository, move an existing SHA-1 history into one with fast-export, and the exact errors you hit when the two formats meet. Every command was run on Git 2.55.

13 min read

Observability from First Principles: Metrics, Logs, Traces and What to Do With Them

What observability actually means, how metrics, logs and traces each answer different questions, how a trace is built, where OpenTelemetry fits, and how SLOs turn signals into alerts.

8 min read

A Home Server for AI Coding Agents on a Mini PC, Step by Step

Tailscale, Gitea, Hermes Agent and Orca headless, wired into one home server on a single mini PC: a private network, a git remote, and two complementary AI coding agents as systemd services.

7 min read

Turning a Raspberry Pi into a Muse Gadget, Step by Step

A hands-on guide to muse-gadget-sdk, Meta's open-source SDK for building personal AI agent hardware: setup, what commands the agent can actually run, and how pairing security works.

10 min read

OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Flow with PKCE, Step by Step

How the OAuth 2.0 authorization code grant works end to end: the request/response shapes, PKCE, refresh token rotation, error responses, and where RFC 10017 now says to actually store the tokens.