We were discussing time zones at work, and suddenly I had a refreshing thought: why do we have negative UTC offsets? This regularly causes bugs when translating times to dates. […]

A typical story: your project has an internal component named xyz, you develop a new version and name it, of course, xyz_new. Is it a good idea? I don’t think […]

My phone’s USB-C connector was having problems holding on to cables for a long while, and today it finally stopped working altogether: the cable will pop out no matter what […]

TL;DR If you use language other than English, you pay more per word sent/received from an LLM. If you don’t use Latin alphabet, you pay way more. Here’s why. LLMs […]

My analog doorbell has died, so I am on the market for a doorbell camera. I would like to avoid storing my videos in the cloud, so it rules out […]

What is dead code? Looks like it depends on who you ask. Some people think it’s unreachable code than never executes. Other people think that it’s redundant code that does […]

There is a rumor C++ 23 introduces method string::contains that checks whether a string contains a substring. I guess in mere 10-20 years we will have string::toupper and string::tolower. Here’s […]

TL;DR std::function works great when we know exact types of the arguments and the return value. It breaks down miserably in presence of templates, and the error messages are not […]

Last week I had an opportunity to experiment with Cassandra database in a semi-real environment. A few notes: Cassandra goes out of its way to be friendly to “traditional” SQL […]