Building HTTP clients might seem straightforward until 3 AM when your service starts hammering a failing external API, burns through your rate limits, and cascades into total meltdown. We’ve all been there. Or maybe you haven’t yet—consider this your friendly warning from someone who has. The difference between a casual HTTP client and a production-grade one often comes down to two deceptively simple concepts: retries and circuit breakers. They’re not glamorous, but they’ll save your bacon when things inevitably go sideways....

Picture this: You’re thirty-four years and eleven months old, and your calendar shows a red circle around tomorrow—the day you supposedly become obsolete. According to industry folklore, you’re about to hit the expiration date stamped on your programmer ID. After that magical thirty-fifth birthday, the algorithm of life supposedly stops compiling your career, leaving you with nothing but legacy code and regrets. Except this is complete nonsense. The “programmer retirement age of 35” myth has haunted the tech industry like a ghost that refuses to acknowledge it’s been debunked a thousand times over....

If your database is a restaurant during dinner rush, then unoptimized queries are like ordering a custom meal while a line of hungry customers wraps around the block. Let’s fix that. High-traffic web applications face a peculiar problem: they’re victims of their own success. More users means more queries, and more queries mean your database either gets faster or becomes the bottleneck that ruins everyone’s evening. The good news? Database optimization is a science, not black magic, and we’re about to demystify it....

You know that moment when you’re building a feature and your PM says, “Just make it a little harder to cancel”? Or when a designer suggests auto-checking that opt-in box? Yeah. That’s the moment your company might be setting itself up for six or seven figures in regulatory fines. Welcome to the world of dark patterns—where what feels like clever product design meets the cold, hard reality of modern consumer protection law....

Remember that moment when you discovered a YouTube video that was exactly what you needed? That wasn’t magic—it was math. And today, we’re going to build something remarkably similar for online courses. If you’ve ever wondered how platforms like Coursera or Udemy seem to know what you want to learn next, buckle up. We’re diving into the beautiful world of collaborative filtering. Why Recommendation Systems Matter (And Why They’re Not Just Hype) Let’s be real: the internet has too many courses....