• The Curious Case of Mongolian Script for Web

    The Curious Case of Mongolian Script for Web

    3–4 minutes

    I’ve been learning about writing systems. Most languages today flow either left-to-right (like English) or right-to-left (like Arabic), always moving down the page. But Traditional Mongolian script? It’s a total outlier – you read it in vertical columns, moving from left to right across the page. Pretty unique, right? I got curious about where you…

  • The 18-Second Request: Tracing a Latency Bug to a Hidden Retry Loop

    The 18-Second Request: Tracing a Latency Bug to a Hidden Retry Loop

    3–5 minutes

    It wasn’t the database, and it wasn’t the network. It was a “helpful” driver feature burying us in latency. A walkthrough of the red herrings—from server upgrades to phantom successful requests—and the logic bug that caused them.

  • How Reasoning Models (pretend to) think

    How Reasoning Models (pretend to) think

    4–6 minutes

    Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to a new generation known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). These models, exemplified by prominent names like OpenAI’s o-series, DeepSeek-R1, Claude Sonnet (3.7/4), and Gemini, are explicitly designed to generate detailed “thinking processes” or “reasoning traces” before providing their final answers. This sophisticated capability, often…