The archive

Every lesson we've published.

Newest first. Browse by room from the nav, or by company and problem from the database. Older pieces stay reachable forever — we don't archive away from URLs.

A photorealistic scene inside a modern startup meeting room, a junior software engineer sitting… Architecture 6 min read
Architecture

Software Architecture Patterns: The Lesson Nobody Taught You About Why They Exist

The first time I sat in an architecture discussion at a real job, I understood about 30 percent of it. I want to be precise about that number, because it is the whole point of this piece.

E Emma Stanfield
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A close-up macro photograph of a dark computer monitor in a dim, empty office… Dart 11 min read
Dart

Error Handling in Dart: How a 47-Line Try/Catch Taught Me to Stop Trusting Exceptions

The catch block was 47 lines long. I counted them twice, the way you count stairs in the dark when you already know you've missed the bottom one.

H Hannah Mercer
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A dramatic close-up of a glowing computer monitor in a dark home office at… Webmcp 5 min read
Webmcp

WebMCP Implementation: I Shipped a Zero-Adoption W3C Standard on My Own Site

My access logs for last month: ClaudeBot and GPTBot together pulled 38,402 pages. Referral traffic from any AI surface back to the site that same month: 11 sessions. Eleven.

D David Thornton
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A young male developer sitting alone at a cluttered desk in a dimly lit… Bootcamp 5 min read
Bootcamp

Academic Honesty Won't Get You Hired. But Faking It Gets You Erased.

A friend of mine — I'll call him Devon — had his freeCodeCamp certification revoked in 2022, and the email took him four days to open.

H Hannah Mercer
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Two open technical documents lying side by side on a dark matte desk under… Machine Learning 4 min read
Machine Learning

Reading the GPT-4 Technical Report vs. the GPT-3 Paper: What Actually Changed Between Two Documents

The GPT-3 paper told you how to build it. Tables of parameter counts, layer widths, the 175-billion number printed plainly, the training mixture broken down by source.

J James Prescott
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