Exclusive articles:
Profile Before You Blame: The Slow Step Was a Regex, Not the PDF
A catalog job crawled for the better part of an hour, and the obvious suspect — heavy PDF parsing — took the blame. Profiling put ~40 of every ~41 seconds somewhere no one had looked: a one-line regex hunting for an email that wasn't there.
Windows Dev-Environment Gotchas That Eat a Day
A running field guide to the traps that bite a Windows dev box day after day - the ones that are small on their own and expensive in aggregate. Each is written as a thirty-second diagnosis.
Count-Based Backup Rotation Is a Trap on a Shared Disk
"Keep the last fourteen" is a sentence about time. A disk only understands bytes. Here is the morning that difference cost us, and the small change that fixed it for good.
The Form Link and the Response Sheet Are Two Different Files
Handing out the form link is safe — nobody who fills it can see anyone else's answers. The spreadsheet behind it is a different file with its own sharing, and that is the one quietly filling with names, numbers, and dates of birth.
Fingerprint at Import: Catching a Source Record That Changed After You Copied It
You imported the record correctly. Then someone fixed a typo in the source — and your re-run skipped right past it, because dedup saw a record that already existed and moved on.