Ancient Cynicism and Diogenes of Sinope: What the Word Actually Meant
The word usually arrives as an accusation. When someone is called a cynic in ordinary English, the charge is that everybody is only interes…
Nginx Response Buffering - Decouple Slow Clients Without Delaying Streams
An application can finish generating a response quickly while the person downloading it is on a slow connection. Who should wait in that si…
Service Directories with systemd - Put Runtime, State, and Cache Data in the Right Place
A small service needs somewhere to put a Unix socket, a database, downloaded metadata, and perhaps its own log files. Creating one writable…
Safe Subprocesses in Small PHP Applications - Pass Arguments, Not Shell Programs
A small PHP application sometimes needs a tool that PHP itself does not provide: an image converter, a document renderer, a media probe, or…
SSRF Prevention in Small PHP Applications - A Valid URL Is Not a Safe Destination
A small PHP application may need to import an image, preview a link, test a webhook endpoint, or retrieve a remote feed. The feature sounds…
HTTP Preconditions for Safe Updates - Let Stale Editors Fail Instead of Overwriting New Work
Two people open the same article in an editor. Both see revision 17. One fixes the introduction and saves revision 18. The other, still loo…
Why a Blog Post Without a License Statement Is Not Free to Reuse
Somebody writes to a small blog and asks a simple question: may I translate your article into my language and republish it on my own site? …
Model Context Protocol for a Small Server — What the Specification Standardizes, and What It Leaves to You
There is a piece of jargon that shows up in almost every conversation about connecting an AI assistant to real software: MCP. The Model Con…
HTTP/3 and QUIC on a Small Server — What Changes, What It Costs, and When to Skip It
There is a version of this question that sounds obvious and is not: HTTP/3 has been a published IETF standard since June 2022, most browser…
Passkeys for a Small Web Application — What Changes on the Server, and What Does Not
There is a specific moment in the life of a small web application when the login form starts to feel like a liability rather than a feature…