guides

Developer guides

Plain-English explanations of the things behind the tools — encoding, auth, hashing, identifiers and time. Each one pairs with a tool on this site so you can read the idea, then try it.

// encoding & text
Text encoding explained
~/guides/text-encoding
How ASCII, UTF-8, URL encoding and Base64 turn characters into bytes — and the bugs that prevents.
Regular expressions guide
~/guides/regex
A practical, plain-English walkthrough of the patterns you'll actually use.
// auth & crypto
JWTs in practice
~/guides/jwt-security
Signing, verifying, where to store tokens, and the attacks that break verification.
Hashing explained
~/guides/hashing-explained
Checksums, why you can't SHA a password, salting, and what HMAC adds.
// ids & time
Choosing a UUID version
~/guides/choosing-a-uuid
v4, v7 and friends — and why the wrong one slows your database down.
Working with timestamps
~/guides/working-with-timestamps
Unix time, storing UTC, daylight-saving traps, ISO 8601 and monotonic clocks.