Every developer eventually runs into a slow query. The table has grown from a few hundred rows to a few million, and what used to take milliseconds now takes seconds — or worse. The fix, more often than not, is an index. A database index is a data structure that helps the database find rows […]
Monthly Archives: April 2026
They say data is the new gold. But navigating through a large dataset to meet the demands of consumers in record time still gives backend devs a headache. Conventional database queries often aren’t totally reliable in getting accurate search results fast. But fortunately, Elasticsearch comes to the rescue. In this article, I’ll walk you through […]
Commitment of Traders (COT) data gets referenced a lot in commodity trading, especially when people talk about crowded positioning, speculative sentiment, or reversal risk. But most of that discussion stays at the idea level. It rarely becomes a rule that can actually be tested. That was the starting point for this project. I wanted to […]
Today Quincy Larson interviews Mark Mahoney. He worked as a dev before becoming a computer science professor. He’s taught computer science for 23 years at Carthage College, a 180-year-old US university. He’s also taught thousands of developers through his free programming courses built on top of his own open source course platform, Playback Press. We […]
Learn CUDA programming for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. We just posted a course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will teach you to build efficient WGMMA pipelines and leverage Cutlass optimizations to perform the massive matrix multiplications that power modern AI. Beyond single-chip performance, the curriculum covers multi-GPU scaling and NCCL primitives necessary for training trillion-parameter […]
We’ve all been there: You open ChatGPT, drop a prompt. “Extract all emails from this sheet and categorize by sentiment.” It gives you something close. You correct it, it apologizes, and gives you a new version. You ask for a different format, and suddenly, it’s lost all context from earlier, and you’re starting over. Errors […]
Have you ever wondered how platforms like Etsy, Uber, or Teachable handle payments for thousands of sellers? The answer is a multi-vendor marketplace: an application where merchants can sign up, list products or services, and receive payments directly from customers. In this handbook, you’ll build a complete marketplace from scratch using TypeScript. You won’t need […]
Losing track of valuable assets costs companies millions of dollars every year. For a long time, businesses faced a frustrating choice. You could either pay a premium for high-end GPS and cellular trackers to guarantee visibility, or you could use affordable Bluetooth tags that only worked inside your own facility walls. Once an item left […]
If you’ve ever worked on something like an inventory system, billing dashboard, or even a small internal tool, chances are you’ve needed to generate barcodes at some point. Most developers either rely on external tools or assume this requires backend processing. That’s usually where things get slower, more complex, and harder to maintain. But modern […]
Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prolific streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a “snowboard bum” doing odd jobs at ski resorts to facilitate him spending as much time on the mountain as possible. At age 28 he taught himself PHP programming and started building […]