Complex systems often appear chaotic or incomprehensible, yet closer examination reveals that such complexity can frequently be reduced to a simple underlying mechanism. By systematically removing layers of emergent behavior, one can uncover a fundamental rule or equation from which the entire system originates.
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OpenAI Codex: A Software Engineering Agent

A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that Codex is available for Plus users, and I didn’t miss a chance to try it. And today, I’m excited to share a guide to OpenAI’s Codex. As a developer, I’ve found it to be a powerful and practical tool.
Coloring a T-SQL Procedure Listing with Metric Values

We append the following metrics to the T-SQL procedure statements: execution count (x), CPU time in milliseconds (c), duration in microseconds (d), number of reads (r), number of writes (w), and @@rowcount value (n). You can display these as absolute values or percentages.
SQL Server vs. PostgreSQL query optimization: room for improvement?

For years, we’ve studied Oracle to make PostgreSQL a more migration-friendly option. We introduced tools similar to SQL profile and SQL plan baseline as AQO and sr_plan extensions. In some cases, PostgreSQL even outperforms Oracle, especially in automatic re-optimization.
Migrations from Oracle to PostgreSQL are usually smooth performance-wise, and we’ve even developed session variable extensions to make the transition easier. While many enterprise-only features exist, PostgreSQL often integrates popular solutions directly into the core.
Neat defer macro for C++17

Manual resource management in low level C-style C++ code might be annoying. It's not practical to create good enough RAII wrappers for every single C API you use, but approaches with goto cleanup
or loads of nested if (success)
hurt readability.
A defer
macro to the rescue! The deferred lambda will be executed on scope exit, no matter how it happens: you can return
from any point, throw
an exception (if allowed), or even use a goto
to an outer scope. It is truly zero-cost and doesn't rely on C runtime or standard library, so it can be used even in kernel development.
Google Jules: An Asynchronous Coding Agent Explained

In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through everything I’ve learned about using Google Jules — an asynchronous coding agent. I’ve kept the explanations clear and simple, so whether you're an experienced developer or a beginner, you’ll be able to follow along. By the end, you should feel confident working with Jules: assigning tasks, reviewing its output, and making the most of its capabilities. Ready? Let’s dive in. ;)
How an AI CAPTCHA Solver Works: From OCR to Deep Learning

CAPTCHA has become a familiar part of the internet: distorted texts, “find all the traffic lights” images, audio riddles, and other challenges that distinguish humans from machines. Every bot-system developer or QA engineer automating web scenarios has at least once run into a script suddenly stumbling over a CAPTCHA. A natural question arises: can a program be taught to solve CAPTCHAs the way a human does—quickly and reliably? In this article I will try to figure out how AI CAPTCHA solvers are built, from classical OCR methods to modern neural networks.
Postgres Pro OpenTelemetry сollector

Hi everyone, I’m Alexey. I’m a big fan of observability, and in this post, I want to share something I’ve been working on — the pgpro-otel-collector
.
TL;DR: pgpro-otel-collector
is an OpenTelemetry collector (aka monitoring agent) tailored for gathering Postgres metrics and logs — brought to you by PostgresPro.
Millau — ingress-proxy with self-configuration for Docker Swarm

Ashamed to admit, I still use Swarm in 2025. It's easy to explain, quick to set up, and simple to use. It's a starting point in the world of containers when full-blown Kubernetes is overkill. But Docker's evolution hasn't been the most straightforward. Over time, it began to lack a minimal dynamic proxy for Swarm - one that you run once, which configures traffic routing to microservices automatically - and forget about it. That's how Millau was born - an ingress-proxy and load balancer based on labels. It currently powers its own website and a few other projects.
Want to rank higher on Google? Use these 6 backlink techniques

Want Higher Google Rankings?
Try These 6 Backlink Strategies That Actually Work.
In the end, you’ll get tips to help you build a strong backlink strategy.
Designing profitable software: architecture principles for business success

This article presents a business-driven approach to software architecture, focusing on maximizing profitability through technical decisions. It advocates for:
Distributed, stateless services with immutable models for scalability
Isolated third-party integrations without disrupting core logic
Simple, modular design
Best for:
✔ Tech leads designing scalable systems
✔ Managers optimizing dev efficiency
✔ Stakeholders evaluating ROI on architecture
cgroups: how to eliminate the “noisy neighbor” effect in PostgreSQL

If you've ever run multiple instances of PostgreSQL or other software on a single machine (whether virtual or physical), you've probably encountered the "noisy neighbor" effect — when instances disrupted each other. So, how do you make them get along? We’ve got the answer!
Why you love bad products

Users don’t fear changes. They fear wasting time. Why users reject “best” products — and how to win them over.
ShopCTL: A Developer-First Toolkit for Shopify Automation
Learning Shopify has been on my bucket list for a few years now. Plenty of people in my circle — friends, colleagues, and fellow devs — are all somehow involved with Shopify in one way or the other. Earlier this year, I finally had some breathing room between projects, so I figured it was the perfect time to give Shopify a proper look.
I started exploring the platform by setting up a dev store, poking around the admin, and skimming through the API manual. While this was a quick and easy start, it didn’t give me a deeper understanding of the platform. Plus, clicking my way through the UI felt repetitive and tedious.
That got me thinking: is there a more efficient, developer-centric way to manage a store? Something that I could run in a terminal, plug into a CI/CD pipeline, or script my way out of those mundane tasks.
Windsurf AI: The Best AI IDE for Developers?

I recently got my hands on Windsurf AI, and I wanted to share my experience with this AI-first Integrated Development Environment (IDE). If you’re a developer like me, always on the lookout for tools to boost productivity, this might be on your radar. So, is Windsurf AI the real deal? Let’s find out.
How to Run Telegram Ads in 2025: Secrets to High-Converting Telegram Ads

In this post, I’ll show you EXACTLY how to run Telegram ads in 2025.
In fact, this is the exact process I use to grow my Telegram channels and get quality subscribers for just 0.01 TON ($0.03 as of May 15, 2025).
DASTing SAML: Breaking Trust, One Assertion at a Time

My name is Ilya and I’m a Core Developer at Bright Security. In Bright we work on a DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) solution that helps development teams find and fix vulnerabilities early, straight from CI/CD. My own path began in full-stack engineering, but almost a decade of shipping production code drew me ever deeper into application security. In this article I’m explaining key approaches on what SAML actually is and how we detect it in Bright using DAST.
The article «About Laying a Foundation That Did Not Yet Exist...»

"Electricity is not just a form of energy, but the invisible current that connects all aspects of our lives, from technology to nature itself."
What's New in the Angie 1.9 Web Server (an nginx fork) and What to Expect from 1.10?

You may have already read in the news that on the eve of Cosmonautics Day, a new stable release of Angie 1.9.0 was released, an nginx fork that continues to be developed by the team of former nginx developers. Approximately every quarter, we try to release new stable versions and delight users with numerous improvements. This release is no exception, but it's one thing to read a dry changelog and quite another to get to know the functionality in more detail, to learn how and in which cases it can be applied.
The list of innovations that we will discuss in more detail:
— Saving shared memory zones with cache index to disk;
— Persistent switching to a backup group of proxied servers;
— 0-RTT in the stream module;
— New busy
status for proxied servers in the built-in statistics API;
— Improvements to the ACME module, which allows automatic obtaining of Let's Encrypt TLS certificates and others;
— Caching TLS certificates when using variables.
Captcha Solver Extension – Which to Choose: AI-Powered or Human-Powered? Difference Free and Paid CAPTCHA Extension

How Does a Developer Realize They Need a Browser Auto CAPTCHA Extension?
Imagine a developer automating routine tasks — for example, testing a web application or writing a data scraping script. Everything runs smoothly until a CAPTCHA appears on the path. In the browser, a familiar window pops up: "I am not a robot," or a grid of images where you need to find traffic lights or pedestrian crossings. The automatic script halts, tests fail, and an inexperienced developer might not even realize the problem for a long time — after all, they set everything up and started it, but didn’t account for the presence of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), designed precisely to stop bots. But what if the bot is ours and performs, say, useful work?