Engineering
Java & Spring, PHP and WordPress deep dives — how production web applications are really put together, from the code up.
12 posts in this category
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When a Proxy Timeout Returns HTML Instead of JSON: A 499 Post-Mortem
Why a self-hosted admin card failed with 'Unexpected token <': an O(n) library audit running inside a GET request, three reverse-proxy hops, and the 499 status no monitor watches — measured from 13.6 s on an idle box to 2,507 s on a busy one.
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Why ffmpeg -map 0 Breaks Your Remux: The Hidden Matrix of Multi-Track MP4 and Matroska
Why using -map 0 silently aborts Matroska muxers, drops subtitle fonts, and corrupts Apple playback: an empirical teardown of container constraints across multi-track media pipelines.
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I Committed 518,000 Lines in 30 Days. Production Kept 235,000.
Over 30 days, autonomous coding agents added 518,000 lines across 5 repos, yet production kept 235,000. Here is why verification gates matter more than generation.
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Embedding Fonts So a PDF Looks the Same on Every Machine
Four families, eight faces, two renderers and one CSS quirk: what it took to stop a generated report depending on whatever fonts the server happened to have.
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Verifying a 19-Page PDF Report Page by Page
Verify a PDF report page by page: print the same HTML from your browser as a baseline, compare the per-page geometry, and keep every deviation under 2pt.
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Migrating a CodeIgniter 4 App From IIS to OpenLiteSpeed
I moved a 17,000-line CodeIgniter 4 app from Windows IIS to OpenLiteSpeed on CyberPanel. Two fatal errors appeared that IIS had been hiding behind SSO.
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Scraping a Bot-Walled Marketplace With a Warm Browser Session
Scraping bot-walled marketplace listings for a client's used-electronics business: warm CDP session, fail-fast health checks, split-wait rendering.
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The JPA Field That Turns a Silent Lost Update Into a 409
How a JPA @Version field turns a silent lost update into a 409 conflict — optimistic locking makes a stale REST write fail loudly instead of overwriting.
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Debugging Remotion Video Jitter: Why Bass Scaling Ruins Background Transitions
Diagnose audio-reactive background jitter and crossfade flicker in Remotion. See how separating the HUD from background layers can improve visual stability and rendering performance.
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No API for Browser Translation: Adding an English Mode to a Chinese-Only Web App
Browsers expose no JavaScript API to trigger translation — and my app declared English while being Chinese. How I injected an English mode at the reverse proxy.
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Two Ways a JavaScript File Stops Working and Looks Fine
A shadowed function name and a let declared below its first call both killed a whole script — and the page rendered perfectly, because nothing had changed on screen.
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The Authentik OIDC Redirect Loop: Why Node.js res.setHeader Overwrites Rather Than Appends
A production admin portal entered an infinite login loop after successful Authentik OIDC authorization with zero server errors logged. The root cause was Node.js res.setHeader replacing earlier Set-Cookie headers instead of appending.
