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and power.
The details behind text processing, encoding, and document formats.
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Why Your Reading Time Estimate Is Wrong — Reading Speed Research, Word Count Inconsistency, and Character Limits That Actually Matter
Database Deduplication at Scale: Fuzzy Matching, Master Data Management, and Building a Deduplication Pipeline
Duplicate database records cost businesses in wasted marketing spend and GDPR violations — and simple string matching misses "St" vs "Street" or "Smyth" vs "Smith." Here's the deduplication spectrum from exact to fuzzy matching, master data management golden records, and building a Python deduplication pipeline.
ROT13, Internet Culture, and Why Obfuscation Is Not Encryption
ROT13 is useless for security but was extensively used in Usenet for spoilers — and this illustrates the difference between obfuscation (hiding in plain sight) and encryption (computationally secure). Here's ROT13's internet history, why frequency analysis defeats simple ciphers, and what makes modern encryption actually work.
Mirror Writing, Palindromes, and Da Vinci: The Surprising History of Reversed Text
Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with mirror script — and nobody fully agrees why. Here's the history of mirror writing, palindromes and semordnilaps, how palindrome detection works in code, and why text reversal has surprising practical applications.
Localised Placeholder Text for International Design: When Lorem Ipsum Fails for RTL, CJK, and Other Scripts
Lorem ipsum is Latin-script only — using it for Arabic, Hebrew, or CJK designs produces completely misleading mockups. Here's why RTL text direction, CJK character width, German compound words, and bidirectional text each require different placeholder approaches, plus pseudolocalisation for layout testing.
From Caesar Cipher to AES: The History of Why Substitution Ciphers Fail
ROT13 is a specific case of the Caesar cipher, which was broken by frequency analysis described in 800 AD. Here's the history from Caesar to Vigenère to Enigma to AES — and what each cipher's failure revealed about what real security requires.
URL Design: Why Your Slug Is a Commitment — and How to Get It Right
A URL published today may need to work in 2034. Here's how Wikipedia, the BBC, and GOV.UK approach URL permanence and readability, the SEO costs of changing slugs, and the slug design principles that produce URLs worth keeping.
Regex for Data Cleaning: Practical Patterns for Messy Real-World Data
Real-world data — phone numbers, dates, emails, log entries, product codes — arrives inconsistently. Here are the regex patterns for the most common data cleaning tasks: phone normalisation, date standardisation, HTML stripping, whitespace cleaning, and log redaction.
Fuzzy Deduplication and Record Linkage: When Exact Matching Isn't Enough
Exact deduplication handles perfect matches — but real data has name variations, address inconsistencies, and multi-source formatting differences. Here's fuzzy matching, the record linkage workflow, edit distance, Soundex, and SQL and Python approaches for production-quality deduplication.
Content Truncation Rules: How Every Platform Cuts Your Text — and How to Write for It
Every platform truncates differently — email subject lines at 50 characters, push notifications at 80, meta descriptions at 155. Here's the truncation rules for major platforms, how to implement word-boundary truncation in code, and using truncation as a deliberate writing technique.
Stress Testing with Repetitive Data: The Edge Cases That Break Real Systems
Normal test data misses the edge cases that break real systems. Here's how repetitive and generated data exposes UI text overflow bugs, database cardinality issues, ReDoS vulnerabilities, and the principles behind fuzz testing and property-based testing.
Invisible Unicode Characters: Security Risks, Homoglyph Attacks, and Text Watermarking
Zero-width characters, BiDi control codes, and homoglyphs are used in phishing attacks, document watermarking, and the Trojan Source code injection vulnerability. Here's what invisible Unicode characters are, why they cause bugs, and how to detect and remove them.
Morse Code as Assistive Technology: Enabling Communication with a Single Button
Morse code is an active assistive technology enabling people with motor disabilities to type with a single button. Here's Google's Morse keyboard for Android, how two-switch input works, why Morse code still matters in amateur radio, and the binary tree that makes it efficient.
