Words, precision
and power.
The details behind text processing, encoding, and document formats.
✦ AI-powered — understands natural language
Why `"abc" is "abc"` Is True But `"hello world" is "hello world"` Might Not Be — String Interning, Ropes, and Concatenation Complexity
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.
Shannon Entropy and Character Frequency: The Information Theory Behind Text Analysis
Character frequency analysis connects directly to Shannon entropy, data compression, and information theory. Here's what the distribution of characters in text reveals about compressibility, password strength, Zipf's Law, and stylometric authorship analysis.
Readability Scores Explained: What Flesch-Kincaid Measures — and What It Misses
Readability scores measure sentence length and syllable count — not vocabulary familiarity, coherence, or domain knowledge. Here's how Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG actually work, what they miss, and when they're genuinely useful as diagnostic tools.
The Case Against Lorem Ipsum — and When to Use It Anyway
Lorem Ipsum is neutral enough to let design be evaluated as design — but it also hides real content problems until production. Here's the legitimate case against Lorem Ipsum, when representative real text produces better design decisions, and when Lorem Ipsum genuinely is the right tool.
How Diff Works: Git, Three-Way Merge, and the Myers Algorithm Behind It
Git diff, pull request reviews, and three-way merges all run on the Myers diff algorithm. Here's how diff finds the shortest edit between two texts, how to read git diff output, why merge conflicts happen, and how diff applies beyond version control.
Code Naming Conventions: Why camelCase, snake_case, and kebab-case Each Exist
Case conventions exist for reasons, not tradition. Here's why Python uses snake_case, JavaScript uses camelCase, CSS uses kebab-case, and how to handle naming across language boundaries when data crosses APIs and databases.
Text Diff — Compare Two Texts and See Exactly What Changed
Learn how text diff works, the difference between line, word, and character diff modes, how to read unified diff format, and when to use a text diff tool for documents, code, and configuration files.
