All articles
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Setting locale, timezone and reconfiguring packages non-interactively on Debian and Ubuntu
localectl, timedatectl and update-locale change locale and timezone without a text-mode dialog, and dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive re-runs a package's debconf-driven setup the same way a script would run the original install, both usable in provisioning scripts with no terminal attached.
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Seed data and fixtures for local databases: small, idempotent and versioned with the schema
Separate reference data (needed everywhere), sample data (development and demos) and test data (created by tests); write the seed as idempotent code with upserts on natural keys, keep the sample set small and named, run it after migrations in both the setup script and CI, and never seed developer machines from raw production data.
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Tracking postmortem action items to closure: tracking bugs, single owners and ageing review
The Site Reliability Workbook warns that without a formal tracking process, action items from postmortems are often forgotten; give every item a tracking bug, one owner, a type and a priority, review open items by age on a schedule, and treat an item past its date as a decision to make rather than a line to skip.
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How can a household water-use observation be reproduced?
Open request for a bounded observation protocol, without claims about water savings.
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Distributed tracing at a glance: spans, parent IDs, and W3C Trace Context
A trace is a tree of spans, each with a trace ID, its own span ID, a parent span ID, timestamps, attributes, and a status. The W3C traceparent header carries the trace ID, parent ID, and a sampled flag across process boundaries, and a service that merely forwards both headers still keeps traces intact.
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Unity URP render graph passes: declare dependencies before drawing
Design custom URP passes around explicit inputs and outputs, and migrate older passes against the documentation for the installed engine and package.
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Language tags: BCP 47 in content and APIs
Language tags combine an ISO 639 language code with optional script and region subtags (de, de-CH, zh-Hant); use them for content language declarations, HTML lang attributes and API filters, and validate them rather than accepting free text.
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Unreal Gameplay Ability System: activation, effects and commitment
Separate ability execution from attribute changes and presentation, then define when costs, cooldowns and cancellation take effect.
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Designing an append-only time-series table in PostgreSQL
Store measurements in a table partitioned by time range with timestamptz, a composite key of series and time, indexes matched to the query pattern (B-tree per series, BRIN for whole-table time scans) and retention implemented by detaching and dropping partitions instead of DELETE; the choices follow from rows arriving in time order and leaving in whole time slices.
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Cancellation and deadlines in Go with context.Context
Thread a context.Context from the incoming request through every call that can block, derive child contexts with WithTimeout or WithCancel, always call the cancel function, and check ctx.Done() in loops so that a client disconnect or a deadline stops the whole tree of goroutines instead of leaving them running.
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Stripe API pagination and idempotency keys: starting_after, has_more and the 24-hour window
Stripe's v1 list endpoints paginate with the mutually exclusive starting_after/ending_before cursor parameters (limit 1-100, default 10) and a has_more flag, with client-library auto-pagination helpers to walk every page; POST requests can carry an Idempotency-Key whose saved result Stripe replays for about 24 hours, after which keys may be pruned. Rate-limited requests get 429 with a Stripe-Rate-Limited-Reason header.
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Property-based testing with generated inputs
Instead of hand-picked examples, a property-based test states an invariant and lets a library generate many inputs, shrinking failures to minimal counterexamples; Hypothesis is the reference implementation for Python.
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Preparing a manufacturer's CRA vulnerability workflow: intake, evidence and reporting clocks
A proposed preparation protocol connects vulnerability intake and component records to the CRA reporting decision. It separates the reporting duty already applicable in 2026 from the wider vulnerability handling requirements applicable in December 2027.
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Diagnosing 'No space left on device' when df shows free space
ENOSPC has three common causes besides a full disk: exhausted inodes, space held by deleted files that a process still has open, and the reserved-blocks percentage on ext filesystems. Check df -i, lsof +L1 and the mount's reservation before deleting anything.
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Wave Function Collapse: local constraints and global playability
Generate tile arrangements through domain reduction and weighted choices, handle contradictions explicitly, and validate gameplay properties beyond local adjacency.
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Agile principles as concrete working agreements
The twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto become useful when translated into checkable team agreements: delivery cadence, direct communication, sustainable pace, technical excellence and regular reflection.
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cgroups v2 on the host: checking the mode and reading per-unit resource limits
Modern container runtimes and systemd both rely on cgroups v2 (the unified hierarchy) to enforce memory and CPU limits. This methodology covers confirming the host is in unified mode, browsing the tree with systemd-cgls/systemd-cgtop, and reading a unit's or container's actual limits.
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Sampling Windows Server performance counters with Get-Counter and exporting them to CSV
Get-Counter samples named counter paths at a chosen interval, continuously or for a fixed count; Export-Counter (Windows PowerShell 5.1 only) preserves every field in the native BLG format, and relog converts a capture to CSV afterwards even without the original Export-Counter command.
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Custom 404 pages and soft 404s: serve the error page with the error status
A custom 404 page helps users only if it is served with status 404; a not-found page served with 200 is a soft 404 that crawlers keep fetching and search engines exclude. nginx's error_page can rewrite the status (error_page 404 =200 ...), which is exactly how soft 404s are created by accident; keep the status, make the page useful, and check with curl -I.
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Dry-run and confirmation in admin scripts: PowerShell -WhatIf/-Confirm and a shell --dry-run flag
PowerShell has a built-in mechanism, SupportsShouldProcess, that gives a custom function real -WhatIf and -Confirm switches wired to the same $PSCmdlet.ShouldProcess() call the built-in cmdlets use. Shell scripts have no equivalent built in, so a --dry-run flag has to be threaded through by hand.
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