- Producing an alkaline battery may require up to 100 times more energy than the battery can deliver.
- This highlights the significant environmental cost of disposable batteries.
- Post-WWII forecasts predicted Asia would struggle due to poverty and lack of resources.
- Asia was considered worse off than Africa at the time.
- Labour force and education proved sufficient to overcome resource disadvantages.
- Probability can be subjective depending on the information available to the observer.
- A secretly observed coin flip is 100% certain for the observer but 50% for everyone else.
- Knowledge asymmetry changes the probability assessment for different people.
- Programming is a craft; pragmatic programmers are inquisitive, realistic, and adaptable.
- Core principles include DRY, orthogonality, reversibility, and designing by contract.
- Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio: learn new languages, read technical books.
- Test early, test often, test automatically — and refactor without hesitation when needed.
- Communicate effectively and always take pride in your work.
- An empty CSS
background-image: url('') causes the browser to make an extra HTTP request to the current page URL. - This triggered a mysterious duplicate request that was difficult to debug.
- The fix is to conditionally omit the style attribute entirely when no image URL is available.
- The bug was found only by old-school elimination debugging.
- Forestry.io is an online editor for Hugo sites, an improvement over scribe.io.
- The preview feature doesn’t support all Hugo shortcodes.
- It lacks spell checking, mobile responsiveness, and the ability to move files between folders.
- It feels designed primarily for Jekyll with Hugo support as secondary.
- Google Passwords has no built-in bulk delete feature.
- A short JavaScript snippet run in the browser console can click all delete buttons at once.
- Hugo with IntelliJ IDEA for writing and Hugo’s live reload server for previewing.
- Deployment is automated via a bash script triggered by git push or GitHub webhooks.
- The site is hosted on a DigitalOcean server with nginx, PageSpeed module, and brotli compression.
- This setup achieved a 100/100 Google PageSpeed score on both mobile and desktop.
- A $5/month DigitalOcean server handled 10,000 requests/second for plain HTML.
- Strong HTTPS reduced capacity to about 4,000 requests/second.
- Google PageSpeed module dropped throughput to 150 clients/second.
- Brotli compression at maximum level further reduced it to 75 clients/second but significantly shrank file sizes.