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<rect x="6" y="33" width="22" height="8" rx="1.5" fill="#E6EDF3" opacity=".45"/></svg><span>Coding the Wheel</span></a><span class="mast-tagline">Software fundamentals, explained properly</span></div><div class="navband"><div class="wrap"><nav class="top" aria-label="Primary"><ul><li><a href="/articles/how-hash-maps-actually-work/">Hash maps</a></li><li><a href="/articles/what-a-database-index-really-is/">Indexes</a></li><li><a href="/articles/why-floating-point-lies/">Floating point</a></li><li><a href="/articles/reading-a-stack-trace/">Stack traces</a></li><li><a href="/archives">Archives</a></li><li><a href="/about/">About</a></li></ul></nav></div></div></header>
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<section class="hero hero-panel"><div class="wrap"><div class="hero-box"><div class="hero-in"><div class="kicker">Software fundamentals</div><h1>Reinventing the wheel, deliberately</h1><p class="lede">Long explanations of the mechanisms under the abstractions — hash maps, indexes, floating point, stack traces — for engineers who want the model, not the recipe.</p></div></div></div></section>
<div class="wrap"><article><p>There is a standing piece of advice in software: don&#39;t reinvent the wheel. It is good advice for shipping and terrible advice for learning, because the fastest way to actually understand a thing is to build a worse version of it yourself and find out where it hurts.</p>
<p>This site is written in that spirit. Long explanations of things most people use without looking inside — how a hash map degrades, what a database index is physically doing, why your async code deadlocks — aimed at working engineers who want the model rather than the recipe.</p>
<ul class="index">
<li><h3><a href="/articles/how-hash-maps-actually-work/">How hash maps actually work</a></h3><p>Buckets, collisions, load factor, and the moment O(1) quietly stops being O(1).</p></li>
<li><h3><a href="/articles/what-a-database-index-really-is/">What a database index really is</a></h3><p>A B-tree, on disk, and why the wrong column order makes one useless.</p></li>
<li><h3><a href="/articles/why-floating-point-lies/">Why floating point lies to you</a></h3><p>0.1 + 0.2, and the binary reason your invoice totals are eight pence out.</p></li>
<li><h3><a href="/articles/reading-a-stack-trace/">Reading a stack trace properly</a></h3><p>The skill nobody teaches, which separates ten-minute bugs from all-day ones.</p></li>
</ul><h2>The bias here</h2>
<p>Depth over breadth, and mechanism over API surface. There are already excellent references for <em>what</em> a function does. There are far fewer good explanations of <em>why the thing behaves that way</em>, and those are the ones that keep paying out ten years later when the framework has been replaced twice.</p>
<p>No tutorials that stop at the interesting part. No &quot;in this article we will explore&quot;. If a piece cannot say something specific, it does not get published.</p>
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