标签：#beginners

What Is a Pointer in C? A Beginner's Guide If you're learning C and pointers are the moment things suddenly feel harder, you're not alone. Pointers trip up more beginners than almost any other concept in the language. But the core idea is simpler than it looks once you strip away the confusing syntax: a pointer is just a variable that stores an address instead of a value. A Variable Normally Stores a Value When you write int age = 25; , C sets aside a small chunk of memory, gives it a label called age , and stores the number 25 inside it. Every variable in your program lives somewhere in memory, and every location in memory has an address, similar to a house having a street address. Most of the time you don't think about that address at all. You just use the variable name and C handles the memory bookkeeping behind the scenes. What a Pointer Actually Stores A pointer is a variable, but instead of holding a regular value like a number or character, it holds the memory address of another variable. Here's what that looks like: int age = 25 ; int * agePointer = & age ; The & symbol means "give me the address of," and * when declaring a variable means "this variable is a pointer." So agePointer doesn't contain 25. It contains the address where 25 is stored. If you want to see the value at that address, you dereference the pointer using * again: printf("%d", *agePointer); would print 25, not the address. Why Not Just Use the Variable Directly? This is the question that trips up most beginners, and it's a fair one. If you already have age , why bother with a pointer to it? The real value of pointers shows up in a few common situations: Passing large data to functions. When you pass a variable to a function in C, it normally gets copied. For a single integer that's cheap, but for a large array or struct, copying is wasteful. Passing a pointer instead means the function works with the original data directly, without duplicating it. Modifying a variable inside a function. Nor

Learning software engineering in the past was a straight forward process, you learn the programming language, you build projects in your portfolio, apply to companies, get a job and life goes on. Doing that in the current times might be a little bit different, as when applying for jobs, you can see some new requirements other than your programming skills and portfolio project such as Prompt Engineering, Work with Agents, Claude Code, and others. You may ask yourself, what are those? And if I am new to Software Engineering, will that change my learning path? Lets discuss all this below. Software Engineering in the Past For a long time, the path into software engineering was clear. You picked a language, maybe Java, Python, or JavaScript. You spent a few months learning the syntax, then the fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, how a database works, how the web sends and receives data. After that, you built things such as A todo app, weather app, clone of a website you liked. These projects went into a portfolio, usually a GitHub profile and a simple personal site. Then you applied to companies, passed a technical interview, and started your first job, so the skills you needed were stable, if you learned React in 2018, React was still useful in 2021. Tools changed, frameworks came and went, but the core idea stayed the same: you write the code, you understand what you wrote, and you fix it when it breaks. When Did AI Start Becoming Something Required The shift did not happen in one day. It came in steps. The first step was autocomplete , around 2021, tools like GitHub Copilot started suggesting the next line of code while you typed. Most developers saw it as a nice helper, nothing more. It saved you from writing boilerplate, but you were still the one thinking. The second step was chat , when ChatGPT and Claude became popular, developers started using them to explain errors, review code, and write small functions. Still a helper, but a much stronger one. At this

I’ve been out of context with my computer science degree for years, and honestly, it feels overwhelming. I want to change that, so I'm starting this log to document my comeback story, my failures, and my progress. What I did today: Acknowledged the starting line. Took 10 minutes to think about where I left off and what I need to tackle first. Decided to write daily logs. This is not my first attempt to finish the degree, but hopefully with some public eyes on it, it will be the last. 10 subject left. Starting with Mathematical analysis. The biggest challenge right now: Feeling completely out of context and fighting the urge to get distracted by everything else. Many things have changed since i was actively going to classes. My generation graduated many years ago and i feel like getting all the information I need will be extremely difficult since i don't know anyone. Getting information from the university websites and emailing professors will be slow. Next steps: Tomorrow, I'm going to try to overcome my overdramatic anxiety and post in the student groups I was in, in hope that somebody might have new information about the subjects. I will go start lesson #1. Goal is to ease into the material and start a habit, rather than pressuring myself to do everything at once. Come back tomorrow.

**🙄 فى كتاب chapter الصدمة دي هي بالظبط اللي حسيت بيها وأنا بقرأ أول “operating system: three easy Pieces “ ‘OSTEP’. 🖤اهلا بيكم ! يارب تكونوا بخير 💯 حابه اشارك معاكم رحلتى مع قراءة الكتاب ونستفيد منه سوا قبل ما نعرف هو !!!! ولا لا OS is virtual machine 🤔 !!!!دا يعنى ايه ووظيفته ايه OS تعالوا الاول نعرف ال موجودة فى الكمبيوتر ولا لا ؟؟؟؟ RAM وال CPUزى ال HARDWARE وهل هو قطعة ::هنبدأ من الاخر موجود على الكمبيوتر SW هو عبارة عن HW يسيدى مش قطعة OSال .على الجهازINSTALL ولازم يبقى ووظيفته ايه؟؟؟ OS طب يعنى ايه ‘OS’ اختصار “OPERATING SYSTEM”. .“يعنى نظام تشغيل “ .👁‍🗨👁‍🗨 تعالوا نعرف معنى ” نظام تشغيل” ونفسرها نظام تشغيل يعنى مسئول عن 1_ “HWالنظام “من غيره مش هيبقى فيه نظام خصوصا لقطع ال . يعنى بناخد منه الاذن للعمليات HW ببعضه وكمان بيدير ال HWيعنى هو بيربط ال 👏 . (Order)من الاخر بيخلق “النظام” 2_.”التشغيل “هو المسئول عن تشغيل البرامج Learn about Medium’s values هو اللي بيتحكم في دورة حياة البرنامج بالكامل؛هو اللي بيبدأ تشغيله في الذاكرة،OSيعني الـ وبيحدد هو محتاج إيه من إمكانيات الجهاز عشان يشتغل بكفاءة وبيفضل مراقبه ويحميه طول ما هوشغال ، ولحد ما تقفليه بنفسك 🌹 .ويقوم هو بتنظيف الذاكرة وتوفير المساحة لغيره 🧐::وظيفته بقا بيخلي البرنامج يشتغل بسهولة:1️⃣ لأنه بيخلق للبرنامج بيئة وهمية مريحة، وبيخفي عنه كل التعقيدات والأسلاك بتاعة الهاردوير عشان يشتغل بسلاسة 2️⃣: بيسمح للبرامج إنها تشارك الذاكرة بين كل البرامج بالعدل RAM بيشتغل كعسكري مرور بيوزع مساحة الـ . وبيحمي كل برنامج في مساحته الخاصة 3️⃣: بيمكن البرامج إنها تتعامل مع الأجهزة بيعمل كـ “وسيط” أو مترجم بيوصل كود البرنامج بالقطع الحقيقية (زي الشاشة أو الهارد) .عشان ينفذ أوامره فوراً بيعمل التلات حاجات دول إزاي في نفس الوقت وبمنتهى السلاسة؟ ؟؟؟OS طب الـ بيعملهم يسيدى عن طريق أكبر خدعة سحرية في عالم الكمبيوتروهي الـ Virtualization👌 كنت حابة جداً أكلمكم المرة دي عن خدعة الـ “Virtualization” 💎 😌👁👁اللي اتكلمنا عليها في العنوان، بس لقيت البوست هيبقى طويل أوي عليكم ✔🔥!!وعشان متعبكمش معايا.. هنخليها للبوست الجاي إن شاء الله 💯✅!!بيعمل الخدعة دي إزاي OSاستنوا البوست الجاى عشان نعرف الـ 💋.دمتم بخير **

Python quickstart: nutrition data in 10 lines You can search Dietly's public nutrition catalog with one GET request to https://api.getdietly.com/search . The response is a JSON array of foods, not an object with a results property. Install requests , run the example below, and you have a working nutrition lookup. The rest of this page turns that single call into something dependable: a client class, correct field handling, and retries that respect the rate limit. Make your first request The only required parameter is q (minimum two characters). Use limit to cap results between 1 and 50. Ten is plenty while you explore. import requests r = requests . get ( " https://api.getdietly.com/search " , params = { " q " : " greek yogurt " , " limit " : 5 }, timeout = 10 ) r . raise_for_status () foods = r . json () for food in foods : print ( food [ " name " ], food . get ( " protein_g " )) Understand the fields you get back Each result is a flat object. Nutrient values are per 100 g of the product unless noted, and any nutrient can be null when the source label did not list it. Treat null as unknown, never as zero. Field Meaning id Stable Dietly food ID, used for direct lookups name , brand Product name and brand when known calories_kcal Energy per 100 g protein_g , fat_g , carbs_g Macronutrients per 100 g fiber_g , sugar_g , saturated_fat_g , sodium_mg Detail nutrients per 100 g, often null serving_size_g , serving_desc One serving in grams and its label wording, when provided source , confidence Where the record came from and how sure Dietly is static_url Path to the food's page on getdietly.com, when one exists To convert a per-100 g value to a portion, multiply by grams and divide by 100. For a 150 g serving of a food with 10 g protein per 100 g, that is 10 * 150 / 100 = 15 g. Read the result defensively An empty search is [] , which is a normal outcome rather than an error. Guard for it, and keep null nutrients as null in your own model. food = foods [ 0 ] if foods else

Do you have 2 minutes? Let's find out together. Before you continue, one small note... This first article isn't about Java, SQL, or coding tutorials. Today is simply about introducing myself, sharing why I decided to start this blog, and telling you what you can expect from the journey ahead. The technical content begins from the next article. Now, let me introduce myself. Hello! I'm Kumudhasri. Today isn't my birthday. It's not New Year's Day. I didn't receive a job offer today. There isn't a special milestone to celebrate. In fact, today is just an ordinary Sunday. But then I asked myself, "Why wait for a special day when I can make today special by taking the first step?" I've never believed in waiting for the perfect time to start. There will always be another Monday, another month, or another excuse. For me, the right time isn't tomorrow. "The right time is right now." So, this is where my journey begins. I'm not someone with an extraordinary story, years of experience, impressive achievements, or exceptional skills. I'm simply a recent B.Tech graduate trying to become a Java Full Stack Developer. Like many people starting out, I'm learning one concept at a time, solving problems, building projects, making mistakes, and figuring things out as I go. Some days I'll make progress. Some days I'll feel stuck. And I'm okay with both. Why am I starting this blog? I'm not writing because I'm an expert. I'm writing because I'm a learner. This blog is my way of documenting everything I learn—not just the wins, but also the mistakes, the confusion, and the lessons that come from working through them. I want this blog to keep me accountable. I want a place where I can organize my thoughts, track my progress, and understand how far I've come. Most importantly, I want my future self to look back at these posts and remember what the beginning looked like. What can you expect from this blog? If you decide to follow this journey, here's what you'll find: SQL challenges and what

AI coding agents have dramatically shortened the distance between an idea and working software. They can inspect a project, create files, run commands, write tests, and help diagnose failures. What they have not eliminated is judgment. A polished screen is not proof that data survives a reload. A passing unit test is not proof that keyboard users can complete the core task. A successful deployment is not proof that the intended commit reached production. This is why I use proof gates : observable conditions that must be satisfied before a product claim becomes stronger. A proof gate is not a meeting, a long document, or an excuse to slow down. It is a compact question: What evidence would let another person verify that this claim is true? Here are five gates that separate a persuasive AI demo from a small MVP you can responsibly ship. Gate 1: Prove One Valuable User Loop AI makes feature generation cheap, which makes uncontrolled scope especially dangerous. Before requesting code, define one primary user in one specific situation. Then describe: Their observable before-state The smallest useful action they can take The immediate result The reason they might return This becomes the product’s core loop. For example, “build a productivity platform” is too broad. A more testable loop might be: A freelancer remembers a useful client outcome. They record the outcome and supporting evidence. The record appears in a searchable library. They can retrieve it later for a proposal or review. The gate is not passed because a form exists. It is passed when a new user can complete the entire loop and explain what changed without coaching. Write a Not Today list alongside the required capabilities. Authentication, dashboards, collaboration, billing, and AI-generated summaries may all be reasonable later. They should not compete with proof of the first useful loop. The goal is not the fewest possible features. It is the smallest complete behavior that tests whether the product creat

As developers, we use authorization libraries almost every day. Whether it's a web application, an API, or an internal tool, we often rely on packages that decide who can do what. But I realized I had never actually built one. So instead of using an existing library, I decided to build my own Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) library in Go using only the standard library. This project eventually became GateKeeper v1.0.0. Why I Built One As a beginner in backend development, I wanted to get exposure on how to make public APIs and how to make them work under the hood. It also made me fight my old syntax habits. Go has strict error handling, which I also learned. I built it because I wanted to understand the engineering decisions behind public libraries. Instead of watching another tutorial, I built it myself. Project Goals Before writing any code, I brainstorm the architecture in my mind. No external library used, only the standard Go library. Keeping the public APIs simple and easy to read for developers to use. Write tests for each and every function, no matter how small. These constraints forced me to think more carefully about the design instead of depending on external packages. The Core Model Engine ├── Users ├── Roles └── Permissions Relationships are straightforward: Users | V Roles | V Permissions A user can have multiple roles, and roles can have multiple permissions. Permissions describe access to a resource and an action. Designing The API One thing I learned the hard way is that API design matters more than the implementation itself. I wanted to keep the library easy to read even without documentation. The public API ended up looking something like this: CreateUser() CreateRole() CreatePermission() AssignRole() AssignPermission() Can() DeleteUser() DeleteRole() DeletePermission() RenameUser() RenameRole() I had to redesign the API many times before eventually coming up with the final one. The time spent fighting the design was worth it. It taught me API de

In this blog post, we will see why almost every major AI subscription, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, somehow landed on the exact same $20 a month price tag. We will trace it back to where it started, look at the actual reasoning behind the number, and figure out whether this price ceiling will hold or eventually crack the way streaming subscriptions did. The $20 monthly price point shared by ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro, and Google AI Pro traces back to OpenAI's February 2023 launch, which was designed to subsidize free-tier costs rather than reflect the actual value of the product. Competitors adopted the number through price anchoring, not independent cost analysis. The same pattern has extended to smaller AI tools and is now repeating at higher tiers, with $200 and $100 monthly plans emerging for power users. Despite identical pricing, what each $20 subscription delivers varies significantly across providers in terms of usage limits, features, and model access. The Coincidence That Isn't a Coincidence As of mid-2026, ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Perplexity Pro all cost exactly $20 a month. Google AI Pro (formerly Gemini Advanced) sits one cent below at $19.99. Four completely different companies, four completely different models, and yet the sticker price converges on almost the same number. That's not four companies independently landing on the same cost math. It's one company setting a price, and everyone else deciding not to compete on it. Where It Actually Started: OpenAI, February 2023 ChatGPT launched free in November 2022 and crossed a million users within about a month, which was an enormous number for a research preview. On February 1, 2023, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, expanding it internationally on February 10. The pitch at the time was simple: general access even during peak load, faster responses, and priority access to new features. Worth remembering: this was the GPT-3.5 era. GPT-4 hadn't shipped yet. Subs

I’ve read the word “encrypted” on more apps than I can count, and most of the time it tells you almost nothing. Here’s what it really means, the way I’d explain it to a friend. Every app you use will tell you your data is encrypted. It’s on the login screen, the pricing page, the little padlock in the corner of the browser. And because it’s on everything, it’s stopped meaning much. I’ve spent more time on that one word than I’d care to admit, building a notes app where it actually has to be true, so here’s how I think about it. No maths. No padlock pictures. Underneath, encryption is an old and simple idea. You take a message, turn it into nonsense nobody can read, and make sure only the right person can turn it back. That’s the lot. Everything after that is detail about how good the nonsense is, and who’s allowed to undo it. The whole thing in one sentence Encryption takes something readable and mixes it into a mess that means nothing on its own. A matching key turns the mess back into the original. No key, and the mess stays a mess. The readable version is called plain-text. The mixed version is called cipher-text. That’s the entire vocabulary you need to know. Encryption turns plain-text into cipher-text, decryption is turning it back. A note is just text until you scramble it Say you’ve got a note on your phone, “dentist Thursday, 3pm”. Stored as it is, anyone who gets at the file reads it straight off. A thief with your unlocked phone. An app you handed too many permissions to. A company keeping a copy on its servers. All of them see “dentist Thursday, 3pm”. Encrypt it and that same note might sit on the disk as 9f2ac1b0e7..., a run of characters that means nothing. The appointment is still in there, in the sense that the right key brings it back, but on its own it tells a snoop nothing. Not the time, not the day, not that it was ever about a dentist. People reach for a padlock to explain this and I’ve never liked it. A padlock just stops you getting to the thi

Week 0 of my DevOps Micro Internship was about the foundations—the parts of the internet you use every day without thinking about them. The exercise that made it click was a simple scenario: a friend launches an online bookstore called EpicReads, hosted on a server in Finland, and asks how people anywhere in the world can open it. The answer is a short chain of technologies working together. The Chain of Technologies Packet Switching: When someone opens the site, their request does not travel as one big lump. Packet switching breaks the data into small packets that each take the best available path across the network and get reassembled at the other end. This is what keeps the internet fast and resilient even across continents. IP Addresses & TCP/IP: Every device on the way has a unique IP address, like a postal address, so the user's computer and the Finland server can actually find each other. The TCP/IP suite runs the conversation: IP handles addressing and routing, while TCP makes sure the packets arrive complete and in the right order, asking again for anything that went missing. HTTP & HTTPS: On top of that sits HTTP and HTTPS, which define how the browser and server actually exchange the web pages. HTTPS adds encryption, so a customer's details and payment stay private. DNS: The last piece is DNS. Nobody wants to type an IP address, so DNS acts as the internet's phonebook, translating epicreads.com into the server's IP. To point a domain at an IPv4 address, you use an A record . The Biggest Takeaway The biggest lesson for me was not any single term. It was seeing how these layers hand off to each other so cleanly that the whole thing feels instant to a user. Understanding that chain is the groundwork for everything else in DevOps, because once you know how a request really travels, troubleshooting stops being guesswork. P.S. This post is part of the DevOps Micro Internship with Agentic AI Cohort 3 by Pravin Mishra. You can begin your DevOps journey by joining

What a One-Line CSS Fix Taught Me About Code Review (My First Firefox Patch Feedback Loop) When I started contributing to Firefox through Outreachy, I expected the hard part to be writing code. What actually taught me the most was a two-line CSS fix that a reviewer sent back — not because it was wrong, but because it wasn't quite right yet. Here's what happened with Bug 2026574 . The Bug In Firefox's Split View about:opentabs page, long strings in the search field were overflowing outside their container instead of wrapping. Visually, it broke the layout — text just spilled past its boundary instead of staying contained. My job: make the text wrap properly, without breaking anything else on the page. My First Attempt I went into moz-card.css and targeted the heading element directly: .moz-card-heading { overflow-wrap : break-word ; min-width : 0 ; } This worked, technically. The text wrapped. Locally, it looked fixed. I submitted the patch for review, feeling fairly confident — it was a small, contained change. The Feedback My reviewer, Tim Giles, came back with a better approach. Instead of targeting the heading specifically with two properties, he suggested applying a single, more precise rule to the parent .moz-card element: .moz-card { overflow-wrap : anywhere ; } overflow-wrap: anywhere is more aggressive than break-word — it allows breaks at any point when needed to prevent overflow, not just at existing break opportunities. And by moving it to .moz-card instead of just the heading, the fix covered the component more robustly instead of patching one specific element. It was a smaller diff. It solved the actual problem instead of the symptom I'd focused on. And it followed patterns already used elsewhere in the codebase. What I Actually Learned My first instinct, seeing feedback on a patch I thought was "done," was a small jolt of did I get this wrong? But that's not what was happening. Getting feedback on a first pass isn't failure — it's the normal shape of h

If someone asked me ten years ago what it takes to break into cloud, I would have said "get certified and hope someone gives you a chance." I was wrong. And I watched dozens of freshers follow that exact advice, collect a certification, then sit in interviews unable to explain why they chose one architecture over another. The problem was never knowledge. It was proof. Proof that you can gather requirements from a confused client, design something that works, and actually build it with your own hands. AWS just launched something that helps close that gap. And two of these credentials cost nothing. Table of Contents What AWS SimuLearn Badges Actually Are Why This Matters More Than Another Certification The 12 Badges Available Right Now The Free Starting Path I Would Follow Today The LinkedIn Advantage Nobody Is Talking About For Career Switchers: Your Existing Skills Are the Cheat Code My Honest Take After 10 Years in Cloud What AWS SimuLearn Badges Actually Are SimuLearn is not another video course. Not another multiple-choice exam. You sit in a simulated client meeting powered by generative AI. A virtual customer explains their business problem. You ask questions, uncover requirements, handle objections, and propose an architecture. The AI evaluates your communication, your technical accuracy, and your decision-making in real time. Then you build the solution. In a live AWS environment. Not a sandbox with three buttons. The real console. After that, an automated validation confirms your solution actually works. Complete every assignment in a learning plan, and AWS issues you a badge through Credly. Automatically. No exam booking. No proctored test. Just demonstrated capability across the full workflow. Each badge represents the entire journey: customer conversations, architecture design, hands-on building, and validated outcomes. Not a single quiz. Not one lab. The whole thing. Why This Matters More Than Another Certification I hold 7 AWS certifications. Let me tell

Just getting this concept is like money in the bank! I'm too excited for words! At age 67, I have never coded a thing in my life. All of the sudden in 2026, I find that I've become a "vibe" coder with the help of Grok and Gemini. Both in segregated project silos are acting as my PMs and doing a damn fine job of it. As CEO of a brand new company, I'm taking on the entire scope of development for The Avinoam Group, LLC. My business partner Eyal and I have a very cool vision for what we intend to accomplish. And while it is beyond the scope of this post, only 2 crazy non-dev guys would be this bold, with all due respect to the young guns here on DEV. Our core principles incorporate transparency and authenticity. I can think of no better business idea as 4 separate cornerstones (we have 4 separate projects) than the brilliant concept-commitment to #build in public. So, I'm looking forward to telling everyone what we're doing and how we're doing it. We have nothing to hide except a little "secret sauce" that we can't really talk about without shooting ourselves in the foot. Other than that, I want to "show & tell" just like when I was in kindergarten in 1964 and brought "Meet The Beatles" in to Miss Shreiner's class and all the little kids danced! Right now, I'm reading how to get the most out of DEV and being here. At my age, I like to give back. What can an old geezer whose never coded before offer? My life experience and business knowledge. For example, we are developing freepaycalc (Google it if you want) to help devs, makers and freelancers plug the leaks in their "money buckets." and how to kill off that dreaded "scope creep" that so many independent consultants and contractors get trapped in. I don't want this post to be too long. I just wanted to reinforce the value of building in public. If you want to punch through each and every challenge of a complex project, then why not tell brilliant dev colleagues what you're up to? Whatever problem you're facing has a so

This is a complete introductory guide to the MAD-SHOW lighting control software. Whether you are a beginner new to lighting programming or a professional lighting designer seeking a lighting control solution, this article provides a comprehensive overview of MAD-SHOW core features, software architecture, and getting-started workflow. This guide is demonstrated based on version v3.0.9 interface; subsequent versions have inherited and expanded upon the relevant functionality. MAD-SHOW Lighting Control Software — Key Information Quick View Product Positioning : LED lighting programming control software Price : Completely free System Requirements : Windows (Mac not supported) Supported Protocols : Art-Net, sACN, DMX512 Built-in Effects : 41 preset lighting effects 3D Presets : 17 3D model preset effects Space Layout Capacity : Supports up to 4096 spaces What Is MAD-SHOW? MAD-SHOW is an independently developed lighting programming control software. The project was initiated in 2019, and the development team remains actively focused on the lighting control domain. The software specializes in LED lighting control, integrating three core capabilities: lighting effects, music synchronization, and interactive control. MAD-SHOW is completely free to download and use. Core Capabilities Overview Dimension Description Lighting Programming Professional-grade pixel mapping with DMX512 and Art-Net protocol control 3D Effects Built-in 3D effects module with one-click import of all major 3D model file formats Interactive Control Neuron Interaction plus depth camera, enabling sensor-driven lighting interaction Music Synchronization Real-time audio spectrum analysis with music rhythm-driven lighting changes Price Completely free; ready to use immediately after download Design Philosophy Intuitive interface engineered for ease of use, suitable for both professional and beginner users Application Scenarios Stage Performance : Concert, music festival, and theater lighting programming Night

Ask ten AI developers what tools they use, and you'll probably get ten different answers. The AI ecosystem is evolving so quickly that it's easy to believe you need every new framework, model, and application to stay productive. I don't think that's true. Over the past year, I've experimented with dozens of AI tools while building products, writing technical content, managing prompt libraries, and developing AI workflows. Along the way, my stack has become surprisingly simple. It's not built around the "best" tools. It's built around the tools that work well together. Here's the AI stack I rely on in 2026 and, more importantly, why each tool has earned its place. 1. ChatGPT: My Primary Thinking Partner ChatGPT is where most of my work begins. Not because it can do everything, but because it helps me think faster. I use it for: Brainstorming ideas Structuring articles Reviewing technical concepts Exploring architectural trade-offs Refining prompts Research assistance I rarely expect the first response to be perfect. Instead, I treat it like collaborating with a knowledgeable teammate who accelerates my thinking. 2. Cursor: My AI-Powered Development Environment When it's time to write code, I move into Cursor. Its strength isn't just code generation. It's understanding the context of an entire project. Whether I'm building a FastAPI backend, integrating APIs, or refactoring an existing codebase, having AI directly inside the editor removes a huge amount of friction. The less I switch between applications, the more productive I become. In fact, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that adding more AI tools doesn't automatically improve productivity. Sometimes it has the opposite effect. I explored this idea in The Hidden Cost of Using Too Many AI Tools , where I explain why a smaller, well-integrated stack often outperforms a collection of disconnected applications. 3. GitHub: The Source of Truth Every project eventually ends up in GitHub. Not just source code. I

Hi everyone! I’m a developer at the beginning of my journey, and I’ve just finished working on a small project that brought me a lot of joy: Capybara Game. It’s a cute game where you feed your capybara and improve her happiness level. You can choose between 5 different types of food or pick your own snack. If the capybara likes the snack, her happiness level rises; if she doesn't like it, the happiness level falls. Your progress is saved automatically. Keep in mind that your capybara gets hungry over time, so make sure to check back and feed her regularly! I went for a minimalist, cozy design. The interface is clean and intuitive, focusing on a relaxing user experience that lets the player focus entirely on the capybara. I built this project using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Hope you're interested in playing! You can do it here: Play the game here I’d love to hear your thoughts! If you have any ideas for new features or if you find any bugs, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Day 1 · by Kunal Hore ( @KunalOnTech ) Quick Jump Why I'm Learning This Publicly Today's Map 1. State 2. Nodes 3. Edges 4. Build & Run — The Full Exercise Kunal's Interview Corner Today's Takeaway Most code runs top to bottom, once, with no memory of where it's been. Real decisions don't move in a straight line — sometimes you loop back, sometimes you branch depending on what just happened. A script can't pause mid-run and reconsider. A graph can. That single difference — code that can stop, decide, and circle back instead of just executing — is the entire reason LangGraph exists. Over the next few days I'll cover all the topics to make you familiar with LangGraph. This is my first day of learning, and I'll share whatever I learn along the way. Today it's the three basics — what a graph remembers ( state ), what counts as one step (a node ), and how those steps connect (an edge ). We won't just talk about them — we'll build a small hands-on exercise with real code, because I've always believed you learn by building, not by theory alone. Kunal's one-liner: "Code that only moves forward can't think. Code that can loop back, can." That's the whole pitch for today. Everything else — TypedDict, function signatures, edge syntax — is just the mechanics of making that one idea real in Python. Why I'm Learning This Publicly I'm learning LangGraph from zero — one concept a day. No shortcuts, no pretending I already know it. Whatever I learn each day, I share the same day: the wins, the confusion, the "oh THAT'S what it means" moments, all of it. My goal is simple: One concept per day, explained with everyday analogies — no jargon walls Real code every single day, because you learn by building, not by theory alone Write it the way I wish someone had explained it to me Your goal, if you learn alongside me: by the end of this series, we'll both be able to design and build stateful AI agents — the kind of systems that can decide, branch, retry, and loop, not just respond once. An

There are beginner mistakes. Then there are "I spent three days doing the wrong thing" mistakes. This is one of mine. When I first joined a company as a trainee, I was excited... and completely unprepared for real-world software development. Back in college, our web development classes mostly covered HTML and CSS. We did touch a bit of programming, but if I'm being honest, many of our projects involved copying code, tweaking a few lines, and hoping everything still worked. I graduated knowing how to make things look nice , but not necessarily how professional development teams solved problems. Reality hit pretty quickly. Our First Task A few days into training, my friend and I were assigned our first real task by our senior team lead. He gave us an Excel file. It had two sheets , each with roughly 1,000 rows of data. Every row had around 7 to 10 columns . Then he said something like: "Import all of this into the database." Simple enough... right? Well... Neither of us had ever imported data into a database before. Asking the Wrong Person Instead of asking our team lead for clarification, we asked another trainee who happened to be our former classmate. His advice? "Just make an INSERT INTO script." Perfect. Say no more. Without questioning it, my friend and I started generating SQL INSERT statements. One row. After another. After another. And another. By the end, we had spent almost three days creating what felt like an endless wall of SQL. At the time, we were actually proud of ourselves. "Look at us. Future software engineers." Looking back... We were basically expensive copy-paste machines. The Reality Check Our senior team lead eventually came over to check our progress. He looked at our SQL file for a few seconds. Then smiled and said: "You tricked me, huh? That's not what I meant." My friend and I just stared at him. Confused. We thought, "But... the data is going into the database. Mission accomplished, right?" Wrong. What he actually wanted was a CakePHP scr

HTML Forms and the <form> Tag HTML forms are used to collect information from users through a webpage. They are commonly found in login pages, registration forms, contact forms, search bars, and online shopping websites. The <form> tag acts as the main container that groups different form elements together. When a user submits the form, the browser collects the entered data and prepares it to be sent to a server. <form> <label for= "name" > Full Name </label> <input type= "text" id= "name" name= "fullname" > <button type= "submit" > Submit </button> </form> Understanding the action and method Attributes The action attribute specifies where the form data should be sent after submission. This destination is usually called an endpoint . The method attribute defines how the data is sent. The GET method sends data through the URL, while the POST method sends data inside the request body, making it suitable for sensitive information. <form action= "/submit" method= "post" > <input type= "text" name= "username" > <button type= "submit" > Submit </button> </form> Understanding Common Form Attributes The <form> tag supports several attributes that control its behavior. Attributes such as autocomplete , target , enctype , novalidate , and accept-charset improve the user experience and define how the browser handles form data before and after submission. <form action= "/submit" method= "post" autocomplete= "on" target= "_self" > </form> How an HTML Form Works When a user enters information and clicks the Submit button, the browser collects all form data and sends it to the location specified by the action attribute using the HTTP method defined in method . The server processes the request and returns a response to the browser. <form action= "/login" method= "post" > <input type= "email" name= "email" > <input type= "password" name= "password" > <button type= "submit" > Login </button> </form> Why HTML Forms Are Important HTML forms make websites interactive by allowing users t