Tips

Short videos for real dev work.

Bite-sized walkthroughs on backend patterns, tooling, and the small decisions that save hours in production — not generic screencasts.

Tip playing

6:14

Tip 42

2:186:14

Stop N+1 queries before they ship

ORM prefetch vs select_related
When to denormalize for reads
Measuring query count in CI

Watch first — notes sit under each tip.

9 videos: Short tips you can watch now
Quick format: Most tips under ten minutes
Text + video: Watch first, read notes below each tip

Video library

Every tip published so far.

A clay scroll of code bars with one row lit by a teal highlight and a magnifying glass over it, a chain of small clay modules beside it, under the title RAG, Line by Line, with Line by Line in teal.

Tip #9

A RAG chatbot, line by line in Python

Walk a small RAG chatbot in the order it runs: main.py, the Rag pipeline, and the Llm client. Then see three live runs, and the three gaps it leaves you as challenges: memory, hallucination, and citations.

Oct 27, 2026

A clay robot chatbot with a glass chest showing eight small machines on a teal conveyor in two rows of four, holding a paper page, a speech bubble above, on a dark plinth with the title RAG in 8 Lines, 8 Lines in teal.

Tip #8

RAG in 8 lines, and where memory goes

The eight stages a basic RAG chatbot runs, one line of code each, from gather to the model. Plus why the closest chunks are not the answer, and where a chatbot keeps the conversation.

Oct 26, 2026

A clay balance scale on a dark stage: a light glossy chat bubble rises on one pan while an open page under a teal magnifier sinks on the other, under the title Sure Is Not Checked with Checked in teal.

Tip #7

A sure answer is not a checked one

Why ChatGPT and Gemini can sound sure and still be wrong, what RAG's three steps do, and how to check the page an answer cites. Plus what to update when a document changes.

Oct 26, 2026

Empty clay chair on the left, a small robot token on the right, a falling-then-rising teal line on a dark desk, under the title Software Job Posts with Posts in teal.

Tip #6

Software job posts, five years

US software job posts doubled by 2022, crashed, and in October 2026 are still 22 percent below early 2020. AI did not replace developers. The rebound is mostly senior and AI-titled roles, so you match your work to the post.

Oct 22, 2026

Two clay houses send envelopes along a teal track; a teal stamp marks the sender and a gate before a server tower lets one through, under the title The Origin Header with Origin in teal.

Tip #5

The Origin header

Origin names the site that sent the request. CORS can hide the answer from that site’s JavaScript. CSRF is another site using your Cookie. Delete as the verb, and SameSite Lax, keep an API safer.

Oct 16, 2026