Profile Before You Optimise: A Five-Minute Habit
Most “slow” code is not slow where you think it is. Measure first, fix second — here is the five-minute loop, from flame graphs to the number you paste into a pull request.
khallaf
Tip
// Archive
All articles
Every published article, newest first. Filter by topic, or jump straight to the tips.
Advertisement
16 articles — page 1 of 2
Regex you will actually use
The small set of regex constructs that cover everyday work, the patterns worth keeping in a snippet file, and how to avoid catastrophic backtracking.
khallaf
Tip
Flutter vs React Native in 2026
A concrete comparison of Flutter and React Native in 2026: rendering models, performance, ecosystem maturity, release process, and the questions that actually decide it.
khallaf
Core Web Vitals in practice
What LCP, INP and CLS actually measure, what breaks each score, and the highest-leverage fixes in the order that pays off fastest for real users.
khallaf
Tip
Three Git Commands That Save an Hour Every Week
Bisect, autosquash and worktree: three built-in Git features that remove whole categories of tedious work, plus the reflog habits that get you out when one of them goes wrong.
khallaf
Tip
Optimistic vs pessimistic locking: how to choose
Two requests touch the same row and one update silently disappears. How version checks, SELECT FOR UPDATE and retry loops behave in production, and how to pick between them.
khallaf
Tip
Cutting a Docker image from 1 GB to 100 MB
A practical walkthrough of multi-stage builds, base image choices, layer order and cache hygiene that takes a typical Node image from roughly 1 GB down to about 100 MB.
khallaf
Tip
Give the Model a Role, Not a Wish
Better prompts come from context, constraints and an output shape — not from adding “please”. Here is how to test prompts, cut cost, and catch confident invention before your users do.
khallaf
RAG vs fine-tuning: when to use which
Fine-tuning changes how a model behaves; retrieval changes what it can see. How to tell which problem you actually have, and how to combine the two without wasting a quarter.
khallaf