If you’ve also been using AI coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, you’ve probably noticed a flood of new terms around the agentic stack — MCP, Skills, Hooks, AGENTS.md, context engineering. It’s a lot. And if you’re like me, you want to understand what each thing actually does before adopting it. After working with them for a while and creating a few of them custom myself, I’ve got some understanding, and here’s the deal: these aren’t just buzzwords. They’re distinct primitives that solve different problems, and together they form an emerging “agentic stack”. ...

What is OAuth? OAuth is an open standard for access delegation. It allows a user to grant a third-party application limited access to their resources (e.g., Google Photos, GitHub repositories) without sharing their credentials (username and password). Instead, OAuth uses tokens to securely manage access. OAuth 1.0: Launched in 2007, it used a signature-based system. It’s now largely obsolete. OAuth 2.0: Introduced in 2012 via RFC 6749, it’s a simpler, more flexible redesign and the focus of this guide. Why Use OAuth? Imagine you want a photo-editing app to access your Google Photos. Without OAuth, you’d share your Google password—risky! OAuth lets you authorize the app to access only your photos, for a limited time, without exposing your credentials. ...

Introduction: Why Digital Signatures Matter Imagine a world where anyone could impersonate you in emails, tamper with your code, or access sensitive files—all because your digital identity lacked verification. This isn’t a dystopian fantasy; it’s the reality we navigate daily. GPG/PGP isn’t just a relic of the 1990s—it’s your shield in an era of phishing, supply chain attacks, and data breaches. Whether you’re a developer safeguarding Git commits, a privacy-conscious user encrypting emails, or a sysadmin hardening SSH access, this guide will help you in utilizing gpg in practice. Let’s dive in. GPG enables you to: ...

Python code snippet photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash At a fast-paced startup, where many commits are pushed frequently across various projects and multiple merge requests are created daily, reviewing them and maintaining code quality standards like code compliance with PEP8 all at the same time is a huge challenge. Making peeps correct their code format or telling them to make changes to follow the pep8 standard is irritating for both. ...

For a startup, before scaling infrastructure either horizontally or vertically we need to make sure that current resources are being used properly, and there is no bottleneck in performance due to the application configuration. The primary aim of the engineering team is to ensure that minimal resources are used in the day to day running of any system designed and deployed. We had faced a similar issue where our deployed system was being used to serve over a million users on a daily basis with spurts of users coming in a sporadic manner. This meant that only deploying multiple servers or scaling them wouldn’t be an optimal solution. ...