Notes on formats, encoding, and the tools around them

Short, practical write-ups — the kind of thing worth knowing once and not re-deriving every time.

Both are readable, structured data formats, but they solve slightly different problems.

The moment you paste something into an online tool, you're trusting whoever runs the server behind it.

A quick reference for the patterns that come up constantly, without re-deriving them from scratch.

It shows up everywhere from JWTs to email attachments, but what it's actually doing is simpler than it looks.

The five fields aren't as arbitrary as they look once you know the order.

Both give you a unique identifier, but they behave very differently once they hit a database index.