NIKHEDONIA
Mathematics · Algorithms · Engineering
Distributed Systems··7 min read
Raft & Viewstamped Replication: Consensus Visualized
An interactive deep-dive into two landmark distributed consensus algorithms — Raft and Viewstamped Replication — with live simulations you can explore and break.
Also In This Issue
Automatic Differentiation
A deep-dive into automatic differentiation: symbolic vs. numerical vs. AD, AST transformation, dual numbers, tapes, hybrid methods, and a generic C++ implementation that computes gradients and solves optimisation problems.
Detecting Hallucinations in LLM Summaries
LLMs write convincingly but fabricate facts. A practical tour of automated detection techniques: BERTScore, embedding similarity, ROUGE/n-gram overlap, NER-based cross-referencing, and QAEVAL.
React vs SolidJS: Dynamic Graphs, Static Graphs, and the Price of Flexibility
React and SolidJS share JSX syntax but are built on fundamentally different computational models. Understanding why illuminates a much older tension in functional programming — and an eerily similar split that once divided PyTorch from TensorFlow.
◆ Interactive Feature
The Challenges of WebGL
WebGL lets you run shaders in the browser — and that's genuinely magical. But using it for arbitrary GPU computation quickly reveals a thicket of constraints that OpenCL and WebGPU were designed to escape.
Read full article →Interactive Features
Fuzzy Search: Typos, Tries, and the Algorithms Behind Instant Results
A deep dive into how fuzzy search works — from edit distance and tries to stemming, BK-trees, and how Lucene/Elasticsearch find typo-tolerant matches at scale.
11 min readPerfect Hash Functions: Collision-Free by Design
A deep dive into perfect hash functions — what they are, why they matter, how to find one efficiently with parallel search, and how they compare to JavaScript's built-in Map.
8 min readFrom DIY Monorepo to Nx: Lessons from a White-Label Credit Card Platform (2024)
Part 2 of a multi-year migration case study. After building a homegrown monorepo toolchain, we adopted Nx — and discovered that its opinionated approach solves some problems elegantly while creating new ones when your apps can't truly be isolated.
11 min readFrom Legacy to Monorepo: Migrating a White-Label Credit Card Platform (2021–2024)
A four-year case study of migrating a white-labeled credit card platform from a legacy Angular/C# stack to a React monorepo with single-spa — covering GraphQL BFFs, micro-frontends, build parallelization, and the people problems that matter more than the tech ones.
18 min readOptimizing CI Builds with Docker Layer Caching on TeamCity
How we cut build times from 45 minutes down to 3–10 minutes on an on-premise TeamCity cluster using multistage Docker builds, content-addressed cache keys, and shared filesystem volumes — plus what modern BuildKit unlocks today.
buckaroo.pm - Find C++ packages
A companion website for the Buckaroo package manager — browse ~400 C++ packages from GitHub, explore the dependency graph, and find what you need instantly with precompiled fuzzy search.
Buckaroo: Conflict-Driven Dependency Resolution for C++
How Buckaroo's dependency resolver borrows ideas from SAT solvers — using conflict-driven clause learning to prune the search space and resolve C++ packages blazingly fast.