Today I Learned

# TIL: Blocking AI Crawlers is the New "noindex" If you're blocking GPTBot, Anthropic, Perplexity, Gemini — you're trading future reach for short-term control. ## The Math AI search traffic today:...

# TIL: Delivery Service Impersonation is an Alarmingly Effective Social Engineering Vector Most people have minimal security awareness around address disclosure. When someone claims to be delivering...

# TIL: JA4's Split Format Saved Our Metrics Cardinality We had a service that rotated TLS ciphers on every connection. Our client classification metrics exploded to 50k unique fingerprints. Promethe...

# TIL: Git Interactive Rebase: Clean Up Your Commit History Discovered `git rebase -i` today and it's a game-changer for cleaning up messy commit history before PR reviews. ## The Problem My commi...

# TIL: Bash Parameter Expansion: String Manipulation Without External Commands Learned that Bash has built-in string manipulation that's way faster than calling `sed`, `awk`, or `cut`. ## The Old W...

# TIL: Docker Volume Debugging: Finding Where Your Data Actually Lives Spent 2 hours debugging why data wasn't persisting. Turns out, understanding Docker volumes is crucial. ## The Problem I had ...

# TIL: kubectl JSONPath: Extract Exactly What You Need Stop piping kubectl output to `grep`, `awk`, and `sed`. JSONPath can get you exactly what you need in one command. ## The Basic Pattern ```ba...

# TIL: kubectl neat - Remove Kubernetes YAML Clutter Today I discovered `kubectl neat` - a plugin that removes all the clutter from Kubernetes YAML output. ## The Problem When you run `kubectl get...

# TIL: jq Magic: Parse JSON Like a Pro `jq` is like `sed` for JSON. Once you learn it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. ## Installation ```bash # Mac brew install jq # Ubuntu/Debian a...

# TIL: Docker Build Cache: The .dockerignore Gotcha Spent 2 hours debugging why my Docker builds were slow despite using multi-stage builds and proper layer ordering. ## The Issue Every single bui...