Jack of All, Master of None
We were told to pick one thing and get good at it. That rule was built for an economy where depth was scarce and expensive. AI just made depth free. What's left of the advice?
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Kushagra Sharma's Profile — Published Posts
Published Posts
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tda@arch~/TheDarkArtistpublished content
Designing a Design System for Claude
Most people treat their AI prompt like a sticky note. Here's why that's wrong, and how thinking about it like a design system fixes it.
MCP as an Attack Surface: Threat Modeling AI Agent Toolchains
The Model Context Protocol is having its npm moment. Every week, another team is wiring up MCP servers to their LLM stack — Gmail, Notion, Jira, internal databases, whatever the product manager asked for. The demos are clean. The capability story is compelling. The security posture is approximately "we'll figure it out later."
How Database Indexes Actually Work — A Visual Deep Dive
Most developers know indexes make queries faster. Few understand why. This post breaks down B-Trees, hash indexes, and composite indexes with diagrams, math, and real SQL — so you never guess at indexing again.
Why “Unhackable” Websites Don’t Exist — And What Real Security Looks Like
The idea of an “unhackable” website is a myth. Security professionals don’t chase that illusion because it isn’t achievable. Instead, they build systems that are difficult to breach, resistant to escalation, and designed to fail in safe, controlled ways. Effective security is a continuous engineering discipline, not a marketing claim.
Void Linux: The Quiet Rebellion
Void Linux doesn’t scream for attention, it just quietly ignores the rules everyone else follows. It’s a general-purpose distribution built from scratch, independent of the Debian–Red Hat–Arch family trees. That independence shows in every design choice: no systemd, runit as init, a package manager that’s blisteringly fast, and a refusal to play copycat.
Arch Linux: Control Without Handrails
Arch Linux isn’t a distribution for people who want things handed to them. It’s for people who want the full blueprint, the parts list, and the tools and are fine with getting grease under their nails.
Building Content Bridge Project
Alright, so We're resuming the story from ex-mark1 project and here's the thing they want me to do an assignment so I guess we're doing an assignment... A custom Contentful-powered landing page builder with a visual drag-and-drop interface that lets editors arrange pre-defined components and save their layout as JSON. The layout is then rendered statically on a Next.js frontend using data from Contentful, delivering performant, SEO-friendly pages with dynamic content and flexible structure.
Django + HTMX: A Modern Approach to Building Dynamic Web Applications
Django is a powerful web framework that makes building web applications easier. HTMX is a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to build dynamic, interactive web pages without writing complex JavaScript. Together, Django and HTMX provide a modern approach to building web applications with minimal JavaScript while keeping server-side logic simple.
Convex: The missing half of your React app
Convex is an open-source, reactive database designed to streamline the development of modern web applications. It offers a comprehensive suite of features that address common challenges in full-stack development, including real-time data synchronization, serverless functions, and seamless integration with frontend frameworks.
PostgreSQL vs MySQL: Choosing the Right Database
1. Complex Queries and Advanced Features - Requires advanced SQL features: Common Table Expressions (CTEs), window functions, etc. - Support for JSONB (efficient storage and querying of JSON). - Complex joins and subqueries for analytics.
Arch + XFCE + i3: Goddamn awesome for minimalists
Been lurking in the world of i3 last couple of days, initial plan was to use i3 with kde, bun than i realized, why man! why would you do that, why wouldn't you just use KDE with it's KWin window manager, what was the reason behind all this soul searching. It was minimalism, performance not depending on those heavy Desktop Environments.
Trust But Verify: A Guiding Philosophy in Software Development
"Trust but verify" is more than a phrase; it is a principle that resonates deeply across disciplines. In software development, this idea serves as both a safeguard and a challenge, urging us to balance reliance on external tools and systems with the discipline of careful validation. Like the craftsman who inspects every tool before wielding it, the developer must approach their work with a blend of trust and scrutiny.
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