Practical, no-nonsense guides on working with data formats,
written by the people who build and use these tools daily.
May 30, 2026
Most developers don't think of themselves as working with "data formats" -- but between a Dockerfile, an Nginx config, a .env file, some YAML, and whatever language the actual application is written in,...
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April 22, 2026
Minification is one of those steps everyone does but rarely measures. You run it, the file gets smaller, you move on. But "smaller" isn't the same as "worth it" -- sometimes a minifier barely touches a file that was...
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March 10, 2026
A field silently changes from a number to a string. A response that used to always include email starts omitting it for some users. Nothing crashes immediately -- it just corrupts data three steps downstream, and you...
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February 3, 2026
This question comes up in almost every new project, and the honest answer is "it depends on who's reading it." JSON is the default for APIs -- compact, and every language parses it natively. YAML wins for...
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January 15, 2026
Trailing commas. Single quotes instead of double. An unquoted key that looked fine in your editor's syntax highlighting but isn't actually valid JSON. If you write JSON by hand or copy it out of a log line, you've...
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