Blog

Stories and deep dives about the formats, protocols, and identifiers behind our tools.

• Six Characters That Ate the Web: The History of JSON

  How a reserved word in a 2001 test message shaped JSON's syntax, why the format has no comments and no version number, and why big numbers still break it.

  12 Oct 2026 · 10 min read

• Counting Seconds Since 1970: The Strange History of Unix Time

  Why computers count time from 1 January 1970, how a single leap second took down half the internet, and why 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038 is a date engineers still circle.

  26 Sept 2026 · 9 min read

• The Improbable History of the UUID

  Why every classic UUID counts time from the year 1582, how a virus author was unmasked by one, and how 128 bits let computers agree without ever talking.

  29 Aug 2026 · 9 min read