Mehdi Akiki

Writing archive

Everything published under Writing, newest first. Each entry is labelled as part of an investigation, an article or reference. Short engineering notes have their own archive.

  • Published on
    Skills are the most underused feature in Claude Code. This guide covers everything: where skill files live, the full frontmatter spec, how invocation works, writing good descriptions, passing arguments, and real examples you can copy today.
  • Published on
    The sliding window pattern shows up in rate limiters, monitoring dashboards, and analytics pipelines. This guide explains the concept from first principles, then builds a real-time stock price monitor in Go step by step — explaining each piece before writing a line of code.
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    Article · Through the layers

    WebSockets From the Wire Up

    Most WebSocket tutorials start at the API. This one starts at the wire — electrons, NIC interrupts, kernel socket buffers, the TCP state machine, the HTTP upgrade handshake, the binary frame format — and works up to what ws.send() actually does.
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    Article · Through the layers

    DefId vs HirId in the Rust Compiler

    Two identifiers, two different jobs. DefId names a definition across the whole compiler pipeline and across crates. HirId points to a node in the syntax tree of the current crate. Mixing them up is the first stumbling block when reading rustc source code.