Micah's Secret Blog

In the realm of computer science, efficiency is often the key to solving complex problems. One elegant solution that stands out for its efficiency is the Bloom filter. Despite being relatively lesser-known, Bloom filters offer a powerful method for determining set membership while using minimal space. This post explores what Bloom filters are, how they work, their applications in various fields, and compares them with other data structures.

Algorithms are all around us. They are the invisible forces that power our modern world, from the search engines we use to find information to the social networks we use to connect with friends and family. In this post, I share some ingenious algorithms that I have learned about both in courses and through my own research.

Nearly a year ago, I took an online course called The Missing Semester of Your CS Education. The course was created by a group of MIT students and covers a wide range of topics that are often overlooked in traditional computer science curriculums. The course is designed to help students become more productive and efficient programmers by teaching them essential skills that are not typically taught in school.

How do software packages work behind the scenes? How are they created, distributed, and installed? In this post, we'll explore the lifecycle of software packages, from creation to installation, using the Node Package Manager (NPM) and the Autoprefixer package as real-world examples.

Hacked by an image? How could that be possible? This is the story of how a seemingly innocuous image format, WebP, was discovered to have a critical vulnerability that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a victim's machine.