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• Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth

  22/03/25, 14:30

  I just read Cloudflare’s post about their AI labyrinth pattern and this is honestly one of the best protections against AI crawlers I’ve seen so far. The concept is brilliant - instead of just trying to block bots with simple rules, which they can bypass easily and adapt to, they just feed them with infinite amounts of data that seems to be very interesting to them but is actually complete nonsense in reality!

  If a user doesn’t want AI crawlers crawling his or her website, Cloudflare first asks the crawler to not crawl and if the crawler doesn’t respect the request, then instead of blocking it, it feeds it nonsense :)

  The way it works is pretty clever - the crawler thinks it’s getting valuable content but it’s actually just wasting computational resources on garbage data. This approach is genius because it turns the tables - instead of you spending resources to block them, they waste their resources crawling nothing useful. It’s like creating a honey pot that keeps bad actors busy while protecting your real content.

  Cloudflare is my favorite company anyway - I use their services everywhere for CDN, DNS, and security. They always come up with these practical solutions that actually work in real world scenarios. This labyrinth approach is definitely something I want to use.

• New Domain - mehdik.dev

  02/02/25, 20:15

  Yesterday I registered a new domain: mehdik.dev! Finally I came up with the idea of merging my various domains together and using a domain with my name to host everything including my blog. I hope that I will keep this forever!!

  I’ve been juggling multiple domains for different projects and services for years now, and it was getting messy to manage. Having everything scattered across different domains made it hard to maintain consistent online presence. The .dev TLD is perfect for software developer like me, and using my actual name makes it more personal and professional at same time.

  I will move all my public and private services to this domain soon including this blog. I’m also moving from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages for hosting this blog. Cloudflare Pages has better performance with their global CDN, faster build times, and more flexible deployment options. Plus since I’m already using Cloudflare for DNS and other services, it makes sense to keep everything in their ecosystem for better integration.

• ChatGPT!

  25/01/23, 21:23

  I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT for a few weeks now, and I have this feeling that we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how software development works. This tool can write quite decent code, explain complex algorithms, and even help with debugging - sometimes it’s better than what you find on Stack Overflow. Of course, it makes mistakes and sometimes gives you totally wrong information with full confidence, but the speed and scope of what it can accomplish is really impressive.

  As software engineers, I think we need to reconsider what our role actually means. If AI can take care of routine coding tasks, API integrations, and generating boilerplate code, perhaps our value becomes more about making architecture decisions, understanding business needs, and recognzing when the AI is producing nonsense. It’s probably not going to replace us in the near future, but it could change what we consider a “senior developer” when you have a junior developer with AI help who can produce code much faster than before. Anyway, I’m watching this closely - it feels like one of those moments where everything is going to change very quickly.

• Joplin Note Taking App

  12/02/22, 16:45

  I’ve been searching for the perfect note-taking app for months now, testing everything from Obsidian to Notion, Bear, Apple Notes, and even some obscure ones like Zettlr and LogSeq. After all this testing, Joplin is definitely the winner for my workflow. What I love most about it is that it’s open source, stores notes in plain markdown files, and has excellent synchronization across all my devices. The fact that I can sync through my own server instead of relying on proprietary cloud services is a huge plus for me. The search functionality is fast, the interface is clean without being too fancy, and most importantly - my notes are not locked into some proprietary format. If Joplin disappears tomorrow, I still have all my markdown files. For someone who takes tons of technical notes and wants to own their data, this is exactly what I needed.