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Articles by Pascal CESCATO
DBench86 — A Style Exercise in PHP 8.6
A benchmark as an excuse to build a PHP 8.6 app, and PHP 8.6 as an excuse to build a benchmark French readers may prefer to read this article in their native language → version française. It all started with a benchmark Databases have always been my playground. From dBASE III+ in the 90s to MyScaleDB today, by way of XML databases in the 2000s… I've always looked for the best solution, the best approach, depending on the project.
Implementation is where judgements go to become invisible
One question, three answers I have a small tool that finds people waiting for a reply from me. It had three versions. Each one was correct. Each one gave a different answer. Version one said 18. It counted a reply only if it sat directly under theirs. But dev.to sometimes will not show a comment its API still returns, so you reply beside it instead. Nine of ten had been answered that way. Version two said 34. It counted any later comment from me in the thread.
From AI Solutions to Shared Knowledge: Building an MCP for the Community
This is a submission for the Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition Don't Just Ask AI. Give the Answer Back. AI is a real force multiplier for software development. It's also the ideal companion for solving technical problems fast. But all that knowledge — we keep it to ourselves. Or rather, we lose it. The story always stops there. Question → answer → problem solved — and the conversation sinks into the chat history, gone. Then someone else hits the exact same wall.
AI Engineering Is Easy. Changing How We Work Is Hard
AI engineering sounds fancy. New terms are everywhere: agentic development, AI-native engineering, spec-driven development, and now AI harness engineering. Underneath all the terminology, though, something genuinely useful is happening. AI can now help with requirements, challenge a PRD, explore UX ideas, reason about architecture, create implementation plans, write code and validate the result. The obvious question is what AI can do.
Greatness Is Forged by Limitation
Can't believe I spent 2 weeks writing this. Last week, I gave a talk at a Cursor community event about AI and how it's changing the way we build software. The event went great, and after the talk, quite a few people came up to me for 1:1 conversations. One particular guy caught my attention.
Why the "AI" Badge Doesn't Matter and How to Restore Trust in Our Code
Hello, DEV community! ๐ This is my first post here. I've been reading articles on this platform for a while, but a recent article by @pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 - "The "AI" Badge Doesn't Measure What You Think It Does" - finally pushed me to join the conversation. It touches on a topic that's been on my mind for a while: the "AI-generated" badge, which is being actively pushed across media platforms, doesn't actually tell us anything useful. Whose thought is it anyway?
The "AI" Badge Doesn't Measure What You Think It Does
Anthropic signed the EU AI Act's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, and started marking text produced by Claude with an invisible statistical watermark. Within days, the same event got read two completely different ways on my feed. The first reading, on dev.to, is by @sylwia-lask The End of Undetectable AI Text? Claude’s New Watermark Explained Separating AI provenance from detection myths The End of Undetectable AI Text?
When Your VPS Never Had the Resources It Was Sold With
I needed a VPS to run CyberPanel. Simple enough: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB SSD, IPv6 only. CyberPanel needs IPv4, so I upgraded to the next tier: 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD, one IPv4 address. What followed was two separate infrastructure failures in the same 24 hours, from the same provider, on the same instance. Neither was a Linux problem. Both were provisioning problems — the gap between what an offer promises and what actually gets attached to the virtual machine. I'm not naming the provider.
Stop Calling Everything Impostor Syndrome: The Myth of "Just Push Harder"
Not everyone who doubts themselves is suffering from impostor syndrome. Sometimes the real problem lies in the strategy they've chosen, and that's exactly why it's so important to learn to tell the difference. I read a lot of articles here on DEV about burnout, impostor syndrome, and similar topics. I thought I'd add my own perspective because I have the feeling that some advice, often given with great confidence, can actually do more harm than good.
CyberPanel's SSL Auto-Renewal Can Silently Fail — Here's the Fix
Last week I was doing a routine check on a CyberPanel server and noticed something that didn't add up. The panel's SSL status showed a clean "SSL Issued Successfully". Nothing to see, apparently. Except the certificate expiration date hadn't moved. The browser was still serving a certificate that was about to expire. That's the kind of mismatch that's easy to miss if you trust the panel's UI at face value — the message says success, the log (if you even check it) looks uneventful, and you move on.
WordPress Web Developer vs Web Developer: What's the Difference?
When planning a website or pursuing a career in tech, you've likely come across the terms WordPress web developer and web developer. While they may sound similar, they have different areas of expertise, responsibilities, and project focus. Understanding the difference can help businesses hire the right professional and help aspiring developers choose the career path that best aligns with their interests and goals.
What Replacing Calendly Taught Me About Trusting Open Source
cal.com, Calendly, zcal... booking SaaS isn't short on options, and most of them are genuinely decent. Free tiers cover the basics for a lot of freelancers. The catch: you're the product (nothing's really free), and your customer data lives somewhere you don't fully control and can't fully audit. A dysfunction I ran into on another SaaS tool was the trigger. Trusting a third-party service by default, just because it's widely used and billed monthly, doesn't always hold up.
Eighty Percent Done Is Not a Real Number
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry. Why this one, and why now I always have several projects running in parallel β a maintenance CRM for tradespeople, a SaaS platform for restaurants, an automated newsletter, a management tool for training organizationsβ¦ Except for that last one, none of them was ready to sell. And I have a whole pile of projects left "as is," untouched for months.
Unboxable in Tech: The Evidence Locker
Eleven exhibits, last time. A career that kept refusing to fit inside a single box — trainer, restaurant owner, postal worker, developer, school aide, developer again — and a closing question I didn't have an answer to: whose problem was that, mine or the box's. I still don't have a clean answer. But I didn't stop while I was waiting for one. The same refusal to fit a category, applied to code instead of a resume, produced eight more exhibits. Here's what came out of that.
1%
Santa Clara, March 14, 2029. Four objects on Jensen's desk. An NSA report, face down. Kai Chen's badge. An iPhone, screen lit: "The White House." And on the wall, framed since 2019, a GeForce 256 signed by hand: "The one that started it all — 1999." Jensen isn't looking at the frame. He's looking at the number on the screen in front of him. 1%. Global inference datacenter market share. One percent. 12% domestic — captive hyperscalers, federal contracts, enterprise stacks buried too deep in CUDA to move.
Too cheap to be good? Think again.
For years, I ran my WordPress sites on OpenLiteSpeed. Fast server, LSCache is genuinely impressive, and the OLS/WordPress combo is hard to beat on raw performance. For the control panel, I started with CyberPanel — buggier than a Microsoft product, with a team that appears to be deliberately sabotaging its free features to push users toward paid plans. I'm not talking about bugs that can't be fixed. I'm talking about bugs that seem engineered to prevent free-tier features from completing any action.
I've been building software for 40 years. But I want *you* to tell me about dev in 1986...
It's 2026 and I started professional software development in 1986 when I took a Summer internship at Tandy Computers in Fort Worth, TX after my junior year at Rice. I worked for them again for a few weeks over Christmas break and started full time there the next year. Now, as we all go through a series of huge changes in our jobs, I thought it would be fun if you would tell me what software development was like 40 years ago.
What Quitting My Job Taught Me About Tech
This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience So it is finally time to write about the past year. It has truly been a roller coaster for me. Last year I quit my job to search for a new one. I am still looking, but the experiences I gained over this year are immeasurable. There is a lot to talk about, so let us begin this journey.
Unboxable in Tech
This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience "I don't know which box to put you in." I've been hearing those words for thirty years. And every single time, it lands like a slap. The violence isn't in the words. The violence is in what the words actually mean. It's not: which box could I put you in? It's: you make me uncomfortable. So I won't hire you.
Unboxable in Tech: 30 Years of Being the Wrong Shape
This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience Every time a recruiter or staffing agency reaches out, the conversation ends exactly the same way. "Your profile is really interesting⦠but honestly, we're not sure which box to put you in." At first, I took it for polite awkwardness. Then for a backhanded compliment. Today, I take it as the most honest diagnosis anyone has ever given me.
RFC 1516: A Build for the Community That Keeps 418 Alive
This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community In the comments of my last article, Sylwia wrote: I replied: "...HTBMCP/1.0 might be next. Hyper Text Beer Mug Control Protocol. Watch this space." This is that space. The Community Before the code: a question worth asking. The DEV prompt says "build for your community." The obvious answer, for a developer, is to build something useful for other developers β a tool, a library, a dashboard. Something that solves a real problem.
16 Modern JavaScript Features That Might Blow Your Mind
You’re absolutely right, Sylwia — a carefully curated list is always welcome… and that’s exactly why it’s always such a pleasure to read your work. Your article on browser APIs was so well received for a reason, and this one follows the same path: it’s not another generic “10 must-know features” list with no depth, but your list — shaped by real research, thoughtful selection, and that unmistakable writing style. And of course, the substance is there.
Stop Ignoring RFC 2324. It's the Most Important Protocol You've Never Implemented.
Some RFCs change the world — TCP/IP, HTTP/2, TLS 1.3. And then there's RFC 2324, published April 1st, 1998, defining the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). Its purpose: control, monitor, and diagnose coffee pots over a network. No, it's not a joke. Well, it is. But it's written seriously enough to actually implement. Emacs did it. We will too. A Brief History of the Web's Most Honorable RFC RFC 2324 is an IETF April Fools' joke authored by Larry Masinter.
Your Article Isn’t the Real Content
The article is often the least interesting thing that happens after you publish. Not always. But more often than we're willing to admit. I saw this comment recently and couldn't unsee it: "Real war stories have specifics — the exact error, the wrong turn you took first, the fix that seemed obvious in retrospect. Generated stuff stays vague. Honestly the comments on that post became better content than the post itself." That last sentence describes something we rarely say out loud.
Who Are We Still Writing Technical Articles For?
I recently read an article asking the question: do people still genuinely care about technical articles? The answer is nuanced: yes, but not everyone. Beyond that question, there is another, more fundamental one: who do we choose to write for today? A Long-Term Trajectory I've been writing technical articles since 2010-2011. Some still exist in the Wayback Machine archives — like this one, dated December 2011, about a MySQL limitation that barely makes sense to address today.
Symfony AI: A Rocket, a School Bus, or Something In Between?
When a recent article compared Symfony AI to “a school bus painted like a rocket pretending to reach orbit,” it struck a nerve in the PHP community: https://dev.to/pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20/symfony-ai-when-a-school-bus-painted-as-a-rocket-pretends-to-go-to-orbit-1mk6 The metaphor was clever. The critique was sharp. And the underlying question was serious: Is Symfony AI real engineering progress — or just AI hype wrapped in Symfony branding?
Actually Static: When WordPress Stops Being the Enemy
This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge This post is for developers who like writing in WordPress but want the speed and safety of static sites (Hugo/GitHub Pages). What I Built I spent years wrestling with WordPress performance and security issues. Optimizing caching layers, hardening installations, fighting plugin bloat — all to keep public-facing sites running acceptably. Then I discovered static site generators. Hugo. Astro. Fast, secure, elegant.
From Local SQLite Scripts to a Cloud Platform with GitHub Copilot CLI
This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge From SQLite CLI to Cloud Platform: How I Became an AI Architect in 25 Hours What I Built TL;DR: I transformed a local SQLite-based CLI tool into a production-grade analytics platform in 25 hours of actual work (10 evenings, 2-3 hours each), without writing a single line of code by hand.
Symfony AI: When a School Bus Painted as a Rocket Pretends to Go to Orbit
_Technical satire You'd almost want to believe it. One fine morning, Symfony announces its "AI" module, and the whole ecosystem shivers as if the framework had just discovered quantum gravity. But very quickly, scratching beneath the polish, you realize you're not witnessing a technological revolution... but a makeover operation. A school bus repainted white, decorated with three NASA stickers, and presented as a space shuttle. Welcome to "Symfony AI," or the subtle art of pretending to be modern. 1.
Being Right Too Early: What NGINX in 2010 Taught Me About Tech Adoption
How shipping NGINX in production before it was 'safe' became my playbook for Caddy, Astro—and for refusing performance theater in tech. People tell me I have something against current standards. What they don't see is that this isn't a recent position. I'm not writing hot takes based on six months of experience. I've been documenting production deployments and technical experiments for over 15 years. That perspective lets you see cycles that others mistake for novelty. June 2010.
Why NaN !== NaN Makes Perfect Sense (I Promise)
No, JavaScript Isn’t Broken (Again) I’ll admit it — sometimes I like publishing a post on the weekend, when both the internet and real life slow down a bit. But weekends are not the time for heavy technical or philosophical deep dives. It’s better to go for something lighter. I spent a while looking for the right format. Topics like “the funniest commits ever” are fun, sure — but how many times can you do that? And then it clicked.
Why WebGPU Feels Like the Future of the Web (Live Demo đ)
WebGPU is the hot topic right now. A brand-new web API that will most likely replace WebGL sooner rather than later (I won't miss you, bro đ). Itâs already supported by all major browsers, and honestly⌠how could I not try it? So I did what any curious frontend-centric software dev would do: I built a small interactive demo and learned a lot more than I initially expected. First things first: why GPUs?
When DEV.to Stats Aren't Enough: Building My Own Memory
One Tuesday morning at 9:14 AM, my six-month-old article got 37 views in 20 minutes. DEV.to's dashboard just said "+37 views". No context. No cause. No pattern. I wanted to know why. Was it a comment from someone influential? A share somewhere? A title change from weeks ago finally paying off? The platform couldn't tell me. So I decided to steal my own data. Not to optimize. Not to perform. But to understand how my articles actually live over time.
How I Cut My Cloud Run Bill by 96% by Stopping a Polish Botnet
The Initial Shock: When Your Demo Becomes a Target On January 4th, 2026, I deployed my "Knowledge Graph CV" app on Cloud Run. Just a small demo for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge on Dev.to, which I describe in the article Beyond the Linear CV. Nothing too complicated. A CV transformed into an interactive graph via Gemini AI, some Plotly visualizations, all wrapped in a nice Streamlit interface. I thought: "Estimated budget: €5-8/month.
The Burnout Industrial Complex: How Companies Profit From Your Exhaustion
Your company doesn't want to fix burnout. They want you to manage it. They offer meditation apps, resilience workshops, and stress management training. Meanwhile, they set impossible deadlines, schedule meetings across nine time zones, and expect Slack responses at 10 PM. This isn't a contradiction. It's the business model. The burnout industrial complex has figured out something brilliant: selling you coping mechanisms is cheaper than fixing the systems breaking you.
Beyond the Linear CV
This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI About Me My professional path isn't linear. It's atypical, composed of pivots, skill acquisitions across different contexts, and transitions that traditional CVs struggle to represent. For years, the challenge wasn't "how to write a CV" but rather: how to make a non-linear journey readable? The classic portfolio format—chronological, linear, static—works well for continuous trajectories.
Aliénation ou emprise ? Objectiver les dérives parentales sans le piège du " syndrome d'aliénation parentale " (SAP). Par Pascal Cescato.
Au sommaire de cet article... Décrypter les dynamiques d’emprise familiale sans les impasses du “SAP” : nommer les abus relationnels, protéger l’enfant et interroger le potentiel de l’IA comme outil d’aide à la justice.
Respiration
A slow retrospective on a season of writing, and the quiet transition now opening between fatigue, clarity, and the return to earth. Some life chapters end without a final scene. No slammed door, no staged farewell, no single sentence that closes the book. They finish the way dusk finishes: a slow dilution of light, almost unnoticed, until you realise the room has changed colour. This text is that kind of dusk.
Nobody Writes Clean Code. We All Just Pretend
I’ve been writing software for more than a decade now, and one of the most important lessons I ever learned came from a conversation early in my career. I told a colleague - a seriously brilliant engineer - “You know, the code in our app is kinda shitty.” He smiled, nodded like an old monk on a mountain, and said: “It’s shitty everywhere.” And honestly? The longer I’ve been in this profession, the more I realize how unbelievably true that is.
I Put an LLM in My Browser and Now It Writes My Commit Messages. The Results Were… Unexpected😭✨
Hi folks! Not long ago I posted an article about the funniest and weirdest commit messages from my projects (If You Think YOUR Commit Messages Are Bad, Just Wait…). The post itself was cool, but — as usual — your comments were pure gold. A few people pointed out that… 👉 “Why write commit messages yourself when AI can do it?” And then I thought: SAY. NO. MORE.
From WordPress to Astro: Three Days to Reclaim Control
When performance, simplicity, and control replace endless maintenance. 1. The Tipping Point: When Maintenance Becomes Exhausting I had two WordPress blogs: one for my technical articles (Python, AI, software architecture), and another focused on WordPress itself and its ecosystem—hosting, plugins, themes, customization, security... Two platforms, two sets of extensions, two databases to monitor—and inevitably, twice the maintenance.
Using CTEs When Your ORM Says No (The Lazy Developer's Survival Guide)
You just spent two articles learning about CTEs. You're excited. You've seen the power. You understand the elegance. You're ready to refactor that nightmare query that's been haunting your dreams. You open your ORM documentation... 404: CTE support not found. "Wait, WHAT? Every database has supported CTEs since 2005-2018, but my ORM doesn't?" Welcome to the final boss fight: making CTEs work in real projects despite ORM limitations.
The Illusion of Control
After exposing the theater (I) and watching its actors perfect their organized laziness (II), it’s time to let the curtain fall. 1. When Control Replaces Trust Agile began with a simple promise: to put people back at the center of software. It was a rebellion against bureaucracy — a call to shorten the distance between those who think and those who build. For a brief moment, it worked. Teams stopped writing novels of documentation and started talking.
(Etude) Recherche juridique : pourquoi l'IA actuelle échoue (et comment la rendre intelligente).
Préambule. L’IA juridique en France (2023-2025) 92% des professionnels connaissent l’IA 77% pensent qu’elle améliorera leur efficacité Mais seulement 19% l’utilisent réellement 85% ont des préoccupations éthiques [1] La complexité croissante du droit et le volume exponentiel des corpus juridiques, notamment la jurisprudence, rendent la recherche d’informations pertinentes un défi majeur tant pour les professionnels du droit que pour les citoyens.
Unit Tests: The Greatest Lie We Tell Ourselves?
Great article. I couldn't agree more, especially with your point that integration tests are "not optional." Your argument that unit tests fail to catch real-world issues like environment drift and integration failures is especially true for microservices. In that world, focusing on implementation-detail unit tests can be actively harmful, as it makes refactoring harder without giving any real confidence.
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