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Creator of mylinx.cc | 🧙‍♂️ Lead Software Engineer @SheetJS |📍NYC | Data Science in JS?

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Lately, I've been diving deep into the world of parser and 

. It's been an exciting yet incredibly frustrating journey, and I've hit a roadblock that has me questioning my life choices.

, it’s perfectly acceptable for command names to double as variable names. Consider this simple example:

 is a command, while the second is simply a variable name. This kind of flexibility is intuitive for us humans, but it can turn into a real headache for a parser.

In my initial implementation, I ran into two major issues:

This created a impossible situation where the parser couldn't distinguish between commands and identifiers with the same name.

After some digging through parsing forums and documentation, I discovered that this isn’t an isolated problem. Many language implementers have wrestled with context-sensitive keywords. The common solutions often involve elaborate workarounds ranging from context-tracking mechanisms to entirely separate parsing passes.

Unfortunately, with my current Chevrotain setup, reordering token precedence isn’t feasible because Chevrotain is a parser generator library for JS that uses LL(k) parsing techniques.

It provides tools for building recursive-descent parser with full control over grammar definitions. This doesn’t mean it can’t handle token precedence it definitely can but it requires manual implementation, which involves considerable effort.

Chevrotain has built in support for contextual tokens. We could define our keywords as contextual and enable them only in certain parsing rules.

This is one is an interesting one post-lexing examines the token stream and reclassifies command tokens to identifiers based on their syntactic position.

Each of these methods has its merits and its tradeoffs. If anyone has tackled this issue from a different angle or has additional suggestions, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

After careful consideration, I went with the post-lexing token transformation approach. This solution proved to be the most practical for several reasons:

The key insight was that context sensitivity could be handled by examining token patterns after initial lexing. This approach effectively solves the "generate generate = 1" problem with remarkably little code.

Parsing Nightmares

Optimizing 🚀 V8 Engine: Cutting Memory Usage by 66%

Mylinx: Accessible and Affordable Bio Link Solution

The bio link space is full of tools that either lack key features or place them behind expensive paywalls. Customization, traffic analytics, and SEO control are often limited or inaccessible, with services charging $10+/month—unaffordable for users in regions like India, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

: Poor analytics, minimal customization, and lack of SEO tools.

: Core features locked behind costly subscriptions.

: Few platforms offer multi-language support, limiting non-English users.

Existing tools overlook creators in developing regions who need affordable solutions to build their online presence. High costs and limited options hinder their potential to grow.

To address these gaps, I built Mylinx in just three months, offering:

: Seamless integration for content sharing.

: Generate codes for easy offline sharing.

: Advanced tools to boost search visibility.

: Supports 11 languages, including हिन्दी, Русский, and عربي.

: Affordable, unlike other smart link services.

Mylinx has created 1,000+ pages and logged over 750,000 hits, empowering creators in emerging markets with accessible and affordable tools to grow their presence.

Another linktree clone?

How I Built a Scalable, Free URL Shortener

As a software engineer working on data visualization and scientific computing projects, I've often found JavaScript's native math capabilities lacking. The hunt for robust standard library led me to 

The stdlib project caught my eye with its impressive set of features:

I ran benchmarks comparing stdlib-js against native JavaScript Math operations across 100,000 rows of data. The results were surprising:

Basic operations showed modest improvements:

Complex operations took a significant hit:

The precision differences were minimal, with a maximum difference of 4.441e-16. Most operations whoed identical results between stdlib-js and native Math.

There's potential for improvement - converting stdlib-js to WebAssembly could boost performance by running close to native speed, particularly for those complex operations currently showing significant slowdown. But until that happens, the choice between stdlin-js and native Math requires careful consideration of your specific needs.

stdlib-js is a solid library taht delviers on its promise of consistency and extended functionality. However, the performance trade-offs mean it's not always the best choice. For my projects, I'll be using native approach and maybe in the future will try to compile stdlib-js to WASM to test if its really faster.

Have you tried stdlib-js in your projects? I'd be curious to hear about your experiences with mathematical computations in JavaScript.

Better Math in JavaScript?

Built Mylinx as a solo dev, learned scrappy solutions often beat perfect ones. At $750/mo revenue, scaling analytics nearly killed it until I found a simple aggregation strategy that cut query times from 30s -> 2s.

I Nearly Lost All My Users to 30-Second Database Queries

So, full disclosure: I’m kind of moving on to other things in life right now.

But while I was cleaning up some old folders, I found this player I wrote for a project a while back. I remember being super frustrated at the time because I needed a way to play everything HLS, Dash, MP4, YouTube, Vimeo without having to glue together three different libraries or write a bunch of conditional logic just to get a video on the screen.

I figured rather than letting the code rot on my hard drive, I’d package it up and share it. Maybe it saves you a headache or two.

. It’s not trying to change the world, it just plays video files.

Back when I was working on this specific project, we had media coming from everywhere. Some of it was static MP4s, some of it was HLS streams, and marketing insisted on embedding YouTube links.

I looked around for a solution that handled all of them with a single, consistent API, and I couldn't really find one that felt lightweight enough. So, I built this.

It’s designed to be simple. You throw a URL at it, and it figures out how to play it.

I tried to make it as "plug and play" as possible. Here are the features I managed to cram in:

- Plays Everything: HTML Video/Audio, YouTube, Vimeo.

- Streaming Ready: Built-in support for hls.js and dash.js.

- Auto-detection: You paste a YouTube link, it knows it's YouTube. You paste a Vimeo link, it knows.

- Accessibility: Full support for VTT captions and screen readers (this was a big requirement for me).

- Customizable: You can rip out the controls and put your own in if you want.

Here is the most basic example. You can see I added support for quality switching and subtitles because, well, real apps usually need that.

import ReactAllPlayer from 'react-all-player';

https://cdn.plyr.io/static/demo/View_From_A_Blue_Moon_Trailer-1080p.mp4

https://cdn.plyr.io/static/demo/View_From_A_Blue_Moon_Trailer-720p.mp4

I hated dealing with the YouTube API iframe mess. With this, you just drop the link in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTqVqk7FSmY

It unifies the events, too. So onPause works the same way whether it's a raw MP4 or a YouTube embed.

I know SSR breaks everything regarding window objects, so if you use Next.js, just lazy load it:

const ReactAllPlayer = dynamic(() => import('react-all-player'), {

Look, it’s open source. It’s got speed controls, picture-in-picture, keyboard shortcuts all the stuff you’d expect.

I’m sharing this because I think it’s a decent tool and it works well for the HLS/Dash/MP4 trifecta. If you find a bug, feel free to fork it or submit a PR, though as I said, I'm moving onto other things so I might not be super active immediately.

If this makes your dev process easier, then I’m happy.

ReactAllPlayer One Player to Rule Them All (MP4, HLS, Dash, YouTube, Vimeo)

My Projects

Mylinx - Launch your bio page in seconds

Launch your site in seconds Mylinx

ReactAllPlayer - A flexible React web player.

AniTrek - Track, discover, and get alerts for anime and manga.

Spreadsheet Viewer VSCode Extension

BinCode - Test and share code snippets

Tabeller - React Native Table Library

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Asad Karimov

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