bit manipulation 2025-09-26T19:16:14Z

The fluorescent glare of my basement workspace felt particularly hostile that Tuesday night. I'd been chasing a memory leak through C++ wilderness for seven straight hours, my coffee gone cold as hex values blurred into hieroglyphs. Every mainstream calculator app I'd tried that evening might as well have been a toddler's abacus – tap-tap-tapping through endless menus just to convert 0x7FFF to binary felt like performing brain surgery with oven mitts. My knuckles whitened around the phone until