DEV Community: 장지호

Why Your Wi-Fi Gets Slower the Further You Walk From the Router (And How to Actually Fix It)

장지호 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:23:37 +0000

YouTube streams fine in the living room, but the moment you lie down in the bedroom, the video quality tanks and the loading circle spins forever. You shake your phone, force-close the app, restart it — nothing changes. If your internet plan is fine but the speed keeps shifting from room to room, the problem usually isn't your connection. It's the wireless signal bouncing around your home.

Same Connection, Different Rooms — Here's Why

The radio waves your router sends out are invisible, but they behave like light or sound: they spread outward and weaken with distance. Walls, glass, and especially anything with a lot of water in it (your body, a fish tank, a bathroom wall) eat into the signal hard. So if there are two or three concrete walls between your router and your phone, the signal that finally reaches your room is already exhausted — no matter how fast your actual internet line is.

The check is simple. Run a speed test app right next to the router, then run it again in the problem room. If the numbers are close, the issue is likely your plan or the ISP line itself. If it's fast next to the router but drops off a cliff in the bedroom, the signal just isn't reaching that far.

Put the Router in the Middle of the House, Not in a Corner

Signal spreads outward from the router as the center point. If your router is sitting on a shoe rack by the front door, or tucked in a corner on the floor, everything on the far side of the house is losing half its strength before it even leaves the starting line. Most installers just drop the router wherever the cable enters the apartment — which is rarely the best spot for signal coverage.

If you can, move it toward the physical center of your home, and put it up higher — a shelf or bookcase beats the floor. If the model has external antennas, angle some vertically and some horizontally so they cover different directions; it spreads more evenly across multiple rooms and floors that way. Keep it away from microwaves, large metal furniture, and fish tanks.

2.4GHz vs 5GHz: Range vs. Speed

Most routers today broadcast both 2.4GHz and 5GHz simultaneously. 2.4GHz travels farther and punches through walls better, but it's slower and gets crowded with every other device in the neighborhood competing for the same frequency. 5GHz is fast but short-range and weak against walls.

So in the same room as the router, or the living room next to it, 5GHz wins. In a far room behind a couple of walls, 2.4GHz can actually be more stable. Devices are supposed to auto-switch to the better band, but in awkward in-between spots they sometimes just stick with whatever they first connected to. If your router broadcasts the two bands under different network names, manually picking the right one for where you actually are can make a noticeable difference.

Reboots, Channels, and Too Many Connected Devices Matter Too

A router that's been running non-stop for weeks accumulates heat and processing cruft, and it slows down. If you haven't power-cycled it in days, unplugging it for a minute and turning it back on often revives it completely.

In apartment buildings, your router's channel can overlap with your neighbor's and interfere with each other. Most routers have a setting to auto-select or manually switch to a less congested channel — the menu location varies by model, so check the manual or manufacturer's site.

On top of that, if dozens of devices — phones, laptops, TVs, robot vacuums — are all connected at once, the bandwidth gets sliced thinner and thinner. Turning off Wi-Fi on devices you're not using helps. Keeping the firmware updated tends to cut down on random glitches too.

If a Room Still Won't Get Signal, Think Extender or Mesh

Even after repositioning and picking the right band, some room may just stay dead. If your home is large, the walls are thick, or it spans multiple floors, a single router has physical limits. That's when a range extender (which relays the signal) or switching to a mesh system (multiple units acting as one network) evens out coverage room by room.

That said, this is the expensive last resort — try everything free first. In most cases, moving the router to the center of the house, picking the right band for your spot, and one clean reboot will noticeably fix a room-by-room slow Wi-Fi problem. Buying new hardware comes after that, not before.

Why Vibe Coding Breaks Down at Scale (A Warning From a Skeptic)

장지호 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:51:51 +0000

A post on the Russian developer community Habr has a title that translates to "Vibe coding has completely won me over." But the very first line reads completely differently. The author, Vasjen, opens with "Everyone around me seems to have lost their minds lately." The title's "won me over" turns out to be pure irony. That gap between title and opening line is exactly what makes you keep reading. You expect another vibe-coding hype post, and instead you get the opposite argument.

Why the irony?

The author isn't angry at vibe coding itself, but at the hype surrounding it: people posting "I built a whole service with a few prompts," others selling courses off the back of it, a general vibe that software engineering as a profession has simply become unnecessary. He's careful to say this isn't about protecting his own job. Instead, he argues that any commercial system at real scale carries complexity no single person can hold in their head, complexity only a team that has worked together for years can actually understand. That's not something one prompt resolves.

Here he brings in Martin Fowler's Design Stamina Hypothesis: projects that invest in design start slow but keep their pace over time, while projects that skip design start fast but eventually hit a point where every new feature breaks an existing one. His diagnosis is that vibe coding traces exactly that second curve. Worth noting, though — Fowler himself calls this a hypothesis, not something backed by data.

The numbers back it up

So is this just an old-school developer grumbling? Recent data suggests otherwise. A 2026 survey found that misusing AI coding tools can actually slow work down by 19% and increase security vulnerabilities by 2.7x. Another survey found that 84% of developers have tried vibe coding, but only 29% said they trust the results. The pattern the author describes — fast in week one, then new features start breaking old ones around month three — is something that's now actually being observed. So when he welcomes vibe coding for dashboards, bots, and simple integrations but draws a hard line at CRM, CMS, and SaaS handling real user data, that's not an emotional reaction — it's closer to an observed pattern.

Where developer identity starts to wobble

What this post really touches isn't code quality — it's identity. To the question "if AI writes everything, what am I even doing here," the author redefines himself: not as someone who types prompts, but as the person who designs and takes responsibility for complexity. That redefinition hit close to home for me, because I've handed blog automation scripts to AI myself. Clearly scoped tasks — a publishing script, an image pipeline — got done in a few prompts, fast. But once several scripts started depending on each other, there were moments where neither the AI nor I could immediately tell what had broken or where. That boundary lines up exactly with the one the author draws: narrow, easily reversible tasks on one side, tasks where multiple parts depend on each other on the other.

Whether to use vibe coding as a tool or hand over an entire system comes down to who ends up carrying the complexity. I'm on the author's side here. I'll keep using AI aggressively for small, reversible tasks, but for anything where multiple parts interlock, I'm keeping the design in my own hands and treating AI as an assist, not the owner. The author has promised a follow-up with concrete failure cases — that one's worth watching for.

Hello, DEV!

장지호 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:54:40 +0000

실무에서 코드를 짜다 보면, 항상 이걸 왜 이렇게 구현했지? 하는 생각이 든다. 결국 코딩은 삽질인가.. 이 블로그에는 그 기록들을 다른 사람이 다시 겪지 않도록 미리 알려주고 싶어서 올리게 되었다.

지난주엔 커밋 훅 하나 잘못 건드렸다가 파일이 통째로 덮어써진 적이 있다. 복구하는 데 반나절 날렸는데, 원인은 정말 사소한 조건문 하나였다. 그때 느낀 건, 당연하다고 넘겼던 한 줄이 결국 제일 크게 터진다는 거다.

AI 코딩 도구를 매일 쓰면서 실무에 적용할 때 만난 트러블슈팅, 자동화 스크립트를 짜다 걸린 함정, 왜 이 방법이 결국 안 통했는지 같은 것들을 짧고 실용적으로 남길 계획이다. 완벽한 튜토리얼을 쓰기는 어렵겠지만, 대신 다음에 똑같은 삽질 안 하려고 남기는 메모는 쓸 수 있다.

잘 부탁드립니다.