The Daily Index — Monday, September 23, 2024

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

ONE YEAR OF RUST IN PRODUCTION

This developer found that Rust's type-safety and compile-time checks led to a smooth transition to production without major issues. After a year, they reflect back on how it's going. They find that Rust's long compile times, particularly with macro-heavy libraries, necessitate a different development workflow. At the same time, Rust is still satisfying to use and will continue to be used in production.

yieldcode.blog · 10 min

TLDR Web Dev

GAINING ACCESS TO ANYONE'S BROWSER WITHOUT THEM EVEN VISITING A WEBSITE

A vulnerability in Arc Browser's use of Firebase allowed unauthorized access to any user's browser without them visiting a website. This was possible because Arc's cloud features, like Boosts, stored data in Firestore with insecure security rules. An attacker could exploit this by obtaining a user's ID, creating a malicious Boost, and changing the Boost's creator ID to the victim's. This has since been addressed by Arc, who patched the vulnerability, added a feature to disable Boosts, and started a bug bounty program.

kibty.town · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

NO ONE BUILDS IN PUBLIC

The "build in public" trend within the indie hacker community has an over-reliance on sharing revenue figures. While initially attention-grabbing, the constant stream of success stories may be losing its impact and overshadowing the discussion of actual product development. Also, the "build in public" approach may not be necessary for success, as some prominent indie hackers have achieved great results without actively sharing their progress publicly.

laike9m.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

A NEW ERA OF WRITING CODE

LLMs can significantly speed up development by taking care of repetitive tasks, but they still have limitations, especially when dealing with complex or open-ended features. While LLMs can't replace engineers entirely, they can help them to focus on higher-level tasks.

developing.dev · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

80% OF DEVELOPERS ARE UNHAPPY. THE PROBLEM IS NOT AI, NOR IS CODING

A recent Stack Overflow survey revealed that 80% of developers are unhappy with their jobs, with many reporting feeling burnt out and demoralized. The primary culprit appears to be a combination of factors, including unrealistic expectations, technical debt, bureaucratic obstacles, and a lack of work-life balance.

shiftmag.dev · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

CSS PEEPER (CHROME EXTENSION)

CSS Peeper is a Chrome extension that allows designers to easily view and inspect CSS styles on any website. It allows for browsing components and colors in a visual way.

chromewebstore.google.com

TLDR Web Dev

FORGET CHATGPT: WHY RESEARCHERS NOW RUN SMALL AIS ON THEIR LAPTOPS

Researchers are increasingly choosing to run smaller AI models on their laptops instead of relying on online services like ChatGPT. This shift is driven by the availability of open-source AI models and the development of smaller models that can run efficiently on consumer hardware.

nature.com · 9 min

TLDR Web Dev

THE SORRY STATE OF JAVA DESERIALIZATION

Java deserialization is surprisingly slow. This developer benchmarks various techniques for reading 1 billion rows of data from disk, including using `DataInputStream`, JDBC, Protobuf, Parquet, and custom solutions. The results show that even with optimized custom implementations, Java's performance lags significantly behind the theoretical maximum for disk I/O.

marginalia.nu · 12 min

TLDR Web Dev

ANALYZING THE OPENAPI TOOLING ECOSYSTEM

This is an exploration of the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) tooling ecosystem that visually diagrams the various tasks tools perform and how they relate to each other. The tools are separated into three areas: Parsing libraries, OAD tools, and API tools.

modern-json-schema.com · 14 min

TLDR Web Dev

SANDING UI

“Sanding UI” involves repeatedly clicking and interacting with a user interface to identify and fix subtle usability issues.

blog.jim-nielsen.com · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

WRITE CHANGE-RESILIENT CODE WITH DOMAIN OBJECTS

By using domain objects that represent the fundamental ideas of a product, rather than specific requirements, code becomes more resilient to changes in those requirements.

testing.googleblog.com · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW I HIRE PROGRAMMERS

A better programmer hiring process focuses on evaluating candidates' past work, conversational intelligence, and compatibility with the team rather than traditional interviews like Leetcode questions.

aaronsw.com · 6 min

TLDR Web Dev

I LIKE MAKEFILES

This developer prefers using Makefiles for project automation due to their simplicity, consistency across projects, and compatibility with various build tools.

switowski.com · 5 min