TLDR DEV 2025-11-11

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SLASHING CI WAIT TIMES: HOW PINTEREST CUT ANDROID TESTING BUILD TIMES BY 36%+

Pinterest reduced Android testing build times by over 36% by implementing a runtime-aware sharding mechanism. This in-house system, called PinTestLab, uses historical test duration and stability data from Pinterest's test management system, Metro, to distribute tests across shards running on EC2-hosted emulators. The algorithm assigns tests to emulators projected to finish earliest by prioritizing equal wall-time over equal test counts.

DEPENDENT TYPES AND HOW TO GET RID OF THEM

Dependent types are a programming language feature where types can depend on values, and the concept can be broken down into three ideas: functions returning types, input values determining output types, and tuple values influencing the types of other tuple elements. To optimize, compilers can erase values that are never used at runtime. Dependently typed languages often automatically identify and erase unused parameters.

MEMORY SAFETY FOR SKEPTICS

Memory safety is still important to understand, even with languages like Rust that are memory-safe by default. This means targeting practical strategies, like prioritizing memory safety in new code, targeting rewrites for critical components, and wrapping unsafe code with safe interfaces. While governments aren't banning C or C++, having better memory safety improves software performance and costs overall.

I HATE SCREENSHOTS OF TEXT

Receiving screenshots of text from colleagues instead of copy-pasted text, code files, or error logs makes debugging harder for everyone involved. Screenshots lack context, make it difficult to search for information, and are often less helpful than sharing the raw text.

FROM DEMOS TO DURABILITY

AI app builders are great at creating quick prototypes, but often sacrifice code quality and long-term maintainability for speed. To build lasting software, devs must prioritize good architecture, code clarity, and best practices.

TIME TO START DE-APPLING

If you want to “de-Apple” your life due to Apple withdrawing Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the UK, you can move data from affected iCloud categories to secure, end-to-end encrypted services. The government sought access to all iCloud data, not just that protected by ADP, raising broader privacy concerns.

is essential reading.

THE (LAZY) GIT UI YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEED

Lazygit is a terminal UI for Git. It improves productivity by making Git commands more accessible, safer, and faster.

HOW TO CREATE ACCESSIBLE PDFS FROM THE START

Creating accessible PDFs is hard. Typst is a markup-based writing platform that automatically creates accessible PDFs by using semantic elements and built-in validation. It makes sure documents are screen reader-friendly by incorporating elements like headings, figures, and tables with proper tagging.

FROM WORDS TO WORLDS: SPATIAL INTELLIGENCE IS AI'S NEXT FRONTIER

AI's next frontier is spatial intelligence, moving beyond language models to understand and interact with real and virtual worlds. Spatial intelligence involves reasoning, planning, and interaction with the physical environment, enabling imagination, creativity, and scientific breakthroughs. Achieving this requires developing world models with generative, multimodal, and interactive capabilities.

HIRING A DEVELOPER AS A SMALL INDIE STUDIO (IN 2025)

The indie game studio Ballard Games recently hired a software developer after receiving 159 applications for the position. Faced with limited resources, the studio streamlined its hiring process by quickly filtering applicants based on salary expectations and relevant skills. It used a practical take-home assignment, directly related to the role, to assess coding abilities in a realistic scenario.

LLMS ARE STEROIDS FOR YOUR DUNNING-KRUGER

The impact of LLMs as "confidence engines" can amplify both good ideas and self-delusion by providing a sense of wrong certainty.

USING THE EXPAND AND CONTRACT PATTERN FOR SCHEMA CHANGES

The expand and contract pattern is a multi-step process that allows for safe and reliable database schema migrations without downtime by introducing new structures in parallel, migrating data, and then transitioning clients incrementally to the new schema while providing rollback options.

ON ZIG (AND THE DESIGN CHOICES WITHIN)

Zig, while interesting, falls short due to its lack of memory safety, overly complex comptime features, and various practical and tooling shortcomings.

THE LINUX KERNEL LOOKS TO "BITE THE BULLET" IN ENABLING MICROSOFT C EXTENSIONS

The Linux kernel is likely to enable Microsoft C Extensions in the upcoming 6.19 release, allowing for potentially cleaner code by using non-standard C/C++ constructs.