TLDR WEB DEV 2025-06-05

HOW WE REDUCED THE IMPACT OF ZOMBIE CLIENTS

"Zombie clients" are abandoned servers that continuously and unsuccessfully request certificate renewals from LetsEncrypt, wasting resources. LetsEncrypt implemented a "pausing" approach, temporarily limiting an account-hostname pair's ability to request certificates if repeated validation failures occur. This system included a self-service unpause feature, allowing users to quickly resume certificate issuance if they resolve the underlying issues.

MACHINE CODE ISN'T SCARY

Machine code is not as scary as it seems. It involves understanding instructions, registers, and memory. This article breaks down the structure of instructions in both architectures, showing how operations are encoded into binary data.

WHY I WROTE THE BEAM BOOK

"The BEAM Book" is a technical resource for Erlang and Elixir systems. The process of writing it was tough, with the author having to deal with canceled publishing deals and periods of stalled progress. The motivation derived from understanding the BEAM and the support from the community kept them going.

WRITING A POSTMORTEM: AN INTERVIEW EXERCISE I REALLY LIKE

Mapbox used a blameless postmortem as a take-home exercise. This type of exercise is great for assessing a candidate's writing ability, empathy, and critical thinking skills, compared to an in-person coding interview.

live workshop.

CURSOR 1.0

Cursor 1.0 has big upgrades, including the BugBot for automatic code reviews and the general availability of Background Agent, a remote coding assistant. The update also integrates with Jupyter Notebooks, allowing code changes directly within cells, and introduces a beta feature called Memories, allowing the tool to recall and reference past conversations.

APP.BUILD

App.build is an open-source AI agent that generates full-stack applications using the Neon platform. It serves as a reference implementation for codegen products.

THE ART OF SQL QUERY OPTIMIZATION

Plan Explorer is a tool developed to visualize and analyze PostgreSQL query optimization decisions. It iterates over a search space, executes SQL queries, and generates diagrams showing query plans, estimated costs, and actual execution times, both in a browser with PGlite or through a proxy to a real PostgreSQL server.

WHEN MEMORY WAS MEASURED IN KILOBYTES: THE ART OF EFFICIENT VISION

In the early days of computer vision, when memory was extremely limited, researchers at Inria developed "An Efficient Chain-Linking Algorithm" to extract meaningful information from images. This algorithm, created by the PASTIS team, processed images line by line, storing only a few lines at a time, making it memory-efficient. The code's dynamic memory allocation was ingenious and was necessary.

EXPLAINER FOR LOCAL NETWORK ACCESS

The Chrome Secure Web and Network team has proposed a new "Local Network Access" feature to mitigate security risks from websites probing and attacking devices on local networks. It will require user permission before a website can make requests to a private IP address or loopback, unlike the previous Private Network Access (PNA) proposal which relied on preflight requests. This approach involves gating local network requests behind a permission prompt, giving users more control over which sites can access their local network.

IRS DIRECT FILE

Direct File is a free open source U.S. government service that lets taxpayers electronically file federal tax returns.

AGI IS NOT MULTIMODAL

Achieving true AGI requires embodied intelligence and interaction with the environment, rather than simply scaling up multimodal models that lack a genuine understanding of the physical world and rely on just symbol manipulation.

DOUBLING DOWN ON OPEN SOURCE

Langfuse is doubling down on its open-source commitment by releasing all remaining product features, including LLM-as-a-judge evaluations and prompt experiments, under the MIT license.

APPLE NOTES EXPECTED TO GAIN SUPPORT FOR EXPORTING IN MARKDOWN IN IOS 26

Apple Notes in iOS 26 is expected to allow users to export their notes in Markdown format, though it is unlikely to support writing in Markdown directly.