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POSTGRESQL PERFORMANCE COMPARISON

The newly released Postgres 18 is the fastest version.

FUNDAMENTAL OF VIRTUAL MEMORY

Virtual memory uses techniques like paging and demand paging to abstract physical memory, allowing processes to access more memory than physically available, manage memory efficiently, and isolate processes from each other.

DAYFLOW

Dayflow is an open-source macOS app that automatically generates a timeline of your daily screen activity with AI summaries and distraction highlights by taking a screenshot of your screen every 15 minutes.

WRITE THE "STUPID" CODE

Write "stupid" code and experiment with new technologies without criticizing yourself.

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THE WEB'S MOST TOLERATED FEATURE

The CSS `zoom` property was a non-standard feature initially introduced by Internet Explorer. Despite its initial lack of standardization and quirks, `zoom` surprisingly ranked high in usage metrics due to a "hack" used to fix IE behavior. Eventually, developers and the CSS Working Group recognized the need for a standardized, layout-affecting zoom, leading to its formal specification and widespread support decades later.

YOU MAY BE LOOKING FOR A USESYNCEXTERNALSTORE

When you see a `useEffect` updating a `useState` with a subscription, you should consider using `useSyncExternalStore` instead. This pattern, while common, can cause jank because React renders the component multiple times. `useSyncExternalStore` provides a cleaner API, allows specifying a server-side default value, and reduces jank by making sure the correct value is used on the initial render.

HOW TO ORGANIZE EXPO APP FOLDER STRUCTURE FOR CLARITY AND SCALABILITY

To improve clarity and scalability in Expo Router projects, organize your folder structure with a `/src` directory to separate app code from configuration files. Create `/components` and `/screens` folders for reusable UI elements and route-specific content, respectively. Finally, use a `/utils` and `/hooks` folders for utility functions and reusable React hooks, and a `/server` folder to manage API routes and server-side logic.

THE SELF-TRIVIALIZATION OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

The self-trivialization of software development is the process of solving complex problems so thoroughly that they become routine and easily reusable. This trend is shown by the shift to high-level languages, the rise of open-source libraries, and the usage of AI-powered coding assistants. While it may seem like developers are working themselves out of a job, they are instead evolving to focus on architecture, integration, and innovation, freeing up their creativity.

THE THEATRE OF PULL REQUESTS AND CODE REVIEW

PRs are often too large and complex, leading to shallow reviews and code quality issues. Smaller, focused PRs (under 300 lines of code) and commits tell a story that improves reviewability and understanding.

THE ATTRIBUTE OF GREATNESS: DECISION LOG

Your past self is a valuable mentor if you document important decisions you make to learn from them later. Write down the context, possibilities, and rationale behind decisions to later analyze and understand how your perspective has evolved. By revisiting past decisions, you can identify missed opportunities and improve your future decision-making process.

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POSTGRESQL 18 RELEASED!

PostgreSQL 18 comes with performance improvements via a new asynchronous I/O subsystem, faster major-version upgrades, and better query performance with features like skip scan lookups and optimized OR conditions. It also has support for virtual generated columns and access to the uuidv7() function.

ANNOUNCING CLOUDFLARE EMAIL SERVICE'S PRIVATE BETA

Cloudflare is launching a private beta for its new Email Service, which allows developers to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. This service combines Email Sending with their existing Email Routing product to provide a unified platform for managing all email needs.

WEB SEARCH

Ollama has launched a new web search API to give its models real-time information and reduce hallucinations. The API is available through a REST endpoint and is integrated into Ollama's Python and JavaScript libraries, allowing models to conduct long-running research.

ATHLON 64: HOW AMD TURNED THE TABLES ON INTEL

In 2003, AMD released the Athlon 64, a 64-bit CPU, challenging Intel's reluctance to extend the x86 architecture. Intel initially pursued its own 64-bit architecture, Itanium, aiming for a clean break from legacy systems and potential market dominance. However, AMD's Athlon 64 offered backward compatibility and strong 32-bit performance, appealing to users and businesses alike, leading to Intel abandoning Itanium and adopting AMD64 (renamed Intel64).

OUR PLAN FOR A MORE SECURE NPM SUPPLY CHAIN

In response to recent security breaches, GitHub is improving npm security to safeguard the open source ecosystem. It is mandating two-factor authentication for local publishing, implementing granular tokens with limited lifespans, and promoting trusted publishing. Legacy tokens and TOTP-based 2FA will be deprecated, and token publishing access will be restricted by default.

INTRODUCING CHATGPT PULSE

OpenAI's ChatGPT Pulse is a new feature for Pro users that proactively delivers personalized research and updates every day based on user chats, feedback, and connected apps.

CONTINUING TO BRING YOU OUR LATEST MODELS, WITH AN IMPROVED GEMINI 2.5 FLASH AND FLASH-LITE RELEASE

Google DeepMind has released updated versions of Gemini 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash-Lite, now accessible via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, that are more efficient and better performing overall.

IMMUTABLE INFRASTRUCTURE DEVOPS: WHY YOU SHOULD REPLACE, NOT PATCH

Immutable infrastructure, where servers are replaced entirely with new, pre-configured instances instead of being patched in-place, offers predictability, atomic deployments, trivial rollbacks, and forces good practices, though it may introduce slower deployments and initial complexity.

RESURRECT THE OLD WEB

Returning to reading blogs and following RSS feeds is a way to escape the pitfalls of modern social media and recapture the personal connections of the early internet.

HOW CLAUDE CODE IS BUILT

This article provides a look into the development of Claude Code, a popular AI-powered developer tool that generates over $500M in annual revenue. The tool originated from a simple command-line tool using Claude to identify music, then evolved into a sophisticated product with a tech stack including TypeScript, React, Ink, Yoga, and Bun, with 90% of the code written by itself. Claude Code's success is attributed to its rapid development pace, with features built and shipped in days. The team uses AI agents extensively for code reviews and tests.

WE THOUGHT REACT NATIVE WAS THE ANSWER — UNTIL OUR APP HIT 190% CPU

Motion initially chose React Native for its mobile app to use its JavaScript team and share code across platforms, but ran into performance issues when its calendar screen hit 190% CPU usage due to the overhead of bridging between JavaScript and native code. After trying various optimization techniques like caching and lazy loading that only provided marginal improvements, its team rewrote the calendar screen in native code, which reduced CPU usage to just 5%. The company now follows a hybrid approach where new features are built in React Native first for speed, then converted to native code based on performance demands.

BUILDING A BETTER ONLINE EDITOR FOR TYPESCRIPT

Val Town has rewritten and open-sourced its online TypeScript editor from scratch to improve its performance and accuracy. The previous editor ran TypeScript in a Web Worker, which struggled with Deno-specific features and large NPM modules. The new editor uses the official Deno Language Server, running it remotely in cloud containers managed by Cloudflare, resulting in a faster, more reliable experience.

HOW TO BE A LEADER WHEN THE VIBES ARE OFF

The tech industry is having a shift with anxieties fueled by AI, return-to-office mandates, and layoffs. While leaders can't control these macro trends, they can support their teams by acknowledging the challenging situation privately and validating their team's emotions. Leaders should avoid making empty promises and instead find small, discreet workarounds to make the work environment more livable.

MIGRATING TO TANSTACK START

This dev migrated their course platform from a client-server setup (separate React frontend + Hono backend) to TanStack Start to enable server-side rendering (SSR) for better SEO on course, author, and tag pages. They chose TanStack Start over alternatives like creating a separate marketing site with Astro or using TanStack Router's SSR mode because it allows selective SSR while maintaining the option to use more backend features in the future.

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PYTHON ON THE EDGE: FAST, SANDBOXED, AND POWERED BY WEBASSEMBLY

Wasmer Edge now fully supports Python via WebAssembly. This allows running popular Python frameworks and libraries like FastAPI, Django, and LangChain directly on Wasmer and Wasmer Edge. It outperforms alternatives like Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda by offering better compatibility and faster cold starts without requiring code modifications.

INTRODUCING SEDONADB: A SINGLE-NODE ANALYTICAL DATABASE ENGINE WITH GEOSPATIAL AS A FIRST-CLASS CITIZEN

SedonaDB is an open-source, single-node analytical database engine that treats spatial data as a first-class citizen. It is built in Rust and uses Apache Arrow and DataFusion, and it offers full support for spatial types, joins, and functions with optimizations for high performance in single-machine environments. It provides Pythonic and SQL interfaces and integrates seamlessly with GeoArrow, GeoParquet, and GeoPandas for efficient spatial data processing without requiring extensions or plugins.

OMITTABLE — SOLVING THE AMBIGUITY OF NULL

In Java, the concept of null is ambiguously used to represent both a value and the absence of a value, causing issues in scenarios like partial updates or filtering, where distinguishing between a missing field and a null value is crucial. While Java's `Optional` type aims to address this, it falls short because it cannot represent the explicit null value. The `Omittable` library for Java and Kotlin introduces a container type that distinguishes between a value and the absence of a value without using null as a sentinel, providing a clearer way to handle optional data.

IMAGINING A LANGUAGE WITHOUT BOOLEANS

Can a programming language not have booleans? This article goes over replacing booleans with alternatives, and introduces new syntax and evaluation rules for `if`, `else`, `and`, and `or` as binary operators acting on these options/results.

WHY YOU SHOULD REPLACE POSTGRESQL WITH GIT FOR YOUR NEXT PROJECT

Git can technically be used as a database, though it's not recommended. Git inherently provides versioning, concurrency handling, atomic transactions, and fast data retrieval through its object model of blobs, trees, commits, and references. This article goes over a simple todo application that uses Git's command-line tools, showing how to store and organize data.

REDIS IS FAST - I'LL CACHE IN POSTGRES

Redis and Postgres are compared as caching solutions by building a simple HTTP server and benchmarking read, write, and mixed workloads on a Kubernetes cluster. Redis consistently outperformed Postgres in terms of requests per second and latency, even with Postgres using unlogged tables for faster writes. The bottleneck for Redis was often the HTTP server's CPU, while Postgres frequently maxed out its allocated CPU resources.

UPCOMING NEW REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUTUBE DOWNLOADS

Due to changes on YouTube's end, users will soon need to install the JavaScript runtime Deno for yt-dlp to continue downloading YouTube videos using the package.

MACOS BECOMES IOS: SAFARI VIDEO CONTROLS

Apple is increasingly merging iOS and macOS, as shown by Safari's video controls darkening videos on both platforms in recent versions.

WHY I KEEP BUSINESS LOGIC OUT OF SQL

Don't use SQL for complex business logic, and instead keep the database as a simple data store while implementing logic within the application code itself.

THE DAY THE LINTER BROKE MY CODE

A seemingly helpful linter suggestion inadvertently introduced a subtle but critical bug by incorrectly applying a standard method within a custom method of the same name, violating Go's error-handling principles and leading to unexpected error equivalences.

GETTING AI TO WORK IN COMPLEX CODEBASES

With core context engineering principles and frequent intentional compaction, current AI models can be great at handling large, detailed codebases. AI can rarely produce correct code in one shot in large code bases, so it needs steps before implementation to do research on the codebase and plan its steps.

THUNDERING HERD PROBLEM: PREVENTING THE STAMPEDE

The "thundering herd" problem occurs when a cache miss leads to a large number of concurrent requests hitting the database for the same record, overwhelming it. There are two solutions: using a distributed lock to allow only one request to access the database, or using in-process synchronization with (as an example) Java's `CompletableFuture` and `ConcurrentHashMap`. While the distributed lock works across multiple nodes, the in-process synchronization avoids network calls but doesn't coordinate across nodes.

HOW INFOBIP'S INFRASTRUCTURE TEAM HANDLED 10 BILLION MESSAGES IN A DAY

Infobip's infrastructure team handles 10 billion messages daily. They overcame issues like email overloads, data center failures, and scaling for WhatsApp Business by using cloud solutions, re-architecting systems, and adopting Kubernetes. A critical decommissioning mistake in 2024 led to the implementation of delayed destructive actions, preventing data loss.

I TRIED HTMX, THEN DITCHED IT

While appreciating HTMX's potential to reduce JavaScript reliance, this dev found its lack of structure problematic, leading him to create MESH, a modular SSR framework based on the "one component = one endpoint" principle. He concludes that he's not using HTMX in the way it's intended and drops it in favor of simpler JavaScript and SSE.

YOUR IMAGES ARE (PROBABLY) OVERSIZED

Serving appropriately sized images for different screen sizes avoids wasting bandwidth and compute power. This can be done by using the `srcset` and `sizes` attributes on the `img` tag to specify multiple image sources and their intended widths based on viewport size.

WHY YOU SHOULD TEST YOUR PAGE WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT

Devs should test their websites without JavaScript enabled to check accessibility and resilience. JavaScript can fail due to slow networks, browser extensions, or user settings, so sites should use progressive enhancement, starting with semantic HTML that works without JS and adding JavaScript features as enhancements.

TANSTACK START V1 RELEASE CANDIDATE

TanStack Start has reached its v1.0 Release Candidate. This version includes type-safe routing, server-first functions, built-in streaming, and URL-as-state primitives, all while offering flexibility for both SPA and SSR architectures.

OPEN SOURCE AI DATA GENERATOR

The AI Data Generator helps users generate sample data with various input parameters, export it in various formats, and explore it within Metabase.

EXPLORING ACTIVE AGENT, OR CAN WE BUILD AI FEATURES THE RAILS WAY?

Active Agent is a Ruby gem that helps integrate AI features into Rails applications using familiar Rails conventions and patterns. It introduces "agents" as a new abstraction that encapsulates AI-backed logic, using action-driven objects, callbacks, and prompt rendering similar to Rails controllers and mailers.