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GOT SOMETHING IN PLACE? NO NEED TO RIP AND REPLACE. PropelAuth BYO

lets you quickly add advanced authentication features like Enterprise SSO, session management, and passkeys.

DRAWING TEXT ON SCREEN - WHAT COULD BE SIMPLER?

This dev rewrote a text-based file manager in Go as a learning exercise, focusing on input and output handling. They used C# and explored different rendering methods, including console methods, GDI, DirectX, and Vulkan. They found that direct text drawing with DirectX performed the best for normal use, better than texture-based caching despite the latter's advantage in extreme stress test scenarios. However, efficient text rendering is more complex than it initially appears.

WE RAN OVER 600 IMAGE GENERATIONS TO COMPARE AI MODELS

A long-time developer of iOS photo apps compared the performance of OpenAI, Gemini, and Seedream AI models on various image editing tasks. They ran over 600 image generations using naive prompts and representative photos to assess the trade-offs between quality, prompt complexity, and pricing for each model. OpenAI was the best at transformative and creative edits, and Gemini was better for realistic edits and detail preservation, while Seedream was a good middle ground.

USING ATOMIC STATE TO IMPROVE REACT PERFORMANCE IN DEEPLY NESTED COMPONENT TREES

Harbor solved React performance issues in its clinical trial data capture application by switching from vanilla React Context to atomic state management with Jotai. The traditional Context approach caused entire component trees to rerender when any single node's state changed, which became expensive in their deeply nested "event → form → field group → field" hierarchy. By using Jotai's atomic state system, it was able to create granular state atoms that only trigger rerenders in components that actually depend on the changed data.

COLLABORATION SUCKS

Excessive collaboration slows progress in companies. Instead, the company should have a "driver" mentality where individuals take ownership and minimize unnecessary feedback. This means defaulting to shipping, seeking specific input, and prioritizing post-shipment feedback.

VERTICAL INTEGRATION IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS

Vertical integration, which means tight integration between different tools in a development stack, is necessary for developer productivity. Examples of such vertically integrated workflows include automated build artifact sharing and interactive debugging across languages. While building a vertically integrated development environment as a product is challenging, the glue code connecting different tools is where the real value lies.

TUSK DRIFT

The Tusk Drift SDK enables deterministic API testing by recording and replaying API calls. It captures real-world API interactions and uses the Tusk CLI to replay them as tests, identifying regressions by intercepting outbound requests with recorded data. The SDK uses Node.js and supports various packages and versions, including HTTP/HTTPS, GRPC, PG, Firestore, and more.

ADK FOR GO

The Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an open-source, code-first Go toolkit designed for building, evaluating, and deploying AI agents. It applies software development principles to AI agent creation and makes the orchestration of agent workflows easier. It is model and deployment-agnostic, and has a tool ecosystem with modular multi-agent systems.

PERSPECTIVE

Perspective is an interactive analytics and data visualization component ideal for large, streaming datasets. It provides a fast, memory-efficient query engine written in C++ and a framework-agnostic User Interface as a Custom Element. Perspective can be used in the browser via WebAssembly or virtually via a WebSocket server using Python/Node.

META'S CHIEF AI SCIENTIST YANN LECUN REPORTEDLY PLANS TO LEAVE TO BUILD HIS OWN STARTUP

Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly planning to leave the company in the coming months to start his own startup focused on world models. LeCun's departure comes at a challenging time for Meta, which has been restructuring its AI organization amid concerns it's falling behind competitors like OpenAI and Google.

A CATALOG OF SIDE EFFECTS

This blog post discusses different approaches compilers use to track the effects of Intermediate Representation (IR) instructions, focusing on how these effects influence optimizations like instruction re-ordering and dead code elimination. There are two main representation methods: bitsets, as used in Cinder and other compilers like HHVM and ART, and heap range lists, as implemented in JavaScriptCore. Bitsets are compact and precise, while range lists offer more long-term flexibility.

A FRIENDLY GUIDE TO FRONT-END DATE PICKERS

Simpler date selection methods are preferred over complex JavaScript date pickers due to better usability and accessibility.

TYPESCRIPT'S RISE IN THE AI ERA

TypeScript became the most-used language on GitHub in 2025, surpassing JavaScript and Python, with over a million new developers contributing (a 66% year-over-year increase).

LEARNING TO MODEL THE WORLD WITH LANGUAGE

Dynalang is an agent that learns to understand and uses multiple types of language by predicting future text, images, and rewards within a multimodal world model.

WHY EFFORT SCALES SUPERLINEARLY WITH THE PERCEIVED QUALITY OF CREATIVE WORK

Achieving higher perceived quality in creative work requires a disproportionately larger effort because the search space for acceptable refinements shrinks, verification latency increases, and the process involves a lot of exploration and exploitation.

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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.

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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.

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HOW DID I GET HERE?

This website uses a custom traceroute program called ktr to visualize the journey of internet packets between the server and your IP address. The traceroute works by sending ICMP packets with increasing TTLs to map the routers and networks (autonomous systems) involved. These networks peer with each other using the Border Gateway Protocol to exchange routing information and determine the best path for data transmission.

INSIDE MODAL NOTEBOOKS: HOW WE BUILT A CLOUD GPU NOTEBOOK THAT BOOTS IN SECONDS

Modal Notebooks are a cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment that offers fast GPU access and real-time collaboration. Engineering-wise, the notebooks use sandboxes for safe kernel execution, lazy-load container images for quick startup, and VolumeFS for persistent data storage.

WHY IS ZIG SO COOL?

Zig is a programming language that is great at compiling C code and cross-compiling to different architectures, setting it apart from other languages. This is a beginner-friendly guide to Zig that covers variable declarations, structs, loops, arrays, pointers, functions, and object-oriented programming concepts.

DEAD FRAMEWORK THEORY

React's dominance is self-reinforcing due to LLMs favoring it in code generation, creating a barrier for new frameworks, libraries, and web platform features. This is because LLMs are trained on existing data, where React is statistically dominant, and tools are incentivized to output React to meet developer demand.

STARTUP LESSONS FROM MY PIRACY WEBSITE

This author fostered a loyal user base while running the piracy streaming site HeheStreams through prioritizing customer service, personalized communication, and honest recommendations. A key growth strategy involved using Reddit's API to encourage user referrals in relevant online communities. These principles apply to all businesses, except in this case, the author went to jail since the site itself was illegal.

BECOMING A COMPILER ENGINEER

Compiler engineers implement programming languages, focusing on optimization and maintenance rather than language creation. The job market is competitive due to limited demand and high entry barriers, with opportunities in startups, larger tech companies, academia, and quant finance. Interviews for compiler engineers usually have questions on LeetCode-style data structures and algorithms (in C++), language design, intermediate representation, and compiler optimization passes.

"what helps make confident decisions fastest?" Miro's guide

provides a FRAMEWORK + SCORECARD so you can commit resources confidently — plus a method for turning early ideas into editable prototypes, before committing to code. Get the guide [15].

VALDI

Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework developed by Snapchat designed to deliver native performance without sacrificing developer speed. It allows developers to write UI code once in TypeScript, which is then compiled directly into native views for iOS, Android, and macOS. Valdi has automatic view recycling, optimized component rendering, and a C++ layout engine for better performance.

MARKOJS

Marko is a declarative, HTML-based language that extends standard HTML to enable building dynamic and reactive user interfaces. It prioritizes performance with features like streaming, an optimizing compiler, and granular hydration.

RIBIR

Ribir is a non-intrusive Rust GUI framework that enables building cross-platform applications from a single codebase. The framework has a declarative language using Rust macros, a widget composition system, a layout system inspired by Flutter, and a theme system.

LEAVING META AND PYTORCH

After eleven years at Meta, including nearly eight years working on PyTorch, which he co-founded, Soumith Chintala is leaving to pursue something new and smaller, driven by curiosity and the desire to avoid regret. He's confident in PyTorch's future, as a capable and value-aligned team is in place to guide its continued evolution.

AI ISN'T REPLACING JOBS. AI SPENDING IS

Despite claims of AI-driven job displacement, AI is not the primary cause of recent layoffs. Tech sector layoffs are more likely due to factors like over-hiring during the pandemic and financial stress from massive AI infrastructure spending that isn't generating enough revenue. Companies are using AI as a convenient excuse for cost-cutting measures when faced with financial pressures.