Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

I Couldn't Submit a PR, So I Got Hired and Fixed It Myself

2025-08-01

For over a year, a race condition in Mintlify's search caused wonky results. As the founder of Trieve, the company powering their search, I tried submitting a PR to fix it but failed. Finally joining Mintlify, I added an AbortController to the debounced search function, solving the issue and making search results consistently relevant. This experience highlighted the power of open source and the satisfaction of directly fixing a persistent problem.

(www.skeptrune.com)

Development

SQLite: Building a Database for 2050

2025-08-01

The SQLite developers ambitiously plan to support SQLite until 2050. To achieve this, they've implemented cross-platform code, a stable database file format, aviation-grade testing, extensive documentation, heavily commented source code, and disaster recovery planning. Rejecting fleeting programming trends, they aim for timeless code easily understood and maintained by future programmers. Even the US Library of Congress recognizes SQLite as a recommended format for digital preservation. SQLite's long-term vision and robust design make it a reliable database choice.

(www.sqlite.org)

Development long-term support

Cancelled: A Scala Developer's Four-Year Reckoning

2025-08-01

In 2021, a prominent Scala developer was targeted by online 'mob justice', accused of sexual misconduct. Despite the false accusations, he lost his job, income, home, and friends overnight, facing financial ruin and health problems. While ultimately vindicated legally, the reputational damage remains, leaving him with psychological trauma and prolonged financial hardship, including homelessness. This account details his four-year ordeal, urging caution in public condemnation and highlighting the devastating impact of online attacks on individuals.

(pretty.direct)

Development online mob justice cancel culture reputational damage

Live Coding Interviews: A Stress Test, Not a Skill Test?

2025-08-01

This article challenges the effectiveness of live coding interviews as a measure of engineering skill. The author recounts personal experiences and cites scientific research showing that high-pressure situations impair cognitive function, specifically working memory, crucial for coding. A study revealed participants performed half as well under observation, with women completely failing in the observed condition. The author suggests mitigating stress through mock interviews and explores supplements like L-tyrosine and L-theanine to improve performance under pressure.

(hadid.dev)

Development live coding interviews stress

Privacy-Friendly Apps Leaving Google Play Store

2025-08-01

A project offering privacy-friendly Android apps since 2016 is discontinuing updates on the Google Play Store. Due to unsustainable maintenance costs, the team is moving its 30+ apps to the F-Droid store for continued support. Existing installations remain unaffected, but users are encouraged to migrate to F-Droid for future updates and to ensure continued functionality.

(secuso.aifb.kit.edu)

Development

rewindtty: A C-based Terminal Session Recorder and Replayer

2025-08-01

rewindtty is an open-source project written in C that precisely records and replays terminal sessions, including timing information. It offers session analysis, generating detailed statistics and optimization suggestions. Session data is stored in JSON format for easy parsing. Furthermore, it includes a browser-based player with advanced features like an interactive timeline and controls, significantly enhancing the user experience. The project is lightweight, has minimal dependencies, and is easy to use.

(github.com)

Development terminal recording session replay

Will This Linux Server Security Guide Protect You From Hackers?

2025-08-01

This comprehensive guide details how to secure your Linux server against malicious attacks. It covers everything from choosing a secure Linux distribution to configuring firewalls and intrusion detection/prevention systems (like Fail2Ban and CrowdSec), and provides Ansible playbooks to automate many security steps. The guide also touches on advanced topics like using SSH keys, two-factor authentication, and kernel sysctl hardening, while cautioning readers about the risks involved in these steps. It's a living document intended to be a comprehensive resource for Linux server security.

(github.com)

Development Server Security

Saying Goodbye to tmux: A shpool and Window Manager Based Alternative

2025-08-01

The author, a long-time tmux user, sought an alternative due to its complexity and annoying issues like color rendering, buffer scrolling, and mouse selection. The article explores the shortcomings of terminal multiplexers and introduces how tools like shpool, combined with window managers (such as ghostty or sway), achieve session persistence and window management, ultimately replacing tmux. While shpool isn't perfect and has minor issues, the author finds its native scrollback, terminal notifications, and titles to be significant advantages. Detailed configuration instructions are provided.

(bower.sh)

Development tmux alternative session persistence

AI Coding: The Coming Flood of Cheap, Low-Quality Software

2025-08-01

The author argues that AI's impact on programming will mirror fast fashion's effect on the clothing industry: a flood of cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste. While acknowledging AI's usefulness in prototyping and debugging, the author highlights the inherent flaws in LLM-generated code, including lack of optimization, security vulnerabilities, and inability to handle complexity. This will lead to a market saturated with low-quality software, comparable to the environmental problems caused by fast fashion. The author calls for standardized code quality metrics and professional certifications to mitigate the potential disaster, emphasizing that despite AI assistance, developers remain ultimately accountable.

(pdelboca.me)

Development

Carbon Language: An Experimental Successor to C++

2025-08-01

Google is developing Carbon, an experimental successor language to C++. Designed to address C++'s challenges in modern software development, Carbon aims for C++-level performance and seamless interoperability while offering a more modern developer experience with features like improved syntax and a powerful generics system. Currently in its experimental phase, the Carbon team is actively developing the compiler and toolchain, welcoming community contributions to shape its future.

(docs.carbon-lang.dev)

Development

PHP-ORT: Bringing First-Class ML Inference to PHP

2025-08-01

PHP-ORT empowers PHP developers to embrace the AI revolution by bringing first-class machine learning inference directly into PHP. This project provides a high-performance Tensor API and math library, with ONNX support, enabling developers to build intelligent applications without the overhead of microservices or API calls. This democratizes machine learning, allowing millions of PHP developers to participate and innovate in the AI space.

(krakjoe.github.io)

Development

Pro-Level Zoom Audio with Audio Hijack and BlackHole

2025-08-01

During the pandemic, a friend sought a way to improve Zoom call audio quality. This post details the author's solution using Audio Hijack (instead of Reaper), the BlackHole virtual audio driver, and a DAW. By creating an aggregate audio device and cleverly using BlackHole's dual-channel capability (one for Zoom mic, one for speaker), and routing/mixing audio within the DAW, high-quality audio input/output is achieved, with monitoring, recording, and system sound sharing capabilities. This method bypasses Zoom's audio processing limitations, giving users complete control over their audio.

(noahliebman.net)

Development

Perl: The Duct Tape of the Internet, A Story of Rise and Fall

2025-08-01

Perl was once ubiquitous, powering countless websites around the turn of the millennium. Its strength lay in handling massive text data, even finding use in bioinformatics. However, Perl's messy syntax earned it the nickname "duct tape of the internet," often jokingly referred to as 'write-only'. Created by Larry Wall, a linguist, its design reflected a philosophy rejecting linguistic purity. Perl's multitude of approaches, while initially appealing, ultimately contributed to its decline in popularity. Despite its fall from grace, Perl stands as a testament to the idea that programming shouldn't be constrained by dogma.

(www.wired.com)

Development

MCP-Use: Open-Source Library Connecting Any LLM to Any MCP Server

2025-08-01

MCP-Use is an open-source library enabling developers to easily connect any LangChain-supported LLM (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) to any MCP server and build custom MCP agents with tool access. It boasts features like ease of use, LLM flexibility, a code builder, HTTP support, dynamic server selection, multi-server support, tool restrictions, custom agent creation, and asynchronous streaming output. Installation is via pip or from source, requiring the appropriate LangChain provider package. MCP-Use also supports configuration file loading and offers a sandboxed execution mode for secure server operation.

(github.com)

Development

Goodbye Scattered Cron Jobs: Heartbeat's Centralized Task Scheduler

2025-08-01

Heartbeat previously used multiple Cron Jobs to manage scheduled tasks, resulting in high maintenance costs and frequent errors. This article describes how they built a centralized, database-driven task scheduler using a single `ScheduledTasks` database table and a single Cron Job to manage all scheduled tasks. Leveraging AWS SQS for asynchronous processing, the system ensures reliable task execution, retry mechanisms, and robust monitoring. This approach addresses issues like task management chaos, difficult error handling, and simplifies the addition of new scheduled tasks.

(mayhul.com)

Development task scheduling

KubeForge: Visual Kubernetes Deployment Made Easy

2025-08-01

KubeForge is a visual-first toolkit that simplifies building, validating, and managing Kubernetes deployment configurations. Its drag-and-drop interface, powered by live Kubernetes JSON schemas, provides smart schema awareness. A modular component editor supports templates and reusable specs, with real-time visual updates and dependency linking. Export ready-to-apply YAML files, reducing the Kubernetes learning curve and eliminating syntax errors. KubeForge keeps schemas up-to-date via daily updates, ensuring accurate configurations. It also offers direct YAML hosting for automation and GitOps pipelines, plus features like real-time validation and Helm chart generation.

(github.com)

Development Visual Tool

QUIC Protocol Heads for Linux Kernel Mainline: A Speed and Performance Trade-off

2025-08-01

After over a decade, the QUIC protocol is finally making its way into the Linux kernel mainline. Designed to address latency, congestion, and security issues inherent in TCP on the modern internet, QUIC uses UDP for faster, more secure data transmission. However, current kernel implementations underperform in benchmarks, lagging behind TCP. Developers attribute this to a lack of hardware offload support and optimization, with future performance improvements expected. Kernel integration will pave the way for wider application support, but complete code review and merging are expected to take considerable time, potentially until 2026 at the earliest.

(lwn.net)

Development Network Protocol

First-Time Manager Survival Guide: From IC to Leader

2025-07-31

This article offers invaluable advice for first-time managers. It emphasizes that management isn't just a change in tasks, but a shift in roles – from individual contributor to team leader. It stresses learning to empower team members rather than micromanaging. The author notes that making mistakes is inevitable; what matters is learning from them, maintaining clear communication, setting clear expectations, and fostering a positive work environment. It also advises managers to prioritize self-care to avoid burnout and learn from strong leaders to improve management skills.

(scottkosman.com)

Development management tips team leadership

Linux Auto-Shutdown on Power Disconnect: A BusKill Alternative

2025-07-31

This article details a simple alternative to BusKill for automatically shutting down a Linux system when the power is disconnected. By creating a udev rule that monitors the power supply status, a custom script (e.g., poweroff) is executed upon disconnection. This is a straightforward method for protecting laptops used in public areas from theft. The article also provides alternative script ideas, such as locking sessions, hibernating, or even destroying LUKS master keys, catering to various security needs.

(dataswamp.org)

Development

Go's Race Detector: A Mutex Blind Spot

2025-07-31

Go's race detector has a blind spot when dealing with mutexes. An example demonstrates how two goroutines using a mutex to protect a shared counter, with one performing an additional increment outside the lock. Even though a data race is possible, Go's detector might miss it because it relies on the order of lock acquisition, which is unpredictable at runtime. While Go's race detector is a best-in-class tool, this example highlights that race conditions can still exist even when the detector reports no races.

(doublefree.dev)

Development race detection

Infracost seeks its first PM to tackle the $600B cloud cost problem

2025-07-31

$Infracost seeks its first PM to tackle the $600B cloud cost problem$

Infracost, a Sequoia and YC-backed startup, is searching for its first product manager. They're tackling the challenge of proactively managing cloud costs, enabling engineers to find and fix cost issues before they hit production. The PM will own critical parts of the roadmap, working closely with engineering and design, and directly with customers to understand their needs. This is a high-impact role requiring B2B product experience, DevOps tool experience, and ideally, cloud cost domain expertise. The company values a user-centric, open, and highly effective execution culture.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Cloud Cost Management

Servo: A Rust-Powered Browser Engine Challenging Chrome's Dominance

2025-07-31

Once, browser engines flourished; now, Chrome reigns supreme, its Chromium core dominating the market. However, a Rust-based browser engine called Servo is quietly rising. Known for its multi-threading and memory safety, it aims to be an embeddable rendering engine, potentially challenging Electron and Android WebView. While still in its early stages, Servo has secured backing from the Linux Foundation Europe and shows impressive performance and potential, offering a glimmer of hope in breaking Chrome's monopoly.

(www.spacebar.news)

Development

Introduction to Computer Music: A 20-Year Journey

2025-07-31

This e-book, initially designed as an online text for first-year computer music studies, serves as a comprehensive introduction for composers, aspiring audio engineers, and music enthusiasts. Developed over two decades, it covers a wide range of topics and continues to expand. Authored by Professor Jeffrey Hass, emeritus director of Indiana University's Center for Electronic and Computer Music, the book is freely available for learning and teaching purposes, with attribution required.

(cmtext.com)

Development computer music music education

Lean: Formalizing Mathematics as Code

2025-07-31

$Lean: Formalizing Mathematics as Code$

Lean is a programming language primarily used by mathematicians to formalize mathematics. It allows mathematicians to treat mathematics as code, breaking it into structures, theorems, and proofs, and sharing them on GitHub. The article uses a simple example, proving 2=2, to introduce Lean's syntax and basic concepts like tactics. It demonstrates how tactics are used to prove or disprove mathematical statements. A fictional axiom, '2=3', illustrates how a faulty axiom can lead to proving anything, highlighting the importance of formal verification. The article concludes by mentioning the ongoing Lean formalization of Fermat's Last Theorem as a testament to Lean's power.

(overreacted.io)

Development

Memory-Efficient C Structs: A Deep Dive

2025-07-31

This blog post explores techniques for optimizing C structs to minimize memory usage. Using a `Monster` struct as an example, the author demonstrates several optimization strategies. These include reordering members to reduce padding, removing redundant fields (e.g., inferring `is_alive` from `health`), using smaller integer types (like `uint8_t`, `uint16_t`), employing bitfields for booleans, and replacing strings with enums for monster names. These optimizations shrink the `Monster` struct from 96 bytes to a mere 20 bytes, significantly improving memory efficiency. The post also discusses trade-offs and potential issues like integer overflows.

(tomscheers.github.io)

Development

Emacs on macOS: Unraveling a Memory Leak Mystery

2025-07-31

The author has long struggled with performance issues in Emacs on macOS: ever-increasing memory usage, eventually leading to freezes. After investigation, the root cause was found to be in the way `[NSApp run]` is invoked, resulting in massive memory allocation and deallocation, especially pronounced on high-performance hardware and high-DPI displays. The interaction between macOS's event handling and Emacs' efficient resource management leads to caching of useless resources, culminating in memory leaks. While a complete fix is difficult, the author proposes a potential solution: rewriting macOS-specific code in Swift, leveraging its more efficient memory management and asynchronous support to improve Emacs' performance on macOS.

(xlii.space)

Development

Gracefully Handling Child Process Termination in Terminal Applications

2025-07-31

When a terminal application with child processes doesn't exit cleanly after Ctrl+C, terminal corruption ensues. This post, using the Moose CLI as an example, details solutions. Key strategies include: 1. Process Output Proxying: Redirect child process stdout/stderr to a logging system, isolating it from the terminal; 2. Terminal State Management: Explicitly clean up the terminal state (raw mode, alternate screen buffer, cursor visibility) using crossterm for cross-platform consistency on exit; 3. Graceful Process Termination: Attempt graceful shutdown with SIGTERM, then SIGKILL with timeouts; 4. Thread-Safe Spinner Management: Coordinate spinners and child process output to prevent display corruption. These strategies build robust terminal applications, preventing frustrating terminal damage from child processes.

(www.fiveonefour.com)

Development child processes

From Embedded Software to PCB Inventory Management: A Highly Efficient System

2025-07-31

An embedded software engineer, while designing printed circuit boards (PCBs), encountered the challenge of managing numerous electronic components. He cleverly applied his software development experience to hardware management, using the Gridfinity modular storage system and a self-written software to achieve efficient component inventory management. The software not only quickly locates components based on the BOM (Bill of Materials) but also allows for batch inventory management, greatly improving efficiency. Future plans include adding bulk purchasing functionality and smarter search capabilities.

(www.vincentuden.xyz)

Development

Vibe Coding: The Allure and Peril of AI-Assisted Programming

2025-07-31

Andrej Karpathy's "vibe coding," an AI-assisted coding approach where you largely ignore the code's intricacies, is efficient for prototypes and throwaway projects. However, for long-term projects, it can rapidly accumulate "technical debt." The article draws a parallel to giving a credit card to a child – initially exciting, but potentially disastrous later. It advocates caution for large-scale projects and stresses the continued importance of solid programming fundamentals and code comprehension.

(blog.val.town)

Development

Blast from the Past: Classic CDE Desktop Environment Added to OpenBSD Ports

2025-07-31

The classic Unix desktop environment, CDE (Common Desktop Environment), is making a comeback! OpenBSD developers have imported CDE 2.5.2 into their ports collection. While not yet directly installable as a package (it needs some fixes and improvements), nostalgic developers can compile it locally and experience the classic Unix desktop. A warning: the code is old and insecure, not recommended as a daily driver, but fun for a trip down memory lane.

(undeadly.org)

Development Unix Desktop Environment

Category: Development