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Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 227 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless." - Bram Cohen

Reading List

Genie: Uber’s Gen AI On-Call Copilot
In today’s fast-paced tech environment, maintaining robust on-call operations is crucial for ensuring seamless service functioning. Modern platform engineering teams face the challenge of efficiently managing on-call schedules, incident response, communication during critical moments, and strong customer support on Slack® channels. This post describes Genie, an on-call copilot we built that uses generative AI to optimize communication and question-answering with on-call engineers.

Hybrid full-text search and vector search with SQLite
You can use SQLite's builtin full-text search (FTS5) extension and semantic search with sqlite-vec to create "hybrid search" in your applications. You can combine results using different methods like keyword-first, re-ranking by "semantics", and reciprocal rank fusion. Best of all, since it's all in SQLite, experiments and prototypes are cheap and easy, no 3rd party services required!

Designing A Fast Concurrent Hash Table
Papaya is a fast, feature-complete concurrent hash table for Rust, designed for read-heavy workloads with low latency and predictable performance. The article details the design choices and optimizations behind Papaya, including its use of open addressing, metadata tables, hyaline memory reclamation, and incremental resizing, to achieve high read throughput while maintaining good write performance.

End-to-End Encrypted Cloud Storage in the Wild: A Broken Ecosystem
This research analyzes five major end-to-end encrypted cloud storage providers (Sync, pCloud, Icedrive, Seafile, and Tresorit), revealing severe cryptographic vulnerabilities in four of them. The study exposes common failure patterns across independent designs, demonstrating that creating secure E2EE cloud storage is more challenging than initially thought, with vulnerabilities ranging from file injection to breaking confidentiality of uploaded files.

Building Real-Time Global Illumination Part 1
The article discusses a detailed approach to implementing real-time global illumination, a key technique for rendering realistic lighting in 3D environments. It highlights how global illumination helps simulate the way light interacts with surfaces in dynamic scenes, creating more lifelike and immersive visuals. This part 1 walks through raymarching, the jump flood algorithm, distance fields, and a noise-based global illumination method.

Part 2 - An interactive walkthrough of implementing radiance cascades, a technique for real-time noiseless global illumination.

Can You Get Root With Only a Cigarette Lighter?
The article describes how to gain root access on a Linux system using only a cigarette lighter through electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) attacks on DRAM. The author demonstrates how precisely timed electromagnetic pulses can flip bits in memory, allowing an attacker to modify critical system data and escalate privileges without traditional software vulnerabilities.

The Senior Shortcut
The article argues against the trend of companies exclusively hiring senior engineers, emphasizing the importance of nurturing early career talent for long-term success. It highlights the challenges of finding truly adaptable senior engineers and the value of growing talent internally, while warning about the risks of relying solely on external senior hires for technical leadership roles.

How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?
The article discusses the balance between an employer's responsibility to retain employees and the employee's responsibility for their own career trajectory. It explores how much effort companies should put into retaining talent versus allowing for natural career growth and transitions.

Self-Hosting a Container Registry
A guide on container registries and self-hosting one.

Watch and Listen

Postcards from the Peak of Complexity
The Java platform has added many major features over the years -- generics, lambdas, modules, virtual threads, and others. Each of these is a bet-the-platform effort, in that a mistake could mean permanent damage. While each feature is unique, such decade-scale evolution projects often have surprising structural similarities. In this talk, Java Language Architect Brian Goetz offers some insights, war stories, and lessons learned from the development of several major Java features.

Next Gen Fullstack React with TanStack
Tanner Lindsley discusses TanStack Start, a new fullstack framework built on TanStack Router, and his vision for robust client-side apps that can incrementally adopt server rendering and capabilities. He shares unique perspectives on React Server Components, type safety, middleware, and more.

Full Golang Tutorial - Learn Go by Building a TodoList App
A Complete Go Crash Course for Beginners to learn the core Go concepts by writing a simple TodoList Application.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

qrframe
code-based qr code generator.

par
Session types for Rust.

textfox
Firefox theme for the tui enthusiast.

zzz
A framework for writing performant and reliable networked services.

lm.rs
Minimal LLM inference in Rust.

nixiesearch
Hybrid search engine, combining best features of text and semantic search worlds.

Stricli
Build complex CLIs with type safety and no dependencies.

Vortex
An extensible, state-of-the-art columnar file format.

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Programmer Weekly - Programmer Weekly - Issue 227

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