Welcome to issue 244 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

Sign up and start mastering AI

Quote of the Week

"The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself." - Alan Cooper

Reading List

Postgres as a Graph Database: (Ab)using pgRouting

pgRouting, a Postgres extension often paired with PostGIS, enables graph-based functionalities like finding shortest paths, offering a lightweight alternative to specialized graph databases. It can be applied beyond GIS for task scheduling, reverse proxy routing, and building recommendation engines by modeling relationships as interconnected nodes and edges.

The power of interning

Making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust.

TLS Certificates - For The Rest Of Us

How does your browser know a website is legit? This post simplifies TLS, certificate validation, and the trust chain behind secure connections.

Abusing C to implement JSON Parsing with Struct Methods

This article explains how to create a JSON parser in C using functions attached to a struct as methods. It focuses on a C issue family-free implementation with a user-friendly API, detailing various aspects of JSON parsing.

Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking

This post covers the full details of EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode signature validation vulnerability recently discovered by the Google Security team.

How We Run Terraform At Scale

Benchling's engineering team manages over 165,000 cloud resources across 625 Terraform workspaces using a self-hosted implementation of Terraform Cloud, enabling high-concurrency infrastructure changes with minimal overhead. They have optimized their processes by automating deployments, monitoring key metrics like agent concurrency and plan times, and ensuring minimal infrastructure drift through frequent releases.

BPF or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kernel

In this post we will briefly discuss why BPF is useful. We will write a toy application that maintains a count of the opened file descriptors for all user processes. We’ll load a BPF application into the kernel, and get our data out of it.

Watch, Listen

How Clay's UI Layout Algorithm Works

Clay is a UI layout library written in C, and this video gives a high level explanation of how the flexbox-like layout algorithm in Clay works.

Building multimodal AI for Ray-Ban Meta glasses

The Meta Tech Podcast features Shane, a research scientist at Meta, discussing the development of multimodal AI for Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which allows the glasses to understand and respond to what the wearer is seeing. The podcast explores the challenges and advancements in AI-driven wearable technology, including models like AnyMAL that process various inputs such as text, audio, video, and motion sensor data.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Mox

Modern full-featured open source secure mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email.

open-infra-index

Production-tested AI infrastructure tools for efficient AGI development and community-driven innovation

Probly

An AI-powered spreadsheet application that combines spreadsheet functionality with Python data analysis capabilities.

BLAFS

A Bloat Aware Filesystem for Container Debloating.

GoatDB

Lightweight NoDB for Deno & React.

Opsy

Your AI-Powered SRE Colleague.

AtomixDB

An persistent relational database built in Go.

superglue

Self-healing open source data connector. Use it as a layer between you and any complex / legacy APIs and always get the data that you want in the format you expect.

upfetch

An advanced fetch client builder with standard schema validation, automatic response parsing, smart defaults and more. Designed to make data fetching type-safe and developer-friendly while keeping the familiar fetch API.

Globstar

Globstar is a fast, feature-rich, and open-source static analysis toolkit for writing and running code checkers. Based on tree-sitter.

Our Other Newsletters

Python Weekly - A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

Founder Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.