Welcome to issue 246 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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Quote of the Week

"To iterate is human, to recurse divine." - L. Peter Deutsch

Reading List

How Cursor (AI IDE) Works

Turning LLMs into coding experts and how to take advantage of them.

In S3 simplicity is table stakes

This article discusses the evolution of Amazon S3 from a simple object store to a sophisticated data platform, emphasizing the importance of simplicity in its design and operation. It highlights how customer feedback has driven key features and improvements, particularly with the introduction of S3 Tables for more efficient tabular data management.

How Engineering Teams are Using AI

Reporting on real-world use cases and stories.

My sales pitch for TypeScript

Roughly, TypeScript is JavaScript plus type information. The latter is removed before TypeScript code is executed by JavaScript engines. Therefore, writing and deploying TypeScript is more work. Is that added work worth it? In this blog post, I’m going to argue that yes, it is. Read it if you are skeptical about TypeScript but interested in giving it a chance.

Going down the rabbit hole of Git's new bundle-uri

Git's new bundle-uri could help significantly speed up clones, but what bugs lurk within?

The Atrocious State Of Binary Compatibility on Linux and How To Address It.

Linux binary compatibility is plagued by one thing that is often overlooked when evaluating shipping software on Linux. This article will deconstruct how to arrive to that conclusion, how to address it when shipping software today and what needs to be done to actually fix it.

The 2FA app that tells you when you get 314159

An indie project for early 2010s internet addicts.

Embedding-Based Retrieval for Airbnb Search

Airbnb built an embedding-based retrieval system to narrow down relevant homes for search queries, using machine learning to map queries and listings into numerical vectors. This system, which incorporates query context, led to a statistically significant increase in bookings and is on par with some of the largest ML improvements to search ranking in recent years.

Building an Authorized RAG Chatbot with Oso Cloud

This article demonstrates how to build a chatbot using Oso Cloud, Supabase, and OpenAI that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) while ensuring users only access information they are authorized to see. It explains how to implement permissions-aware context filtering for RAG chatbots, preventing sensitive data leaks.

Watch, Listen

Helping a Dev Manager Focus on ACTION—Not Fear

In this live coaching session, Jamie helps Ben, an engineering manager, explore his fear of leaving a stable tech job to pursue solopreneurship and find work that energizes him. They discuss balancing financial security with the drive for independence and identifying actions to move forward without risking everything.

It’s Not As Simple As “Use A Memory Safe Language"

The talk advocates for wider adoption of memory-safe languages like Rust but stresses the importance of securing existing C/C++ code through tools like sanitizers and sandboxing with WebAssembly, as rewriting entire codebases isn't always feasible. It also suggests that the Rust community should focus on a safe subset that is easy for everyone to adopt.

LynxJS: First Impressions, Live Coding & What’s Under the Hood

This talk discusses ByteDance’s new JavaScript framework, LynxJS, which is already in production for millions of users. It highlights Lynx’s performance, its framework-agnostic nature, and potential impact on the React Native ecosystem. The framework is polished for an early release, but questions remain about native module support. Early adopters have an opportunity to shape its development.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Xata Agent

An open source agent that monitors your database, finds root causes of issues, and suggests fixes and improvements. It's like having a new SRE hire in your team, one with extensive experience in Postgres.

TracePerf

Advanced console logging & performance tracking for Node.js applications.

Scorpi

A Modern Lightweight General-Purpose Hypervisor.

TinyKVM

TinyKVM is a simple, slim and specialized userspace emulator library with native performance.

XPipe

Access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop.

Sidekick

A native macOS app that allows users to chat with a local LLM that can respond with information from files, folders and websites on your Mac without installing any other software. Powered by llama.cpp.

Komodo

A tool to build and deploy software across many servers.

git-who

Git blame for file trees.

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