What a month! GitHub went down six million times, eleven thousand Vercel security holes have been unveiled, Copilot doesn’t accept new signups due to a super unsustainable business model (finally someone admitted it), Anthropic landed on top of Hacker News billions of times due to some drama, popular npm packages have new malware injected again and tons more. This all happened in the past month. The tech world doesn’t slow down, the quality of the software is going downhill, massive layoffs all over the place. If you want to stay optimistic, spending time in front of a computer is not a good idea, so you seriously better go out and touch grass.
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What a month! GitHub went down six million times, eleven thousand Vercel security holes have been unveiled, Copilot doesn’t accept new signups due to a super unsustainable business model (finally someone admitted it), Anthropic landed on top of Hacker News billions of times due to some drama, popular npm packages have new malware injected again and tons more. This all happened in the past month. The tech world doesn’t slow down, the quality of the software is going downhill, massive layoffs all over the place. If you want to stay optimistic, spending time in front of a computer is not a good idea, so you seriously better go out and touch grass.
Some good music, as every month, is waiting for you here, and a few links that I found particularly interesting this past month. Enjoy reading and listening, and I will catch you next month 💌
Album of the month
I was shocked when I visited
my local records store
on RSD (Record Store Day) and I found most of the discography of Lack of Afro. I love his heavy drums style, mostly fast paced raw funk. Modern, but with this old, JB (James Brown) kinda of groove to it. When I took the record home and listened to it for the first time after many years, I couldn’t stop playing
“Rusty”
which is based on a drum line from
“Fire Eater” by Rusty Bryant
. What a tune! What a monster tune for bboys! Naturally
“Press On” by Lack of Afro
is my album recommendation for this month.
This game is close to my heart. When we got our first family computer a few decades ago, I was the one who occupied it for the most time. My sister really enjoyed looking at me playing games a lot more than playing on her own. Twitch later on proved that she was not a weirdo at all, as there are millions of others who prefer to take a back seat. For me, it was a perfect deal. RollerCoaster Tycoon was my sister’s domain though — she was so, so, so good at it! Ever since, I have good feelings about this title. This post goes in depth into some of the game design decisions that made this game so revolutionary at the time.
I use email every day, and it is embarrassing how little I knew about the way it works before reading this post. I also browse the web daily and I know tonnes about the protocols and transfer layers involved in that. This article helped me to fill the gaps in my knowledge. Well explained step by step and all the technologies involved in every single process of authenticating, receiving and sending emails.
I loved this article. The difference between writing code for an enterprise organisation at work, vs the little side projects that passionate people create on their own time aligns with my experience as well, as everything that keeps me going as a software creator comes from these extra hours I spent after writing enterprise-level code at work. Good read, good analogy!
Good reminder not to overoptimize prematurely. I found this article at the perfect time in my life, where I’m in the middle of untangling the difference between multiple AWS services, because I am trying to deploy a container. Maybe I don’t need a container at all. Maybe you also don’t.
A great reminder of the design idioms, why we missed them and how we can bring them back. Another article from the category “just keep it simple,” but surprisingly, no matter how often advice like that comes out, the industry still struggles to implement it. Quite the opposite is the reality nowadays, unfortunately.
Redowan Delowar’s blog is one of my favourite resources for learning Go. He is such a good blogger, super active and insanely helpful. Here is his little recap of the UUID proposal being added to the Go standard library. The day has come and I really hope that with the release of 1.27, I will be able to replace
github.com/google/uuid
with the built-in
uuid
.
Beautifully written by Rachel Andrew. I love her writing and her deep attention to detail in her craft. Her talks, her posts, her presentation slides. Rachel has been hugely inspiring to me since I started learning web development, and she still is a mentor today.
Another banger post on the same vibe as Rachel’s article. It is funny that in the age of AI-generated everything, I value non-techy posts a lot more than before this whole madness.
Although I’m not a daily user of Zed, I’m a fan. I played around with it years ago and open it from time to time just to be amazed at how well polished an IDE it is. This is a really viable competitor to Visual Studio Code that absolutely dominates the market. Good! In my opinion, everything about Zed is better than VSCode: the look, the feel, the defaults, the memory consumption, and the fact that it still feels more like a tool to write code first rather than a chat to interact with LLMs. If you use a GUI, this is the one you should give a go to if you haven’t already.
What a month! After losing a job at the end of January, I started looking for a new one straight away. Seeking a new job nowadays is very different from how it used to be. Very long, multi-step and mentally draining processes are the new norm. The recent explosion of AI tools makes things massively more complicated. Some companies force you to use Claude Code and others mandate disabling the autocompletion or even solving the problem on the whiteboard. When it comes to the number of available positions, things don’t look as bad as people say, but the competition is high. Everything is just mad!
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What a month! After losing a job at the end of January, I started looking for a new one straight away. Seeking a new job nowadays is very different from how it used to be. Very long, multi-step and mentally draining processes are the new norm. The recent explosion of AI tools makes things massively more complicated. Some companies force you to use Claude Code and others mandate disabling the autocompletion or even solving the problem on the whiteboard. When it comes to the number of available positions, things don’t look as bad as people say, but the competition is high. Everything is just mad!
I’m happy to share that a few weeks ago I joined a new company as a Lead Engineer where I’ll be working mainly on backend services written in Go. I had been preparing myself for a little break from the frontend for a while. I do love frontend and web standards, but I’m tired of the immaturity of the JS ecosystem. I’m tired of CSS-in-JS, Tailwind, frameworks battles and Vercel’s CEO photos on Twitter. I’m worried about the surveillance forced upon web users, the quality and the direction of the dominant web services. I just need a break.
I have been writing Go for a while now, and using it has revived my passion for programming. I still learn a lot, but I’m extremely productive using it and the ecosystem and community of Gophers align with my values better.
Other than some exciting changes in my professional life, the past month has been busy on the Web and a lot of good resources popped up. I really hope you will like this month’s selections. Music recommendation is as always here for ya. Enjoy!
Album of the month
Black Sheep is a rather lesser-known part of the Native Tongues Collective. They are mainly known by their first album “A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing,” but the next, “Non-Fiction,” released in 1994, is my favourite. I really like the vibe of
“City Lights”
and
“Summa Tha Time”
. Also, the
European release of this album
says “Balck,” not “Black” on the spine, which is a funny little mis-print.
Interesting little trick how you can abuse the spec for your convenience. It turns out that you can split URLs into multiple lines and the browser just ignores all the invalid tabs and newline characters.
This is the harsh reality. I have been a victim of this multiple times, and the fact that I often describe my ways of working as a “simplicity guardian” is very rarely appreciated. Good write-up, Matheus, thank you.
Keith published this fantastic deep dive into the color precision in CSS. It contains a number of interactive demos and also he built a whole little game to support the idea conveyed in this post (try to beat my score of 0.0022). Really incredible research!
The release schedule of Node.js is changing, and things are becoming a lot easier. The current release schedule is a decade old, and barely anyone cares about odd versions. The new plan nicely aligns with the current year and there is no confusion about the LTS versions. Every release hits LTS in April each year.
I’m very lucky that I attended a talk by Jason Williams at the recent
State of the Browser conference
, and this article is just a written version of it. It is a celebration of the Temporal proposal reaching stage 4, which means it is officially going to be part of ECMAScript 2026. Finally, the date/time in JavaScript is fixed.
Earlier today, Temporal reached Stage 4 in the TC39 staging process, which means it will be part of the next annual ECMAScript specification (ES2026). However, you don’t need to wait until then - you can use it today!
Good talk by Shelley Vohr about the garbage collector in JavaScript (very V8 specific, but most of the concepts are also present in other engines). What it is, how it works, and how to optimise your application to make it more memory efficient. It presents a few not very obvious practical tips. Good one!
Evgeni Chasnovski, one of the core contributors to Neovim and also a maintainer of a top collection of plugins from the
mini.nvim
family, published this incredible guide to the new, native way of managing packages. I’m looking forward to the upcoming stable release. The built-in package manager is one of the new add-ons I’m super excited about, along with tons of other improvements. This release is going to be a huge one.
“A Demo of vim.pack” by Evgeni Chasnovski on YouTube
is a video version of this blog post that nicely summarises the most important bits, although the blog post contains more more details.
This is over a decade-old resource that presents a miles-long list of common tips in the Go programming language. These things should be part of the official learning path for this language. I found some of these points so well explained, and for sure I will be coming back to this list a lot.
Concurrency in Go is a beauty if you understand how it works. Coming from other programming languages, it may be hard to grasp without a good real-life analogy. This post does a perfect job at explaining the concept. There is a follow-up post
“The Nature Of Channels In Go”
that is a natural next step to embrace the two most powerful concepts in Go: goroutines and channels.
A beautiful essay by Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, Pygments and plenty of other great open source projects. I love how he talks about the importance of friction in the peak of the AI momentum when automation maniacs do everything to remove friction. I can’t help it, but I also love the series of good analogies that this post is full of.
Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend sprint. The things I value most — the projects, the relationships, the communities — are all things that took years to become what they are.
