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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 258 June 12 2025)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 258 June 12 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
June 12, 2025
Welcome to issue 258 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
“Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, often with the same outcome.” — Neal Ford
Reading List
Meta’s “localhost tracking” technique secretly linked users’ web browsing activity to their real identities by bypassing Android’s privacy protections, even when users used VPNs, incognito mode, or deleted cookies. This could result in record-breaking fines up to €32 billion for violating GDPR, DSA, and DMA regulations due to the massive scale and systematic privacy breaches.
Learn how GitLab tracked a performance bottleneck to a 15-year-old Git function and fixed it, leading to enhanced efficiency that supports more robust backup strategies and can reduce risk.
The author details their challenging journey porting a complex C-based Rubik’s cube solver to the web using WebAssembly and Emscripten, sharing hard-earned lessons for C/C++ developers interested in web deployment. The post serves as a candid, technical guide—covering setup, multithreading, JavaScript integration, and performance considerations—while warning that this approach is not for the faint of heart.
The TensorZero team reverse-engineered Cursor’s LLM client by routing its API calls through a self-hosted proxy, enabling full observability, prompt analysis, and real-time experimentation with different language models. Their setup allows engineers to optimize and evaluate Cursor’s AI coding assistant behavior using production feedback, A/B testing, and prompt engineering—all without sacrificing the native Cursor user experience.
If you're selling business software, you'll likely run into a customer that wants something called "SCIM." Here's what you need to know.
This guide details how to build a custom AI server for under $1,300 by selecting and assembling hardware components, then installing the OS and necessary software tools for running deep learning workloads. The author highlights the benefits of hands-on learning and cost savings for heavy AI usage, while noting the limitations of small-scale experiments compared to cloud solutions.
Uber’s Compliance Data Store team developed a config-driven archival and retrieval framework to efficiently manage and secure regulatory data, automating the movement of data between hot and cold storage to optimize costs and ensure compliance. This solution enables scalable, secure, and flexible data workflows, reducing manual effort and supporting high-volume reporting and audit needs.
Instacart accelerated the development of its customer support chatbot by implementing LLM-based automated evaluation, streamlining the testing and iteration process. This approach improved chatbot quality, reduced manual review workloads, and enabled rapid deployment of new conversational features.
Watch, Listen
Slack’s engineering team transitioned from a monolithic to a cellular architecture to boost resilience and handle critical infrastructure failures, learning from early setbacks and complex migration challenges. Their approach focused on isolating services by availability zone and automating failover, providing actionable lessons for building robust, fault-tolerant systems.
Uber’s developer platform team built AI-powered tools—Validator for automated code quality and Auto Cover for intelligent test generation—using a custom Lang Effects framework that wraps LangGraph and LangChain, saving 21,000 developer hours across their massive codebase. The approach combines deterministic sub-agents with LLMs to achieve 3x better test coverage in half the time compared to industry alternatives, enabling thousands of automated fixes and high-quality tests monthly.
The video discusses efforts to retrofit Apache Kafka to use object storage like S3 instead of local disks, aiming to reduce costs and improve scalability while accepting slightly higher latency. Industry experts from Aiven explain the technical and community challenges of making this feature open source and compatible with existing Kafka deployments.
Book
This book is designed to help C++ programmers learn Rust. It provides translations of common C++ patterns into idiomatic Rust. Each pattern is described through concrete code examples along with high-level discussion of engineering trade-offs.<br>
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
The Cursor for Designers – an Open-Source, Visual-First Code Editor.
SnitchBench is an open-source tool designed to test how aggressively different AI models will "snitch"—or report—on users for exhibiting bad behaviors, using various prompts and tools. The repository provides scripts for running these tests and analyzing results, with a JSON breakdown and visualization, and warns users about potential costs and provider bans.
Development environments for coding agents. Enable multiple agents to work safely and independently with your preferred stack.
Markdown with superpowers — from ideas to presentations, articles and books.
Heimdall is a data orchestration and job execution platform.
A tool that adds small enhancements to Claude Code.
A controlled concurrency testing framework for the JVM.<br>
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