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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 275 October 30 2025)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 275 October 30 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
October 30, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome to issue 275 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
"The only thing more frightening than a programmer with a screwdriver or a hardware engineer with a program is a user with a pair of wire cutters and the root password." - Elizabeth Zwicky
Reading List
Last Monday, a major AWS outage hit thousands of sites & apps, and even a Premier League soccer game. An overview of what caused this high-profile, global outage
Nanit saved $500,000 per year by reducing reliance on AWS S3 and building their own “N3” landing zone for uploads, using S3 only as a fallback buffer. This approach cut per-request fees, optimized storage for thousands of uploads per second, and significantly lowered costs while maintaining reliability.
Started evaluating 3 frameworks for work, ended up building 10. Next-gen frameworks (Marko, SolidStart, SvelteKit, Qwik) all deliver instant 35-39ms performance. The real differentiator? Bundle sizes range from 28.8 kB to 176.3 kB compressed. Choose based on your priorities, not microscopic FCP differences.
The article demonstrates how a message queue can be built using only two UNIX signals, SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2, encoding binary data by interpreting one signal as 0 and the other as 1. It provides a Ruby-based example implementing a full message queue system including sender, receiver, and broker processes communicating solely through these signals, highlighting the fundamentals of IPC and creative low-level programming without relying on complex tools like Kafka.
The article distills key observations about what makes an effective principal engineer or scientist, emphasizing a shift from individual technical contributions to broader impact through technical vision, cross-team influence, mentoring, and aligning organizations toward long-term goals. It highlights the importance of communication, leadership, finding unique high-impact work, scaling through others, and balancing deep expertise with pragmatic collaboration across large scopes of work.
The author recounts building the Carbn climate-action app solo, making major architectural decisions despite limited experience. The article explores both the initial MVP backend and a costly overhaul after funding, sharing lessons from these startup "war stories".
A guided tour through how code becomes something a computer can actually run. The post explores how languages like C, Python, Java, and Go build, package, and execute programs. How they link libraries, manage dependencies, and interact with native code.
Evan Hahn lists simple utility scripts he's created, such as clipboard management and music downloading, which he regularly uses to streamline everyday tasks. The post highlights how custom automation can improve productivity in small but meaningful ways.
A researcher discovered British Airways' free in-flight messaging WiFi can be used for general browsing by spoofing the TLS handshake SNI to appear as WhatsApp traffic. Using an HTTPS proxy and custom DNS settings, they tunneled arbitrary data, though bandwidth remained very limited and sites with large assets loaded very slowly.
Agentic AI systems are vulnerable because they cannot reliably distinguish instructions from data, creating risks when sensitive information, untrusted inputs, and external communication intersect. Security requires isolating these elements, constraining system permissions, and breaking tasks into small human-supervised steps to prevent hidden prompt exploitation.
Watch, Listen
The talk explains that the biggest mistakes SaaS startups make include building products customers do not want, failing to bake multi-tenancy into the architecture from the start, and not automating tenant provisioning. It also warns against creating unique features per customer, deploying exclusively on customer clouds, and pursuing multi-cloud strategies prematurely due to the complexity and cost involved. The speaker emphasizes focusing on clear product vision, learning quickly through iteration, and understanding customer willingness to pay for your architecture's baseline costs.
The video explains how to build intelligent self-healing Kubernetes systems that use event-driven automation combined with AI for analysis and remediation. It outlines a maturity progression from manual troubleshooting through rule-based automation to AI-assisted problem-solving, emphasizing that AI excels in analyzing unknown issues while traditional automation handles known problems efficiently.
The video discusses how AngelList manages a complex Rails monolith by consolidating microservices into modular engines, using Packwerk to maintain architecture boundaries, and employing multiple async job solutions. Alexander Stathis shares insights on coding style influenced by Sorbet, onboarding engineers without Rails experience quickly, and strategies for managing complex business logic in Rails.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Build data pipelines with SQL and Python, ingest data from different sources, add quality checks, and build end-to-end flows.
Personal AI Notebooks. Organize files & webpages and generate notes from them. Open source, local & open data, open model choice (incl. local).
The Intelligence Layer for AI agents. Connect your models, tools, and data to create agentic apps that can think, act and talk to you.
CJ's Shell (cjsh) POSIX shell scripting with modern shell features.
Extensible and configurable logging library for embedded and desktop applications.
Diagram as Code Tool Written in Rust with Draggable Editing.
Discover open-source Clojure projects.
Import a 3D Model and automatically assign and export animations.
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