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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 277 November 13 2025)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 277 November 13 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
November 13, 2025
Welcome to issue 277 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
Voice AI: Get the Proof. Avoid the Hype.
Deepgram interviewed 400 senior leaders on voice AI adoption: 97% already use it, 84% will increase budgets, yet only 21% are very satisfied with legacy agents. See where enterprises deploy human-like voice AI agents - customer service, task automation, order capture. Benchmark your roadmap against $100M peers for 2026 priorities.
Quote of the Week
“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding” ― Burt Rutan
News
A forgotten tape reel found at the University of Utah may contain the only complete copy of Unix Fourth Edition, the first version rewritten mostly in C and a cornerstone of modern computing history. The Computer History Museum is working to recover and analyze its contents, which could fill a major gap in software preservation and Unix’s story.
Reading List
The post describes how to build a cost-effective, scalable search engine using Tantivy (a Rust-based search library) with all storage on S3 and a local NVMe cache for fast queries. The design leverages immutable snapshot indexes uploaded to S3, stateless indexers, and cache-aware query routing, enabling low overhead for large, infrequent search workloads while providing fast search after the initial cache warmup.
The post describes the design and implementation of blobd, a single-machine object store optimized for sub-millisecond random reads and small objects. Key innovations include bypassing traditional filesystems with direct I/O, using a fixed hash map index for constant-time lookups, atomic writes, io_uring for efficient async I/O, and a buddy allocator for managing disk space, resulting in significantly better performance compared to RocksDB, MinIO, and standard filesystems.
Context management is everything. Glory awaits those willing to seize it.
The top reasons why the best engineers are interviewing elsewhere include lack of influence on technical decisions, poor management, stagnant career growth, loss of job satisfaction, and being burdened with meaningless or maintenance work. Additionally, information about these issues often fails to reach executives early due to hierarchical filtering, leading to costly resignations that could be prevented with better communication and empowerment.
Stategraph chose OCaml because its strong type system catches entire categories of bugs at compile time, preventing state corruption and reducing the need for extensive testing. OCaml's immutability by default, type-safe SQL queries, and automatic JSON serialization ensure robust, reliable management of concurrent Terraform state operations without runtime errors. This makes infrastructure state corruption impossible rather than rare, enhancing system reliability and developer productivity.
Timely and constructive feedback plays a key role in great coaching and mentoring!
The post critiques many configuration languages for complexity, outdated features, or being too close to programming languages, leading to confusion or inefficiency. The author created MAML to offer a simpler, stricter, and more readable configuration language based on JSON to address these common issues.
AI tools are commoditizing single-skill roles. The future belongs to people who can think, build, and ship across the entire stack.
Watch, Listen
Will Larson argues that expectations for effective engineering management continually shift with changes in the macroeconomic climate and business needs. Larson emphasizes that core management principles—like execution, ownership, alignment, and navigating ambiguity—remain important, but good managers must continually adapt their skills and focus areas to remain valuable across different industry eras.
The video argues that typical technical engineering interviews, which focus on competitive programming and abstract problem-solving, fail to predict real job performance and can exclude strong candidates. Kristen Shaker offers a framework for designing interviews that more accurately assess the skills required for success in software engineering roles, proposing more practical and relevant assessment methods.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Fast, stateless LLM for your shell: qq answers; qa runs commands.
Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework by Snapchat that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity.
An alternative to Nextcloud written in Go.
Open protocol encrypted p2p email.
Simple syntax, native performance, transparent Rust FFI.
Real-time interactive flowcharts and dependency visualization for your code.
A Ruby DSL for building Excel spreadsheets programmatically.<br>
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