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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 280 December 11 2025)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 280 December 11 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
December 11, 2025
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Quote of the Week
"When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb." — Steve Haflich
Reading List
Understanding the Tensor Processing Unit.
The post shows how to implement a Haskell-style type class system in plain Java using reflection, a parsed AST of java.lang.reflect.Type, and a first‑order unification algorithm to automatically resolve “witness” instances (including higher‑kinded ones) at runtime.
What happens when you take an XKCD joke too literally.
The essay contrasts “spotlight” product roles with long-term infrastructure work, arguing that optimizing for systems, stewardship, and deep context can create bigger, compounding impact than chasing high-visibility projects and executive attention.
The article explains why Punycode, used to encode internationalized domain names into ASCII, is a surprisingly sophisticated algorithm that combines ASCII passthrough, delta encoding, variable‑length base‑36 encoding, and an adaptive “bias” parameter to get very compact, DNS‑compatible representations of Unicode domains. It walks through how the encoder and decoder stay perfectly in sync without shared state, unpacks design choices like sorting by code point, damping, and base‑36 selection, and argues that Punycode is a model of elegant, constraint‑driven algorithm design that achieves near‑optimal efficiency across diverse scripts.
We built an agentic security investigation service to help us research alerts as part of our mission to keep Slack secure and protect our customers. Our service deploys teams of AI agents that collaboratively perform security investigations. AI agents free human analysts from tedious data gathering tasks. Over just the first quarter of their deployment, our agents have performed over 7,500 investigations, issuing over 500,000 tool calls. Our agents are enabling us to gain unprecedented real-time insight into Slack’s infrastructure in a way we could never do with human labor alone.
ParadeDB introduces Elasticsearch-style faceting directly into PostgreSQL using the pdb.agg() window function for intuitive SQL syntax that returns both ranked search results and facet counts in a single query. It achieves 14x faster performance on large datasets (46M Hacker News items) by executing search ranking and aggregation in one index pass via Tantivy's columnar storage, with optional MVCC disable for 3x extra speed.
Watch, Listen
The talk argues that concrete syntax is a central part of a programming language’s user interface: small choices in keywords, punctuation, and indentation measurably shape how programmers understand and use language features, not just how code looks. Using case studies (e.g., async control flow, gradual subtyping, first-class functions), it shows that language designers often undervalue syntax, and reports early empirical work on how lexical ambiguity affects comprehension of advanced type-system constructs.
This episode follows Michelle Lim’s journey from big tech internships (Meta, Slack, Robinhood) to becoming founding engineer at Warp and then founding her own AI startup, Flint, highlighting how product-first engineers create value and evaluate risky early-stage offers. It covers concrete advice on negotiating equity, asking founders for references, choosing tech stacks (like Warp’s switch from TypeScript to Rust), and developing the mindset needed to succeed as a founding engineer at AI startups.
Learn to build AI agents with Langbase, one of the most powerful serverless AI clouds. This hands-on course will teach you how to create context-engineered agents that use memory and AI primitives to take action and deliver accurate, production-ready results using Langbase.
This video demonstrates 10 essential GitHub features for 2025, including issue/PR templates, code owners, automated labeling, Renovate for dependencies, security scanning (OpenSSF Scorecard), and stale issue management to organize chaotic repositories. It shows manual setups plus automation via DevOps AI Toolkit's Project Setup MCP tool with Claude Code, enabling smooth collaboration for humans and AI agents alike.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
A lightweight tool for deploying and managing containerised applications across a network of Docker hosts. Bridging the gap between Docker and Kubernetes.
Production-grade client-side tracing, profiling, and analysis for complex software systems.
Text editor for your terminal: easy, powerful and fast.
A minimal, fast, database client desktop application. Built for developers who want to quickly peek at their data without the bloat.
Acontext is a context data platform for building cloud-native AI Agents.
A library for building dynamic terminal apps, using bonsai.
Quantum4J brings quantum programming to Java with a full Quantum Software Engineering stack — circuits, simulators, compiler passes, QASM support, and enterprise-grade extensibility.
A modular, non-POSIX operating system for x86_64, built from scratch in C and assembly. Intended to be an educational and experimental project that rigorously follows a Plan9-style "everything is a file" philosophy, featuring a from-scratch ACPI AML parser, EEVDF scheduler and a focus on unique solutions over tried-and-tested ones.
Local-first development platform.
The open protocol for real-time sync to client applications.
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