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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 281 December 18 2025)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 281 December 18 2025)
Rahul Chaudhary
December 18, 2025
Welcome to issue 281 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
"If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge." — Henry Spencer
News
The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) with founding contributions of leading technical projects including Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md. The AAIF provides a neutral, open foundation to ensure agentic AI evolves transparently and collaboratively.
Reading List
Sebastian Aaltonen argues that modern graphics APIs like DX12 and Vulkan have become overly complex and burdened by legacy abstractions that hinder performance and developer productivity. He proposes a "no-API" approach that exposes GPU hardware more directly such as through buffer pointers, enabling simpler, more efficient rendering layers that treat GPUs more like standard CPUs.
Simon Willison describes porting JustHTML, a pure Python HTML5 parser, to JavaScript in just 4.5 hours using AI tools like Codex CLI and GPT-5.2. The project successfully translated the library while maintaining full compliance with over 9,200 official tests, demonstrating the efficiency of modern "vibe engineering" for complex code migration.
Learn how to build a crash-safe Write-Ahead Log (WAL) in Go, and why CRC32 alone is not enough. We explore the durability layers UnisonDB uses to prevent corruption after crashes.
This post describes building a SwissTable-inspired “SwissMap” hash table in Java that uses separated control bytes, high load factors, and SIMD/SWAR-style probing (via the Vector API) to minimize cache misses and key comparisons. The author walks through design trade-offs like tombstones, resize strategies, and iterator behavior, and shows that at high load factors SwissMap can match or beat Java’s HashMap throughput while using significantly less memory in pointer-heavy workloads.
This anonymous essay is a reflection on leaving a toxic workplace where leaders perform “care” in public while neglecting real communication, wellbeing, and trust within their teams. It argues that true leadership is proven by consistent, accountable, people-first actions, especially when no one is watching and that burnout and attrition are symptoms of leadership failure, not employee weakness.
Claude uses selective, on-demand memory retrieval via tools instead of injecting pre-computed conversation summaries into every prompt. This design trades automatic continuity for efficiency and depth, giving Claude flexible access to detailed history only when it decides context is relevant.
The article explains how to build your first ChatGPT app using the new ChatGPT Apps framework, showing how a backend MCP server, frontend UI component, and ChatGPT’s tool system work together to embed interactive features into chat.
React2Shell sparked confusion, bad PoCs, and wrong assumptions. Here’s a clear look at what really happened—and what the vulnerability actually is.
The author details a critical Linux kernel deadlock occurring when async-profiler is used on newer kernels, resulting in total system freezes. The post explains the technical root cause involving a perf_events bug and provides a workaround by switching to the ctimer engine.
Watch, Listen
In this presentation, Patricio Whittingslow explores the potential for Go to run directly on "bare metal" hardware, eliminating the need for a traditional operating system for specific embedded tasks. He highlights the TinyGo project and a proposed "bare metal" Go runtime, demonstrating how these tools can achieve C-like performance and memory efficiency while simplifying the development of robust, real-time firmware.
This episode details the engineering journey behind Meta's Ray-Ban Display glasses, highlighting the technical hurdles of integrating advanced display technology and emerging UI patterns into a wearable form factor. Meta’s Wearables engineers discuss the iterative design process and the multidisciplinary expertise required to evolve the hardware from initial prototypes into a polished consumer product.
This interview with Glauber Costa explores the creation of Turso, a distributed database built on a fork of SQLite called libSQL, which aims to provide a more scalable and community-driven alternative for modern edge computing. The conversation delves into Costa's background in the Linux kernel, the technical challenges of implementing concurrent writes, and the vision of building a robust, open-source ecosystem around SQLite-based technologies.
This comprehensive tutorial by Jonathan Hill introduces Supabase as an open-source Firebase alternative, guiding beginners through the process of building a real-time sales dashboard with ReactJS. The course covers essential topics including database and schema design with PostgreSQL, implementing secure authentication, managing user sessions, and applying Row Level Security (RLS) for fine-grained access control.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
A visual automation builder that lets you create, schedule, and run automations with secure credential management.
High-Performance Pattern Matching Index for PostgreSQL.
A small, simple, fast, local task and record manager in CLI.
A calm, CLI-native way to semantically grep everything, like code, images, pdfs and more.
object capability-based sudo.
A Claude Code plugin that automatically captures everything Claude does during your coding sessions, compresses it with AI (using Claude's agent-sdk), and injects relevant context back into future sessions.
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