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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 282 January 8 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 282 January 8 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
January 08, 2026
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Quote of the Week
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." — Tom Cargill
Reading List
Addy Osmani's 2026 AI coding workflow emphasizes treating LLMs as "powerful pair programmers" that require clear direction, beginning every project with a detailed specification and step-by-step plan before generating any code. He highlights the importance of an iterative "AI-assisted engineering" approach where developers break tasks into bite-sized chunks, provide extensive context, and remain strictly accountable by manually reviewing and testing every AI-generated line.
The article reviews 2025 as a pivotal year in databases, highlighting PostgreSQL’s continued dominance, the rapid spread of MCP-based “LLM-to-database” integrations, and intense M&A activity around Postgres, OLAP engines, and data tooling. It also surveys new file formats competing with Parquet, notable company rebrands, shutdowns, and the growing role of private equity and cloud giants in reshaping the database industry.
The post argues that compilers are powerful allies rather than adversaries: by avoiding “lies” like nulls, unchecked exceptions, unsafe casts, and opaque side effects, developers can let the type system prevent entire classes of bugs before runtime. It advocates designing code so that important invariants are encoded in types (options/results, tiny types, union types, non-empty collections), turning compilation errors into a constructive dialogue that guides safer refactoring and evolution of complex systems.
Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended.
In this post, we will explore Terraform parallelism: what it is, how to manage it, and best practices for configuring parallelism in Terraform.
The author argues that Bundler can achieve uv-like speeds without a Rust rewrite by adopting key optimizations such as parallel downloads through decoupling download and install steps, global gem caching with hardlinks, and compact integer version comparisons, many of which are already feasible in Ruby. He highlights Bundler’s current bottlenecks, including dependency-first queuing and lack of parallelism in linear dependency chains, but shows how architectural tweaks and better use of Ruby’s GVL for IO could significantly close the performance gap while preserving backwards compatibility.
Why doesn't npm detect compromised packages the way credit card companies detect fraud?
Watch, Listen
The video explains how Claude Code–style coding agents work, focusing on why recent agents suddenly became good and how their architecture differs from earlier attempts. It argues that the key is a very simple loop plus a small set of shell-like tools (especially bash), better tool-calling models, and lightweight constructs like markdown constitutions, todo lists, and context buffering to keep agents robust, steerable, and practical for real engineering teams.
This video showcases a fully functional 32-bit RISC-V CPU built entirely within Factorio, featuring a five-stage pipeline and a 700 Hz clock speed. The creator demonstrates the system's capabilities by running custom-built software, including a command-line environment, a file system, and games like Minesweeper and Snake.
Book
An online book that teaches how to build a simple but real programming language in Rust, covering parsing, ASTs, interpretation, JIT compilation with LLVM, and a basic VM plus REPL. It targets readers with basic Rust knowledge and uses a step-by-step, example-driven approach starting from a calculator language and planning toward a statically typed language with more advanced features.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
witr is a small CLI tool that traces a process, service, or port back to its origin and “responsibility chain” to answer the question “why is this running?” in one human-readable report.
Terminal UI for AWS (taws) - A terminal-based AWS resource viewer and manager.
A SQLite extension that adds graph database capabilities with Cypher query language support and built-in graph algorithms.
Build Dynamic Apps Using Mostly HTML. EHTML transforms standard HTML into a powerful application layer. Write less JavaScript and let HTML handle templating, data loading, rendering, and interactions.
A high-performance, pure C library for reading and writing Apache Parquet files.
Gene is a general-purpose, homoiconic language with a Lisp-like surface syntax.
Browser automation for AI agents and humans.
Scripts for agents, shared between my repositories.
A structural code search engine for Al agents.
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