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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 284 January 22 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 284 January 22 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
January 22, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to issue 284 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." — Paul Ehrlich
Reading List
Anthony Templeton details how he optimized the SGP4 satellite propagation algorithm in Zig to achieve 11-13 million calculations per second by utilizing branchless hot paths, comptime precomputation, and native SIMD vectors. By implementing custom polynomial approximations for trigonometric functions and cache-conscious tiling, the resulting "astroz" library outperforms traditional Python and Rust implementations, enabling full-catalog orbital visualizations in seconds on a single CPU thread.
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL.
The post explains how treating ASCII characters as tiny shapes rather than uniform pixels enables much sharper image-to-ASCII rendering, especially at edges and object boundaries. By precomputing high-dimensional “shape vectors” for each character and applying both global and directional contrast enhancement (implemented efficiently on the GPU), the renderer picks characters that closely follow contours and separation lines, producing crisp, readable ASCII art for both static images and animated 3D scenes.
Armin Ronacher argues that the dopamine loop of agentic coding has created a "slop loop" where developers prioritize the speed of generation over critical thinking and long-term codebase health. This addiction results in an asymmetric burden for maintainers who must spend hours reviewing low-effort AI pull requests, ultimately fostering parasocial relationships with "dæmon" agents that value ritualistic prompting and high token consumption over genuine technical architectural integrity.
Senior engineers often choose strategic restraint over friction, letting some bad projects fail to preserve influence and push for lasting organizational learning. They advocate timing interventions to maximize impact while protecting team momentum.
A comprehensive look at WebAssembly adoption, performance in production, tooling maturity, and the roadmap for portable, high-performance code on the web and beyond.
Project Babylon's HAT (Heterogeneous Accelerator Toolkit) enables Java developers to offload parallel workloads directly to GPUs using enhanced code reflection and the Panama FFM API. By utilizing HAT's ND-Range and Kernel-Context layers, developers can implement advanced GPU optimizations such as 2D kernels and shared memory management to achieve performance competitive with native cuBLAS.
Freenet is a decentralized platform for building censorship-resistant services. Applications compile to WebAssembly and run across a peer-to-peer network with no central servers. This tutorial walks through creating a web UI, container, and backend contract, building locally, and serving the app from a Freenet node.
Watch, Listen
Bill Hoffman reviews CMake’s 25 year history while outlining a future focused on the Common Package Specification (CPS) and enhanced standardization for better ecosystem interoperability. The upcoming CMake 4 introduces high impact features like native C++20 module support, a new Fast Build generator for distributed builds, and instrumentation tools to analyze performance bottlenecks.
In this video, Shivay shows you how to run Claude Code with Ollama so you can use local open-source models directly inside Claude Code without needing a Pro subscription.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
An open-source alternative to Claude Cowork, powered by OpenCode.
A columnar SQL database with push-based query execution.
An all-in-one enhancement suite for Google Gemini - timeline navigation, folder management, prompt library, and chat export in one powerful extension.
A modern, cloud-native tile server for Whole Slide Images. One command to start serving tiles directly from S3.
Show status of GitHub Repos right in your menu bar and terminal: CI, Issues, Pull Requests, Latest Release.
An experimental concurrent programming language. It's an attempt to bring the expressive power of linear logic into practice.
A complete browser-based reverse engineering platform built on Rizin, running entirely client-side via WebAssembly.
Generative UI for React.
A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs.
Free, local, open-source Cowork for Gemini CLI, Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Qwen Code, Goose Cli, Auggie, and more.
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