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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 285 January 29 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 285 January 29 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
January 29, 2026
In partnership with
Welcome to issue 285 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
"A system characterized by high cohesion and low coupling is a system that is easy to evolve." — Larry Constantine
Reading List
An inside look at how OpenAI scaled PostgreSQL to millions of queries per second using replicas, caching, rate limiting, and workload isolation.
The post introduces Information Chaining, a new family of erasure codes built by encoding data into Bloom filters and decoding by exploring conditional probability paths to recover the original message. It explains how chaining insertions transforms independent Bloom filter lookups into conditional ones that enable efficient decoding, and it outlines how this concept can be adapted into erasure coding for reliable transmission.
The author reflects on ten years as an engineering manager and shares non-obvious lessons on leadership, such as how the role varies widely, why every team member must care about the product, and how transparency and strategic communication build trust and effectiveness.
Dropbox’s VP of Engineering explains how the company built Dropbox Dash, an AI-driven cross-app search and knowledge system that uses indexing, knowledge graphs, and contextual reasoning to unify work content from many tools into a single, context-aware platform. The piece highlights engineering decisions about when to use indexed retrieval over federated approaches, how MCP tool calls affect performance, and how LLMs and prompt optimizers like DSPy help improve result relevance and system efficiency
"Operations" is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can't write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.
Learn how a chaotic eBPF-based scheduler helps reproduce rare concurrency bugs, demonstrated with a real OpenJDK case.
The author discovered that reading thousands of small files was far slower than expected because the huge number of operating-system calls (open/read/close) created massive overhead, dominating the total I/O time. By packaging many files into a smaller number of tar.gz archives, syscall overhead dropped dramatically, yielding around a 43× faster I/O and a 2× overall speedup despite decompression cost.
Watch, Listen
Amazon S3’s simple interface hides a massively complex distributed system designed to operate reliably across millions of servers at internet scale. The discussion highlights AWS’s focus on designing for failure, correctness via formal methods, and relentless simplicity as core principles for long-term durability and availability.
Kelsey Hightower explains common misconceptions engineers have about AI careers, focusing on how to build real skills and choose the right problems to solve for lasting impact. He stresses that clear thinking, fundamentals, and practical experience matter far more than chasing hype or the latest tool, and he outlines advice on career decision making in the AI era.
This video provides a technical walkthrough of implementing passkeys by demonstrating the cryptographic handshake between a browser and a server using a mock PHP/JavaScript website. The demonstration highlights how the navigator.credentials API interacts with hardware like a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to sign unique server challenges, proving identity without ever transmitting a password.
The talk explains how a high-performance time-series database was built directly on Amazon S3 object storage to avoid traditional server overhead and simplify scaling. It discusses architectural lessons on using object storage as the core storage layer, performance trade-offs, and key takeaways for building serverless databases.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform.
Beautiful, open source, WebGPU-based charting library.
Get a parallel build of Claude code that unlocks feature-flagged capabilities like swarm mode.
Algorithm powering the For You feed on X.
Local Area Network discovery tool with a modern Terminal User Interface (TUI) written in Go. Discover, explore, and understand your LAN in an intuitive way. Knock Knock.. who's there?
Admiran is a pure, lazy, functional language and self-hosting compiler based upon Miranda.
High-performance asymmetric lossless compression library optimized for Content Delivery. Decodes 40% faster than LZ4 on ARM64.
A single command-line interface for managing Windows SDKs, packaging, generating app identity, manifests, certificates, and using build tools with any app framework.
A drop-in, 5-20x faster, experimental Homebrew alternative.
A type-safe, component-based language for building high-performance web apps with WASM and fine-grained reactivity.
Sirius is a GPU-native SQL engine. It plugs into existing databases such as DuckDB via the standard Substrait query format, requiring no query rewrites or major system changes.
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