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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 289 February 26 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 289 February 26 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
February 26, 2026
Welcome to issue 289 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
“The most terrifying words in English are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. The most terrifying words in programming are: I just made a small change.” — Adapted from Ronald Reagan
Reading List
One engineer used AI to rebuild Next.js on Vite in a week. vinext builds up to 4x faster, produces 57% smaller bundles, and deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command.
You execute a query that joins two tables with a valid an enforces foreign key and it returns no results. How is it possible? We thought it wasn't possible, but a recent incident revealed an edge case we never thought about. This article shows how under some circumstances row locks with joins can produce surprising results, and suggest ways to prevent it.
The author reverse-engineered a 20-year-old Snom 360 office VoIP phone, extracted its firmware and built custom images to gain shell access on the device. They then ported the original Doom game to run on its tiny monochrome display by writing custom drivers for graphics and input.
Learn what Merkle trees are, how they work, and why this elegant data structure is critical to Git, blockchains, cloud sync, and secure systems at scale.
Hiring CTOs, VP of Engineering and senior leadership in general is tricky. Here's how the author like to use a slider metaphor to sort through the different signals.
PostgreSQL uses locks to manage concurrent access to data, ensuring consistency by preventing conflicting operations, and it distinguishes between different lock levels (e.g., row vs table locks) and modes (e.g., shared vs exclusive). Understanding how locks are acquired, when they escalate, and how to diagnose blocking is key to avoiding performance issues in PostgreSQL applications.
Tatix is a minimal kernel built solely to serve web pages, designed to include only the essential features needed for that purpose without unnecessary complexity. The post explains the scheduler design behind Tatix and how the system largely avoids explicit locking to keep concurrency simple and efficient.
Benchling moved from fragmented, tool-specific API development to a framework-based, spec-first approach, enabling more consistent, scalable, and predictable API design across teams. By standardizing on shared frameworks and automated tooling, they reduced duplication, improved developer experience, and made it easier to evolve APIs without breaking clients.
Lyft scaled its localization process by integrating AI-assisted workflows, using machine translation and human review to handle rapidly growing multilingual content more efficiently. By combining automated suggestions with quality checks and tooling, they improved translation throughput and consistency while keeping human oversight where it matters most.
The author wanted Wi-Fi support on FreeBSD for his old MacBook’s Broadcom BCM4350 chip and used AI tools to port and build a native FreeBSD kernel driver based on the Linux brcmfmac driver, iterating through planning, specification, and testing. Despite challenges and known limitations, he eventually produced a working module supporting 2.4 GHz/5 GHz connectivity and authentication, illustrating both the potential and current constraints of AI-assisted low-level development.
Go 1.26 includes a new implementation of go fix that can help you use more modern features of Go.
Watch, Listen
The video teaches core Linux commands in the context of a realistic production scenario, focusing on investigating errors in growing web app log files. You learn not just individual commands but how to chain them step by step into powerful workflows that make everyday engineering tasks faster and more effective.
Asciinema evolved over 14 years from a simple terminal sharing tool into a full recording, playback, hosting, and live streaming platform, rebuilt multiple times across different languages and architectures. The conversation explores the technical journey behind faithfully recording and replaying terminal sessions in the browser, including shifts from Python and ClojureScript to a Rust and WebAssembly based stack powering the entire system.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
A modal TUI for tracking home projects, maintenance schedules, appliances, and vendor quotes.
CSLib aims at formalising Computer Science theories and tools, broadly construed, in the Lean programming language.
A compiled actor-based programming language with type inference, designed for concurrent systems.
A terminal weather app with ASCII animations driven by real-time weather data.
Watch SQL traffic in real-time with a TUI.
Ghostty-based macOS terminal with vertical tabs and notifications for AI coding agents.
A High Performance, Real-Time, Self-Learning, Vector Graph Neural Network, and Database built in Rust.
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