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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 290 March 5 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 290 March 5 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
March 05, 2026
Welcome to issue 290 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
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Quote of the Week
"If you're building an algorithm without understanding the context in which it will be used... you're going to have problems." — Timnit Gebru
Reading List
Visualizations of covering spaces and their applications to geometry and video games.
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
The article explains that WebAssembly is currently a “second-class” web language because it must go through JavaScript for loading and DOM access, which complicates tooling and app architecture. It then outlines Mozilla’s push for the WebAssembly Component Model and esm-integration so Wasm can import Web APIs directly, be loaded like modules, and truly behave as a first-class citizen on the web.
How Replit turns any web page into a deterministic video by virtualizing time itself, patching key browser audio APIs, and waging war against headless Chrome's quirks.
That article explains why BEAM’s lightweight, isolated processes and preemptive scheduling solve many classic concurrency problems, avoiding shared-state bugs, global GC pauses, and “big lock” architectures. It walks through message-passing, mailboxes, and OTP supervision trees to show how failures are contained to single processes and automatically recovered, giving soft real-time behavior and reliability that many modern systems are independently rediscovering.
The article introduces pg_plan_alternatives, a tool that uses eBPF to trace all alternative execution plans and their costs that PostgreSQL’s cost‑based optimizer considers during query planning, not just the final chosen plan. It explains how this instrumentation helps users understand why the planner prefers one plan over others, offering deeper insight into cost‑based decisions and potential mis‑estimates that standard EXPLAIN output hides.
Does MongoDB still have an edge as a document-oriented database for JSON in particular? Or is Postgres better? Or at least good-enough to stick with it, since it is a more universal database, offering a richer feature set and wider applicability?
Watch, Listen
In this technical breakdown, "Low Level" demonstrates how to exploit a popular $5 Temu router by bypassing its diagnostic interface to download the entire system firmware and file system. By identifying unsanitized inputs in a hidden "time configuration" function, he executes a command injection that allows him to upload a custom script and gain root-level shell access to the device.
This complete Kubernetes course is designed to take you from a cluster novice to a cloud-native architect. You will learn to deploy a complete microservices application end-to-end, ensuring you master everything from core architecture to advanced networking.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Fastest, smallest, and fully autonomous AI assistant infrastructure written in Zig.
OpenFang is an open-source Agent Operating System - not a chatbot framework, not a Python wrapper around an LLM, not a "multi-agent orchestrator." It is a full operating system for autonomous agents, built from scratch in Rust.
Hundreds of models & providers. One command to find what runs on your hardware.
The open-source dashboard for AI agent orchestration.
Browser control for AI agents.
Fast and accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) for edge devices.
Complete NumPy implementation for TypeScript and JavaScript.
prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.
Keep track of you codex sessions per commit.
Interactive, side-by-side file review for git diffs with per-file navigation, vertical and horizontal scrolling, syntax highlighting, and added/deleted line tinting.
Transform SQL queries into interactive visual flow diagrams.
A lightweight, developer-focused database management tool. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Hackable with plugins. Built for speed, security, and aesthetics.
A lightweight JIT compilation provider for PostgreSQL that adds three alternative JIT backends - sljit, AsmJit and MIR - delivering faster compilation and competitive query execution across PostgreSQL 14–18.
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