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- Programmer Weekly (Issue 318 September 17 2026)
Programmer Weekly (Issue 318 September 17 2026)
Rahul Chaudhary
September 17, 2026
Welcome to issue 318 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.
Analytics on Live Data Without Leaving Postgres
When analytics on Postgres slows down, most teams add a second database. Then they manage pipelines, sync lag, and drift forever. TimescaleDB extends Postgres instead. Analytics run on live data, in the database you already have. No pipeline. No migration. No new query language.
Quote of the Week
"An error written to a log file that nobody monitors is just an expensive way to fill up a disk."
Reading List
Coding agents changed what it costs to build mobile apps twice. Here’s why Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin.
Ken Shirriff details the reverse-engineering of the Intel 8087’s FSCALE instruction, which uses more than 140 micro-instructions across three levels of subroutine calls to scale floating-point numbers by powers of two. Despite the operation being conceptually simple, the implementation is complicated by corner cases involving NaNs, denormals, rounding, and overflow and underflow exceptions.
Postgres has no query cache, but it caches more than you think. What shared_buffers, plans, and the OS cache do, and which result cache to add.
Follow a SQL query through the router, across four Postgres shards, and back.
Two days of live sessions on AI-assisted development, modern deployment, and the tools top engineers ship with. Prepathon'26 runs Sep 22-23, online, and it won't cost you a thing. Seats are limited. SPONSOR
The author converts a $20 4G hotspot into a handheld Linux device with a physical keyboard, Sharp Memory Display, custom adapter PCB, and modified enclosure. The build covers PCB modifications, USB and SPI debugging, Linux device-tree configuration, and extending a DRM display driver with dithering, while leaving the messaging software for a future post.
The author details how he turned a publicly known Linux kernel TLB shootdown race into a working exploit, allowing an unprivileged process to retain access to a freed memory page after Linux reused it as a page table. He walks through race-condition timing, memory reclamation, page-table manipulation, and debugging techniques that ultimately led to a successful flag capture in Google's kernelCTF challenge
What it takes to run agents in a codebase older than the team.
Modern AI coding agents produce syntactically correct and highly competent PostgreSQL schemas, but they tend to over-index write-heavy core tables on a query-by-query basis. While the added indexes can significantly improve read performance, they can also increase WAL volume, slow writes and VACUUM, raise cache pressure, and eliminate Heap-Only Tuple (HOT) updates.
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup.
Vercel team replaced per-path CDN routing metadata with indexed shards of bounded size, cutting P99 path metadata lookup latency by 91% and making deployments faster. Here's how they did it.
Laurie Voss examines how AI coding agents could reshape software engineering over the next decade. His central thesis is that as writing, reviewing, and maintaining code become increasingly automated, the scarce skills will shift toward understanding customer needs, defining what good software looks like, and making products enjoyable to use.
The author walks through building a custom GNU Guix service for the Caddy reverse proxy while migrating from NixOS. It covers declarative service configuration, Scheme, service extensions, creating system users, managing configuration files, and running daemons with Shepherd.
Watch, Listen
Tibo Sottiaux shares how Codex was built and how OpenAI continues to evolve its models, harness, CLI, and multi-provider architecture. The conversation also covers how OpenAI uses Codex across the software development lifecycle, from code reviews and maintenance to rearchitecture, and how AI is changing the cost of modifying code.
What if it's the first time someone you know hears about DDD? Or maybe they heard it before but never got to grasp it? Where to begin? What are the key concepts? What should they read, or watch, or do to become a DDD practitioner? How could you guide them? This talk shows you the very first steps towards becoming a DDD practitioner!
Learn how to take a web application from local development to a secure, live production environment. You will learn how to manually configure an Ubuntu server, set up essential runtimes, establish automated CI/CD pipelines, and secure your site using HTTPS and Cloudflare. By tackling everything hands-on before introducing automation, you will gain a deep, foundational understanding of full-stack deployment and how to reliably host complex systems.
Book
The book introduces programming through OCaml, emphasizing that good programming requires not just algorithms and language knowledge but also style, structure, efficiency, and experience. It starts with OCaml fundamentals for beginners, then moves into core algorithmic concepts with reusable programs written directly in OCaml.
Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Rune is a fast, GPU-accelerated, full-featured IDE and terminal multiplexer, suitable both for automatic and manual programming.
OpenTrailPaper is an open-source DIY e-paper bike computer built around the ESP32-S3, with standalone GPS navigation, offline maps, ride recording, BLE sensor support, and companion iOS and Android apps.
Local-first AI red team for web, API, and LLM application security. Attacker-style reasoning, evidence-backed findings, and skills for AI coding agents.
px0 is a fast, lightweight, read-only IDE designed for instant code navigation and review in your browser.
Run frontier MoE models on hardware you already own, using pure C with zero dependencies and experts streamed from disk. Tiny engine, immense model.
Records every process and file access in a build and shows it as an interactive timeline.
Pluggable data replication with checkpointing, batching, and integrity events.
Turn one goal into an ordered plan of coding-agent tasks, each with its own runner, model, and mode, then execute and verify it.
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