~/devreads

25 Jul 2025

Agustin Sanchez 3 min read

Updated 7/25/2025. Originally published 12/10/2024 Ambiguity in design isn’t a roadblock — it’s an opportunity. Design ingenuity thrives in the gray area where rules haven’t been written, and solutions are waiting to be discovered. So how do you turn “I have no idea where to start” into breakthrough ideas that actually work? At 8th Light, our approach is anchored in…

experiential design

24 Jul 2025

Postmark team 1 min read

Meet Rens Wolters from PartyRens, who decided that controlling a Game Boy Advance emulator through email wasn't just possible but absolutely necessary. PostmarkGBA is what happens when a developer's weekend project meets genuine ingenuity, and we had to know more. We caught up with Rens to understand how this beautiful chaos came to life. This is the actual setup that’s…

blog.muffn.io (muffn_) 1 min read

🤦 Intro - The rantings of a muffn # As usual, I’m doing substantial yapping before the guide, if you don’t like reading and/or know what you’re doing, jump to the guide Here we are again. Politicians making laws about technology they fundamentally don’t understand, wrapped up in the classic “think of the children” rhetoric that’s become the defacto justification…

23 Jul 2025

20 min read

Meta has developed Privacy Aware Infrastructure (PAI) and Policy Zones to enforce purpose limitations on data, especially in large-scale batch processing systems. Policy Zones integrates with Meta’s exabyte-scale data warehouse and processing systems, using runtime enforcement and SQL parsing to propagate and enforce privacy annotations across millions of daily data flows per day, performing trillions [...] Read More... The post…

security privacy

22 Jul 2025

13 min read

Hardware faults can have a significant impact on AI training and inference. Silent data corruptions (SDCs), undetected data errors caused by hardware, can be particularly harmful for AI systems that rely on accurate data for training as well as providing useful outputs. We are sharing methodologies we deploy at various scales for detecting SDC across [...] Read More... The post…

data infrastructure

RisingStack Engineering 4 min read

AI in healthcare is no longer theory. It’s showing up in real hospitals, solving specific problems. Not just in research papers or flashy demos, but in production. This post walks through five recent examples where AI made a real difference. No hype, just what was built, what problem it tackled, and how it fit into […] The post AI in…

ai

13 min read

A year ago we renamed the Talking Postgres podcast—and just published our 29th episode. Since it’s a monthly thing, that means 13 new conversations in the past year. So this feels like a good moment to pause, reflect, and share a few highlights. If you’re already a listener, this post might help you find an episode you missed. If you’re…

Rob 2 min read

Back in 2016, I wrote about using QuickGrab to take a screenshot of the active window via a single key press with no mouse use required. It's now 2025 and I'm still using this and Apple has announced that Rosetta 2 will be phased out in a couple of years. As QuickGrab is one of the few Intel-only apps I…

macsoftware

1 min read

Oracle and OpenAI have entered an agreement to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data center capacity in the U.S. This investment will create new jobs, accelerate America’s reindustrialization, and help advance U.S. AI leadership. It also marks a major milestone for Stargate, OpenAI’s AI infrastructure platform and long-term vision to deliver the benefits of AI to everyone.

company

21 Jul 2025

1 min read

I’ve always considered myself a pragmatic technologist—someone who loves technology not for its own sake, but for the direct impact it can have on people’s lives. That’s what makes this job so exciting, since I believe AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any other technology in history. If we get this right, AI can give everyone more…

company

4 min read

It’s mind-boggling how many in the general public don’t understand this, so let me rant about it for a bit: many companies are designed to lose money this year. That’s the fucking point. Today’s main character energy is the news of WNBA players wearing Pay Us What You Owe Us shirts during the All-Star game. The knuckle-draggers on social media…

19 Jul 2025

jonskeet 7 min read

Unexpected inconsistency in records The other day, I was trying to figure out a bug in my code, and it turned out to be a misunderstanding on my part as to how C# records work. It’s entirely possible that I’m the only one who expected them to work in the way that I did, but … Continue reading Unexpected inconsistency…

c#

18 Jul 2025

Kristin Kaeding 2 min read

Why It Matters At 8th Light, we help enterprise teams remove friction, foster alignment, and build tools that scale with confidence. This project exemplifies what happens when human-driven design meets technical rigor: major time and cost savings. By focusing on systems thinking, user needs, and resilient architecture, the organization created a path forward that supports both immediate impact and long-term…

delivery and practiceplatform innovation

1 min read

I work on homomorphic encryption (HE or FHE for “fully” homomorphic encryption) and I have written a lot about it on this blog (see the relevant tag). This article is a collection of short answers to questions I see on various threads and news aggregators discussing FHE. Facts If a service uses FHE and can respond to encrypted queries, can’t…

MARTIN ELIAS COSTA, AI ENGINEER @ TOPTAL 1 min read

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how medical images are acquired, analyzed, and interpreted. The transformation ushers in a new era of data-driven diagnostics and faster, more personalized patient care.

17 Jul 2025

1 min read

At OpenAI, we build tools to help people solve hard problems—including nonprofits working on the frontlines of their communities. The OpenAI Academy is teaming up with the Walton Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, and a network of local nonprofit organizations to host the Nonprofit Jam—a one-day, nationwide event bringing together more than 1,000 nonprofit leaders across 10 locations.

global affairs

16 Jul 2025

9 min read

Meta has developed an open-source AI tool to design concrete mixes that are stronger, more sustainable, and ready to build with faster—speeding up construction while reducing environmental impact. The AI tool leverages Bayesian optimization, powered by Meta’s BoTorch and Ax frameworks, and was developed with Amrize and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I) [...] Read More... The post…

ai researchdata center engineeringopen source

5 min read

How does a human quality assurance engineer (QA) test a web application? If I ask you to look at this TodoMVC web app, how do you know what features it has? From your life experience, you might guess that this app lets the user enter new Todo items and should show them in the list somewhere below the input element.…

2 min read

Frances has urged me for years to collect resources for folks getting into performance and platform-oriented web development. The effort has always seemed daunting, but the lack of such a list came up again at work, prompting me to take on the side-quest amidst a different performance yak-shave. If that sounds like procrastination, well, you might very well think that.…

15 Jul 2025

Ruslan Spivak 5 min read

“Mathematics is the art of reducing any problem to linear algebra.” — William Stein If you’ve ever looked at a vector and thought, “Just a column of numbers, right?”, this chapter will change that. The Dark Art of Linear Algebra (aka DALA) by Seth Braver opens with one of the clearest intros I’ve read. Not every part clicks on the…

Rob 2 min read

I've been writing a simple Swift command line tool called QuickSS. It's a single file swift file, that I compile to a standalone binaryusing: swiftc quickss.swift -o quickss To distribute it on modern Macs, I need to sign it and then get Apple to notarise it. Signing the binary To sign the binary, you need a "Developer ID Application" certificate…

command linedevelopmentshell scripting

14 Jul 2025

Erlang Solutions Team 5 min read

Remote Patient Monitoring is helping healthcare leaders manage demand, improve outcomes, and shift care closer to home, without clinical pressure. The post What is Remote Patient Monitoring? appeared first on Erlang Solutions.

healthcare

Sumit Sarabhai 4 min read

After the successful release of Public Preview of mssql-python driver, we’re thrilled to announce a major milestone for the mssql-python driver: full support for all three major operating systems—Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release marks a significant leap forward in our mission to provide seamless, performant, and Pythonic connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server and the […] The post Announcing Full…

pythonazure sqlclient driverpython driver for azure sqlpython driver for sql server

13 Jul 2025

PubNub Labs Team 1 min read

Discover how network automation eliminates bottlenecks and human error to unlock the speed, scale, and security your infrastructure needs—a must-have for modern DevOps success.

11 Jul 2025

Juan Santana 1 min read

Congratulations to Rani Zilpelwar, the recipient of 8th Light’s Quarterly Beacon Award, a peer-nominated honor that celebrates team members who shine light on our core values. Rani is a Software Delivery Lead with over a decade of experience building high-quality software and high-trust teams. This quarter, Rani’s leadership and influence grew significantly beyond her original role with one of the…

culture and newsdelivery and practice

10 Jul 2025

Michael Carroll 1 min read

Scalable systems run on smart data communication. Explore how real-time protocols, messaging patterns, and observability tools shape modern, resilient infrastructures

9 Jul 2025

PubNub Labs Team 1 min read

Layout shifts, oversized assets, bloated JSON, synchronous publish loops, and unthrottled real-time updates can crush UX—even when your APIs are fast

8 Jul 2025

Rob 2 min read

I'm currently writing a script that notarises a macOS CLI app which needs to access a password. Rather than put it in an environment variable, I thought I'd use the 1Password CLI. This is the first time I've used it, so these are my notes. The 1Password CLI tool is call op. I installed it via Homebrew with: brew install…

command linedevelopmentshell scripting

MapTiler (Jakub Bican) 1 min read

Search for places on maps and reverse geocode in your offline or self-hosted environments with MapTiler Server 4.7

7 Jul 2025

Kishore Mavuri 1 min read

In today’s dynamic enterprise landscape, Customer Experience (CX) is no longer just a service function, it is a strategic advantage. Enterprises are seeking innovative ways to engage customers, personalize interactions, and create seamless, scalable journeys.

6 Jul 2025

2 min read

One morning, my son woke up and came downstairs, deep in thought. He looked up at me and said, “Can we make a game, Mummy?” He’s seven and he’s called Jacob. He told me his game was called Exploding Kitties. He described the mechanics. Bad guys patrol up and down. If they see the player - a kitty - they…

4 Jul 2025

1 min read

While investigating the performance of the new Python 3.14 tail-calling interpreter, I learned (via this very informative comment from Sam Gross) new (to me) piece of performance trivia: Modern CPUs mostly no longer struggle to predict the bytecode-dispatch indirect jump inside a “conventional” bytecode interpreter loop. In steady-state, assuming the bytecode itself is reasonable stable, modern CPUs achieve very high…

RisingStack Engineering 7 min read

What does it mean to “jailbreak” an AI? In short, it’s when someone finds a way to make an AI system ignore its safety rules and do something it’s not supposed to. Think of it like tricking a chatbot into telling you how to build a bomb, or getting an image model to generate violent […] The post How People…

ai

2 Jul 2025

4 min read

Enter Deliveroo’s ML Platform For the past three years, we have been building Deliveroo’s Machine Learning Platform, or the ML Platform as we like to call it. The ML Platform boosts our model-building and deployment capabilities by standardising ML workflows, streamlining the end-to-end development process and simplifying model deployment. Besides saving software engineering effort through centralising tooling, the ML Platform…

1 min read

We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post…

1 Jul 2025

Postmark team 7 min read

When we launched the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators on DEV Community, we expected clever solutions. What we got were projects that completely reimagined what email could do. Developers didn't just parse emails, they turned inboxes into gaming platforms, AI transcription services, environmental monitoring systems, podcast distribution channels, and automated code review systems. Each submission reminded us why email remains one…

Rob 1 min read

We have an HP all-in-one scanner and printer that is on our local network. Recently, I was away from home and needed to reconfigure the scanning settings for unimportant reasons. Usually, when I'm not in the office, I use Tailscale to connect back to machines as required, but the printer isn't running Tailscale, so its built-in web app isn't directly…

computing

30 Jun 2025

1 min read

We are proud to announce that Meta has officially joined the Kotlin Foundation as a gold member, marking a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to Kotlin and the broader Android development ecosystem. Over the past several years, Meta engineers have been actively migrating our extensive Android codebase—comprising tens of millions of lines—from Java to [...] Read More... The post…

androiddevinfraopen source

1 min read

Today, OpenAI, in partnership with Mandala Partners, is sharing the OpenAI AI Economic Blueprint for Australia. At a time when boosting productivity has emerged as a national priority for Australia, the Blueprint provides a clear, actionable plan for how Australia can unlock the full economic and social potential of artificial intelligence.

company

1 min read

When participating in conversations, meetings, or discussions, we're often very confident in what we're saying and the points we're putting forward. But pause for a moment and ask yourself - do you truly know, or are you assuming, vaguely remembering, or guessing with confidence?

4 min read

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community. Exhibit A It is a technical decision. The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was…

27 Jun 2025

16 min read

Before saying anything else, I'd like to thank the organisers of JSNation for inviting me to speak in Amsterdam. I particularly appreciate the folks who were brave enough to disagree at the Q&A sessions afterwards. Engaged debate about problems we can see and evidence we can measure makes our work better. The conference venue was lovely, and speakers were more…

26 Jun 2025

RisingStack Engineering 6 min read

Search is changing. Instead of ten blue links, we now get AI-powered summaries, conversational responses, and sometimes… no need to click at all. For content creators, SEOs, and product owners, the game hasn’t ended – but it’s definitely shifted. Google and ChatGPT are both surfacing content in new ways. The rules are still evolving, but […] The post AI SEO…

other

1 min read

Retell AI is transforming the call center with AI voice automation powered by GPT-4o and GPT-4.1. Its no-code platform enables businesses to launch natural, real-time voice agents that cut call costs, boost CSAT, and automate customer conversations—without scripts or hold times.

Karan Gourisaria 6 min read

How Blinkit Cracked Android's Performance Puzzle with Droid Dex Adaptive real-time performance tuning — fewer ANRs, smoother UX, and smarter device-specific optimization Picture this: Your app runs buttery-smooth on Pixel 7 Pro while throwing ANRs on a Redmi Note 4. Users on a Fold 6 have to experience the same janky transitions as those on a ₹6,000 device. Sounds familiar?…

engineeringperformancemobile-developmentandroidkotlin

5 min read

Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on Tuesday I released a new zine called “The Secret Rules of the Terminal”! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal, or get an 15-pack of all my zines here. Here’s the cover: the table of contents Here’s the table of contents: why the terminal? I’ve…

24 Jun 2025

Erlang Solutions Team 2 min read

Márton Veres shares his journey and what he’s looking forward to in his new role as London Business Unit Leader. The post Meet the Team: Márton Veres appeared first on Erlang Solutions.

meet the team

Rob 1 min read

I run a Tailscale network so that remote computers can access local services. I also have a Linux box at home on that network that advertises itself as an exit node and recently noticed that it wasn't working. I had some time recently to sit down and work out what was going on. My initial suspicion was that it was…

computing