Dev

Random thoughts

A post from alan w. smith

Formats over apps.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the...

The job of software developer is dead. You might still be coding, but the profession as you knew it is gone.

Everyone is either offended or excited about "vibe coding." It's all the rage and going to solve all your problems, or it's the next great evil spewing crap...

Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.

We recently passed the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene and its devastating impact on Western North Carolina. As a web developer, I am thinking again...

How I charged a company $18,000 for a single page and got away with it. My impostor syndrom kicked in.

Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...

A guide for how to use your smartphone to code anywhere at anytime. - GitHub - rberg27/doom-coding: A guide for how to use your smartphone to code anywhere at...

Every time we've made it easier to write software, we've ended up writing exponentially more of it. History suggests we won't do less work - we'll discover w...

Lukewarm takes from an amateur pizzaiolo and software engineer.

I've been a computer programmer all-told for 43 years. That's more than half the entire history of electronic programmable computers. In that time, I've seen a...

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A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

Salut à toi, lectrice, lecteur ! Je m’appelle Marine, et j’ai un problème : j’ai bien du mal à répartir mon temps entre toutes les activités qui m’intéressent....

A measured-yet-opinionated plea to try HTMX. Skip the React complexity, skip the raw HTML limitations. There's a third option.

Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.

TL;DR: bcrypt ignores any bytes after the first 72 bytes, this is due to bcrypt being based on the Blowfish cipher which has this limitation. bcrypt has been a...

Five months ago, my lifelong profession of software development changed completely.

This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front...

A deep dive into how thoughtful URL design can enhance usability, shareability, and performance. Learn what state belongs in URLs, common pitfalls to avoid, and...

Killing the joy of homelabbing with my own expectation

Effective writing for software developers

On AI, Creativity, and Craft

You are a software engineer. Don't become a prompt refiner.

DevOps Engineer and Full-Stack Developer with 4+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and scalable web applications.

<p>Welcome to FictionalSoft! I hope your first week is going well? Great.</p> <p>As you start to find your feet, I want to make sure we have a...

Technical mastery still matters

Sharing CSS tips, tricks, and best practices

Podman offers better security, uses fewer resources, and integrates seamlessly with Linux and Kubernetes, making it a superior Docker alternative

Examples are the best documentation | exotext

Werner Vogels on building scalable and robust distributed systems

Effective writing for software developers

A portfolio website for Bhargav. Software developer based in Berlin,Germany.

In my consulting work, I’ve worked with a wide range of developer-focused tools. WordPress, React, Vue, Next, HTMX, PHP, Python, Rails, Java, .NET, a variety of...

To cut things short, always use the easiest solution to solve a particular problem and once that solution does not work for the business anymore reassess wha...

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The financial transactions database designed for mission critical safety and performance. - tigerbeetle/docs/TIGER_STYLE.md at main · tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle

Offline-first apps promise instant loading and privacy, but in practice, very few apps get offline support because getting sync right is surprisingly hard.

Designer, builder, and visual storyteller. Now building Huxe. Previously led design on NotebookLM and contributed to Google AI projects like Gemini and Search....

Supply chain attacks are malicious updates that sneak into open source code used by many apps. Here’s how we design Obsidian to ensure that the app is a secure...

The bitter truth about people preaching taste with AI.

Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI…

I use Homebrew all the time. Whenever I see a new CLI that offers an npm or uv install path alongside a brew one, I choose brew every single time. And yet,...

Don't just write software that works; write software that can be maintained.

Try building software using basic tools only to declutter your developer toolbox and learn which tools are worth using.

The Grug Brained Designer

The Great Pyramids took decades to build. It was a monumental feat of human ingenuity and collaboration. Today, we software developers erect our own pyramids...

A static site with version control history enables me to travel into any point in the project’s past and serve the site as it was back in the day.

A lot of ink is spent on the "monoliths vs. microservices" debate, but the real issue behind this debate is about whether distributed system …

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece of advice. I genuinely think…

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

“Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me!”

Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of...

Why we need a different term for best practice

SVGs are one of the most remarkable technologies we have access to on the web. They’re first-class citizens, fully addressable with CSS and JavaScript. In this...

PHP is still one of the best ways to get started on the web.

A summarization of some traps to developers. There traps are unintuitive things that are easily misunderstood and cause bugs.

I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who...

From the Zed Blog: Writing code is only one part of effective software engineering.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Cross-Site Request Forgery countermeasures can be greatly simplified using request metadata provided by modern browsers.

Contrary to what many people seem to be doing, especially in the digital world, I don’t often change the tools and services I use. When I find …

With the rise of LLMs, I am seeing tech professionals blatantly skipping over the fundamentals. For example, in my world of data analytics, SQL is table s...

A deep dive into local-first architecture, triggered by wondering why Linear feels so fast. Looking at the technical implementation, exploring tools like Jazz...

where my words occasionally escape /dev/null

This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts...

Stop vibe-coding blindly! Why reading AI-generated code is crucial in 2025. Avoid security flaws, architectural decay, and knowledge loss when using Claude Code...

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.

Learn how AI transforms test-driven development (TDD) from a time-consuming chore into your secret weapon for building robust and bug-free applications.

Why I believe live coding is NOT fair

Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant...

<h1 id="a-valid-html-zip-bomb"><a tabindex="0" class="anchor" href="/notes/html_zip_bomb">A valid HTML zip bomb</a></h1><p><img...

Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was...

Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small...

how i scraped together one of the largest collections of book recommendations on the internet

The best strategies including cycling, swim lanes, the boy scout rule, backlogs, and more.

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

Analyse des éléments à prendre en compte pour générer un flux et le partager au plus grand nombre

This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the...

Elastic scope, minimal cognitive overhead, clear objective, existing resources, and tangible artifact.

From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision...

I might write stuff here sometimes. Contribute to madprops/blog development by creating an account on GitHub.

Learn how serverless is a scam and why you should just use a container.

Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

In this blog post, we explore how we can style text that we log to the console in Node.js. Some of the examples use a Unix shell but most of the code should...

Remember when PHP and jQuery let you just build stuff? Now we drown in Babel, Webpack, and React hydrations. Modern web dev overcomplicates everything—and why...

Stop reinventing the wheel. The web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer.

Recently I got this DM, “Which tech stack should I learn?” “Should I use Next.js or Svelte?” “Is... Tagged with programming, javascript, beginners, webdev.

This guide will detail step-by-step how to set up a cheap and simple server to host your web apps.

Self-hosting teaches you how software really runs, how systems talk to each other, and how to secure, scale, and deploy real-world apps. Here's why every...

What the docs don’t teach you, 25 years will

Through an interactive visualization, I explore web traffic patterns, bot activity, server optimizations, and the unexpected lessons learned. Including how a...

A deep dive into the technical world of zip bombs, exploring how a minuscule compressed file can be weaponized to overwhelm and crash systems by expanding to...

Why 'reflexive AI usage' sounds like a diagnosis I don't want next to my name

Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own...

Carson Gross explores the concept of 'vendoring' in software development, where external project sources are copied directly into a project. He covers the...

When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally...

Writing code is the hardest part of software development.

You've probably heard about vibe coding—using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Copilot to program via natural language. There’s been a fair amoun...

Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft...

Explore the power of local-first web development and its impact on modern web applications. Learn how to build offline-capable, user-centric apps that...

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

We are not hired to write code. Instead developers are hired to build product or features that may or may not deliver.

If you've been a web developer for more than five minutes, you've seen this pattern: every few... Tagged with webdev, javascript, programming, react.

Problem-solving isn't always straight forward.

Exploring software development with PHP, JavaScript, Rust, and beyond.

I tweeted about ORM last week, and since then several people have asked me to clarify what I meant. I have actually previously written about ORM, but it was in...

I think it's code that does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Those are the two iron requirements. If it doesn't do the job or isn't ready...

or, Career Advice For The Working Web Dev I have been thinking a lot about the thing we call "the stack", one of many vague concepts web developers use when...

Today I read Alex Russell's post The Market for Lemons and I found myself compelled to write a rebuttal. I am a big fan of Alex's work in general but not of...

Nine months ago I gave a talk about how there is no such thing as the fundamentals of web development. It's a thing I have been saying

The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I...

Generating changelogs is a rather tedious task for developers. But with a bit of discipline it becomes a one-line script.

View transitions are a great way to make your website feel more dynamic and engaging when users navigate between pages. The View Transition API, in particular,...

In this article, I show you how to use native HTML to implement features like modals & accordions, image captions, grouped lists and more.

A strategy for keeping dependencies up-to-date. When to update, how to update, and what to update first.

Modern frameworks are supposed to help speed up development while providing modern tools and a developer-friendly workflow. In reality, Kevin Leary has found...

After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation.

It works great, as long as browsers support it.

Invaluable pointers about repositories on GitHub that offer immense value to developers that are at the early stages of their journey.

While most people here will probably mostly know me as a (PHP) developer, I actually have a background in business studies, so when Matt Mullenweg reached out...

In this essay, Carson Gross explains the Hypermedia-Driven Application (HDA) architecture, which combines the simplicity of traditional Multi-Page Applications...

Marko Zivanovic is a programmer, technologist, and one hell of a guy. He loves to learn new programming languages and enjoys long walks on the beach.

Frameworkless movement

N. Voloboev is a developer and coder that has worked on several projects, and right now is creating a full wiki dedicated to the things he has learned during...

Dans cet article, trois experts discutent sur ce que peuvent faire les équipes d'ingénieurs pour communiquer l'importance du traitement de la dette technique...

Hosting my static sites with nginx

On a starting point that involves committing to high standards (including validating, and exercising control over oneself), acting ethically, practicing,...

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

Why hydration is a workaround, not the solution. Dive deeper into hydration. Understand how Resumability works.

I first heard about the dinosaur 🦕 VS shark 🦈 analogy when I read this excellent article about relational databases:

A little HTML widget gave us all-powerful Amazon and Facebook. There's no closing Pandora's text box now.

In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great...

What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do...

Designer, Developer and digital minimalist. Always searching for less complexity.

You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully. ‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems...

A lot of folks in the PHP community have been checking out PHPStorm lately, including myself and most of the developers I work with. We love

My favorite settings, plugins and themes for coding in PHP in Sublime Text. Tagged with productivity, php, webdev.

Resilient sync for local-first apps by using existing technologies such as file systems

Start with a simple HTML file, then add features like templates, sorting, and filtering as they become useful.

Showcase sites that showcase nothing, and the web design at the origin of the web.

By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In December of 2021, an itinerant sci-fi and...

If a single programmer builds something, it can be hard for others to maintain later.

Programmers should be paranoid.

Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

I accepted an offer for a permanent job in one of the most prestigious British institutes. To get there, I had to first understand I'm not cut for the web...

In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites

I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this...

It's more about soft skills than technical skills

I'm into web development and social impact. I write code and create content for these topics, and I share it on my website.

A little rest area by the road to a better web.

Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation...

I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.

The story of Timefold: how we turned a doomed open source project into a fast-growing PlanningAI company.

Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That's because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is...

<p>Folks, today's the day.</p> <p>As of this morning, I've made over a million dollars on GitHub sponsors. Wowoweewow.</p> <p><img src="/pos...

I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself:...

Essential Skills for Developers that will enhance their coding ability

Let's discuss web development and the best approach for building projects. As a web developer with over 7 years of experience, I will share what I would use for...

Related to my previous article “What 10,000 Hours of Coding Taught Me: Don't Ship Fast“, I want to further expand on the subject of performance and efficiency,...

Everyone at least once in their life coded in JavaScript. We have some people say that they like it and and some others that they don’t. This will be just a...

Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.

An extended “uses” post that outlines the hardware I’m currently using, the software and tools that I use to get things done, and how I configure things.

An exploration of the design space of wikis.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

ked with mentoring an intern. It wasn&rsquo;t my first time mentoring, but it was my first time being fully in charge of a new employee. In the end, the intern...

Web 3.0 was not about the blockchain, thank god

How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.

the next 30 years don’t have to look like the last 30!

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

This post is kind of part 3, coming off last week's thrilling episode. I am a simple sole, I want to reduce the cognitive load in my web projects. The general...

How some businesses live off API complexity while others sell simplicity.

6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts

I’ve been an engineer for over 7 years now. I have worked on countless projects in backend, frontend, and DevOps. I don’t consider myself a great engineer;...

Loris Cro's Blog

macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.

Tony Alaribe challenges common myths about multi-page applications (MPAs) and explores how modern browser technologies can enable fast, interactive, and...

In this essay, Carson Gross and Alex Petros discuss htmx's future direction and philosophy. They explain how the project aims to emulate jQuery's success...

Apologies, this is a long one - clearly I’ve got a lot to say on this subject! It didn’t take long after ChatGPT was released for me to start seeing how...

What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project

At scale there are no rollbacks and no cut-overs. Your software only moves forward.

Every problem is a front-end development problem.

How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.

How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.

Reflections on a year of charging by day.

The fastest way to get better at something is to start slow.

What are the principles the blog The Valuable Dev is following?

Thoughts on web development, open source, software architecture, and the future.

Do you work on software projects? Or are they software products? According to definitions, projects are time-constrained efforts, supposed to have a defined...

Most job descriptions simply describe a list of technologies as the necessary “skills” for the open position. But… Aren’t there other skills that could have a...

Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many...

In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was...

From aliases, to commits, to commit messages, to reviews, to workflows.

Web development is boring—or should be more boring. On us tending to celebrate the wrong side of web development.

Quick thoughts on being a framework developer.

I'm a web developer and designer. I build websites & interfaces with JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition...

As a person in tech, I see that there is a lot of emphasis on scalability, speed, the next shiny doll that everyone wants to…

Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years:   Development 1. Start small, then...

I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming...

What makes a good programmer? It's an interesting question to ask yourself. It makes you reflect on the craft of software development. It is also a good...

Software Cyber Shepherd

In the second part of my tell-all memoir, we find out why I was constitutionally unsuited to employment in a structured environment, or indeed any...

Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace...

If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.

Software documentation that doesn't suck needs to exist with the living

In the fast-paced world of JavaScript frameworks, each new release triggers strong reactions from the developer community. By recognizing that framework fatigue...

I still use Sublime Text in 2025 even after trying a lot of other editors

A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about state-based UI vs. traditional DOM manipulation and Web Components. I recently had a student ask when you should reach for...

This post is specifically about saving webpages and entire websites and then accessing those sites completely offline. The tools I'm using to do this is zimit,...

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Guidelines for creating a living personal Web site.