I've started working on a new product and decided to pick up a good old Java & Spring stack instead of fancy things. And you know what? It feels great to be back! ☕

It's a bummer that the session limit can be reached in the middle of the answer. Understandable from the cost perspective, but a bad UX nevertheless. A great example of a hard engineering task to solve

Bought a used Lenovo laptop and installed Fedora on it to test forq.sh, as it’s a Linux-first tool. It’s been a while since I touched non-server Linux. Surprised how fresh Fedora looks! Great to see that Linux is becoming more user-friendly for non-tech folks.

Software engineering is full of trade-offs. Take SQLite for example: only 1 writer can modify the DB at the same time. Coming from the Postgres world, this sounded like a no-go. But, hey, it was a walk in the park to implement the FIFO ordering in forq.sh due to that nature.

If your workflow contains builds for ARM architecture, prepare your patience 🧘

Claude strikes back 🤖

I ran out of monthly credits in Cursor and decided to give the "grok-code-fast-1" model a try, as it is free for now. As you can see, it didn't go well. Not sure about developers, but it can already replace the Lorem Ipsum thingy for sure 🙂

DHH has just announced that Campfire is open-source from now on. Pretty cool! See here: github.com/basecamp/onc...

When Claude convinces you to use a particular product despite the initial idea to go with the competitor, it's a good sign of nice docs and credibility. DaisyUI it is, then. Great job, @saadeghi.bsky.social and @daisyui.bsky.social contributors!

So, I've finally tried HTMX. Funnily enough, here is what excited me the most: If you leave your browser tab open for 42 years, it will stay the same. No refreshes, no crashes. The page is just stoically waiting for you to be back. Long-forgotten joy after a decade of SPAs!

I manually submitted talktolocals.ai to 31 directories, and here are the stats 2 months later 👇 We have a clear winner, so far: TAAFT. But 2 launches are still pending: BetaList and ProductHunt. Let's see who will win 🙃 I'll post new stats in a month, so stay tuned and don't miss out.

Reached my very first milestone with talktolocals.ai The next screenshot will be from the Polar dashboard. I hope 😄

The number of bots parsing GitHub is insane. Here is a screenshot from my newly created repo with 0 stars and followers. Do you see the similar stats for your repos?

Just noticed that my most used LLM instruction in the agent mode is "Let's only discuss this, do not modify the code" Helps with LLMs' eagerness.

Came across this post on Hacker News today. It's quite ironic to see how professional devs in Microsoft are forced to use the tool that is not good enough yet. But somebody up the ladder can report that AI creates 80% of PRs now. Check for yourself: www.reddit.com/r/Experience...

Digging through a box of forgotten relics, I stumbled upon a pre-Spotify era gem. Punk rock is today's soundtrack 🤘

When you vibecoded your tariffs

Have you ever heard of Brooks's law? "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." From 1975, but hasn't aged a day. From 1975, but hasn't been understood yet.

Check out the coolest dark theme on the web! 🔥 What are your top picks?

Google explains recursion with a hidden Easter egg

"Keep it simple" in a nutshell: instead of worrying about the complexity of scaling, they "outsourced" this challenge to Google for free. Ingenious! www.levels.fyi/blog/scalin...

I started my journey in tech with a role that was a hybrid of PM and QA: - figure out what needs to be done for the product - compile a list of requirements - send it to devs - test the feature they built With LLMs and Cursor, it feels like being back to where it started 🙂

In 2025, choosing a programming language for the project has a new dimension: AI awareness of it. And since LLM quality relies on the amount of data it was trained on, it leads to surprising results: Java > Kotlin JS/TS > Swift C > Zig Python > Rust Interesting, isn’t it?

Coming from (relatively) big tech, I always think about scalability when building something. Would it be able to handle a million users? The truth is that most indie apps end up having 0 users. And tech is not the reason for that. A reminder to myself: think, but not overthink.

After numerous tech discussions, I came up with a simple trick to quickly spot experts. Explain them a problem and observe: experts will ask questions to clarify things before offering solutions. The trick expands well outside tech: try it with a doctor, plumber or bank advisor

Since software engineers were the main users of Firefox due to privacy reasons, what is your new browser? Seeking privacy alternatives without the UX sacrifice.

Finally, a useful study out there: www.jmspae.se/write-ups/k...

Whenever I'm picking a database for my indie projects, I hesitate with SQLite, questioning its ability to scale. “It's just a file!” my decade+ of the industry experience screams to me, “you need Postgres!” Ben E. C. Boyter shares another opinion in the latest post: 🧵

Previously, when I used @v0 to build the app from scratch, I invested hours crafting a detailed spec for the initial prompt. Now, this article elevates the game, integrating LLM interaction right from the start: 🧵 harper.blog/2025/02/16/...

"For never was a story of more woe than this of Karen and her Jason" (c) William Shakespeare

What are the must-follow accounts for in-depth insights and engaging discussions in software engineering and computer science?

I somehow missed that Go 1.24 had been released. If you are like me, here is the official announcement with a changelog summary. go.dev/blog/go1.24

Look what I’ve found: Anthropic made a dedicated llms.txt file to navigate LLMs over their docs. Will this become a new standard? docs.anthropic.com/llms.txt

Came across this piece while reading Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” book. Internet proved to be useful, but overvalued internet companies without real use cases or profit streams collapsed the entire industry. Is it only me, or does this look similar to nowadays AI gold rush? 🤔

In 1990, @microsoft.com already knew how to create cool ads. Give this one a go, it's pretty cute 🙂 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO3...

Show this post to those who enforce the returning to the office policies: My wife has been down with fever, and it appeared to be smth contagious, so I also got it. Not my colleagues, though. Why? I work from home.

I’ve discovered lately that the 2nd edition of the Design Data Intensive Applications book by @martin.kleppmann.com is coming this December! Exciting, as it’s one of the best software engineering books out there www.oreilly.com/library/view...

If somebody needs a good reason to start blogging, here might be a good one: 2 weeks ago, I published a longread post where I challenged the established Bcrypt API design of truncating the input if it exceeds the max allowed length. The most exciting part is what happened next:

This Wired article is another example of how far someone can get their public image if they just keep claiming something. Telegram managed to create a reputation of being secure and private, despite the fact that default chats are not E2E, on top of other things. www.wired.com/story/pavel-...

As Donald Knuth’s books have been around since forever (1968 according to Wikipedia), in my head I always imagined him to be a 150-year-old Gandalf-like figure 🧙‍♂️ So that was a great surprise to see that he is still in business, and gave a Xmas 2024 lecture in Stanford youtu.be/Hi8r_63LGyg?...

After watching @mtlynch.io “Hit the Front Page of Hacker News” course and applying the knowledge, my post ended up on the front page. No secret tricks in the course, though, just tips on how to write a good content, and insights on what topics are a good fit for HN, and what are not.

In the new post, we are discussing the 5000x performance degradation of the app as the result of the wrong choice of the hashing algorithm for the particular scenario. And, of course, we will fix that! As a bonus, we'll take a peak at the Postgres source code. Let's go! =) n0rdy.foo/posts/202501...

While I'm not hyped by the DeepSeek due to privacy concerns, I find it ironic that OpenAI is unhappy about the unfair use of its model, while their own models were built by scraping the internet regardless of the copyright, licenses, or terms of service. www.macrumors.com/2025/01/29/o...

A few weeks ago, I've learned about the Okta Bcrypt incident from the @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com newsletter, and it made me wonder about the API choices by crypto libraries that allowed this incident to be unnoticed for years. My new post explores the topic. Enjoy! =) n0rdy.foo/posts/202501...

Just published a short post about the Ghostty terminal. Enjoy! =) n0rdy.foo/posts/202501...

An excellent summary on what 2024 brought in the realm of databases www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/...

After a long pause, finally got back to blogging, and here is my post about the cool algorithm behind the OTP generation: n0rdy.foo/posts/202412...

Some handpicked talks from AWS re:Invent 24 rootly.com/blog/aws-re-...

It's been a while, but here is my new post "JWT, JWS, JWE and how to cook them". Grab a lot of coffee, as it will be quite a ride =) n0rdy.foo/posts/202403...

I have just published a new post "Understanding CORS". Let's finally understand what the "Access to fetch at ... from origin ... has been blocked by CORS policy: ..." error means and how to get rid of it. n0rdy.foo/posts/202401...