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I'm AlanWu. I'm in junior high. I've written a lot of bad code. Here's what I changed to make it less bad. 1. Name things like a human // Don't do this int d ; // days? distance? damage? int cnt = 0 ; // "cnt" — you know, the classic vector < int > v ; // v of what // Do this int daysUntilDeadline ; int errorCount = 0 ; vector < int > studentScores ; Full words, no abbreviations. idx instead of i in loops is fine. But sz for size, cnt for count, ptr for pointer — just type the word. You're not being charged by the character. 2. Functions should do one thing If you need the word "and" to describe a function, split it. // Bad: does two things, name lies void loadAndValidateConfig () { readFile (); checkSyntax (); } // Better Config loadConfig ( string path ) { return parseConfig ( readFile ( path )); } bool validateConfig ( const Config & cfg ) { return cfg . width > 0 && cfg . height > 0 ; } My rule of thumb: if a function is longer than what fits on one screen, break it. If I can't describe what it does in one sentence without "and", break it. 3. Comments explain WHY, not WHAT // Bad — tells me what the code already says // Loop through all students for ( auto & s : students ) { s . score += 5 ; } // Good — tells me WHY, which the code can't // Extra credit: 5 points for submitting early for ( auto & s : students ) { s . score += 5 ; } If you're writing a comment that just restates the next line of code, delete it. The only comments worth keeping are the ones that answer "why did I do it this way?" 4. Don't nest too deep // Bad — 3 levels deep, I've already forgotten what the top level was for ( auto & student : students ) { if ( student . hasSubmitted ()) { for ( auto & answer : student . answers ) { if ( answer . isCorrect ()) { score ++ ; } } } } // Better — flatten with early exits for ( auto & student : students ) { if ( ! student . hasSubmitted ()) continue ; for ( auto & answer : student . answers ) { if ( ! answer . isCorrect ()) continue ; score ++ ; } } Al

Rspack, developed by ByteDance, has released version 2.0, featuring enhanced performance, reduced dependencies, and a focus on modern ECMAScript modules. Key updates include a pure ESM core, improved static analysis, and support for RSC. Performance benchmarks show big improvements in build times. The project has experienced substantial growth, with npm downloads exceeding 5 million weekly. By Daniel Curtis

DISCLAIMER: This post was written entirely by me! I used AI for a little research, spelling, grammar, and comprehension checks. This post was originally shared on Hackernoon Entertain me for a moment, let's appreciate where we are today by understanding where we've been… or at least, where I've been. I remember when I first learned to code. I was bad, like really bad. But I was so curious! It all started by writing some VBA in an MS Access Database to create an IT Inventory app in the late 90s. Then I learned JavaScript, ASP (without the .Net), then C#, .Net ( I still have my .Net for Dummies book, see below) , jQuery, Python, Java, Angular, ReactJS, and Python again (yeah, had to relearn that one for some reason), and I'm sure there are others in there I forgot about. Learning to write code was rewarding! There were those days I'd spend hours on a bug, only to realize I didn't initialize the variable or forgot a semicolon. I learned .Net over a weekend thanks to the above book. I never became an artist of the craft, like some of my colleagues have (you know who you are: Josh, Kevin, and many others), but I knew how to build anything. I loved that ability: I could build anything. Pure joy! If you haven't had the joy of learning to code, do your best to learn it, because you can't prompt your way to being a Senior Engineer . As I progressed in my career, I became an architect and senior lead. I started off by leading a single engineering team, and now I support large programs and teams. All the while, I never let go of hands-on-code. I still love coding for work and my myriad of side projects. Then, a few years ago, this GenAI thing showed up. Put me in that group of: oh-no-there-goes-my-joy. Joy, yes, not my job. I love my job because I get to do what I love. I loved the dramatic rollercoasters: architecting a perfect solution, realizing it's wrong, getting to write every line of code, chasing impossible bugs, panicking with deadlines, late nights chasing hot fixes,

GenPage is a generative AI system developed by Netflix to replace its traditional multi-stage recommendation pipeline by directly generating personalized user homepages. GenPage leverages user history and request context as a prompt to produce the entire page, resulting in improved user engagement and reduced serving latency. By Sergio De Simone

What if you could take an existing class and say "I want everything this already does, plus a few...

Introdução O nome do princípio vem do próprio nome do projeto de pesquisa (que remete a Deméter, deusa grega da agricultura — a metáfora era "cultivar" software que cresce de forma incremental e adaptável, não do princípio de acoplamento em si). O projeto Demeter investigava como reduzir o custo de manutenção de sistemas orientados a objetos observando que boa parte das mudanças de software quebrava código muito distante do ponto onde a mudança real acontecia — um efeito cascata causado por classes que conheciam profundamente a estrutura interna de outras classes. Essa observação foi confirmada empiricamente alguns anos depois: em 1994, Chidamber & Kemerer publicaram as famosas métricas CK ( A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design ), nas quais o CBO (Coupling Between Objects) — quão acoplada uma classe é a outras — se tornou um dos preditores mais fortes de defeitos e esforço de manutenção em estudos empíricos posteriores de engenharia de software. Ou seja: a intuição por trás da Law of Demeter (menos acoplamento = menos bugs ao mudar código) tem respaldo em dados de décadas de pesquisa empírica em qualidade de software. Definição Também chamada de "Principle of Least Knowledge" , a formulação clássica é: Um método M de um objeto O só deve chamar métodos de: O próprio O Os parâmetros recebidos por M Qualquer objeto que M crie/instancie internamente Os componentes diretos de O (seus atributos/campos) Variáveis globais acessíveis a O Resumo popular: "use apenas um ponto" — evite código como: pedido . getCliente (). getEndereco (). getCidade (). getNome () Isso é conhecido como "train wreck" (trem de vagões) — cada . é um vagão acoplado ao anterior. Se a estrutura interna de Cliente ou Endereco mudar, todo código que fez essa travessia quebra, mesmo estando em um módulo completamente não relacionado. Porque isso importa na prática? Quando o método M faz objeto.getX().getY().metodo() , ele passa a depender da estrutura interna de X e Y , não só da interface pública d

Why some records should be created by your system, not your users, and how to do it safely in .NET. A support ticket lands on your desk: "The Teams page is empty. I added a member, but no team shows up." You check the API. It's behaving exactly as written: { "items" : [], "totalCount" : 0 } Nothing is broken. And that's the problem. The system is faithfully returning nothing, because the row that the page reads from was never created. Somewhere in your design, you assumed a human would create it first. This article is about a small, recurring design decision that quietly causes empty dashboards, confused users, and "is this a bug?" tickets: who is responsible for creating derived records the user, or the system? and how to let the system do it without introducing duplicate rows or race conditions. The problem Let's use a fictional product: a collaboration tool called Loop . In Loop, the important entities are: An Organization (a paying customer). A Member (a person invited into an organization under a plan). A Team a grouping that members belong to, keyed by (OrganizationId, PlanCode) . The admin dashboard lists Teams . Each team card shows a member count. Here's the catch in the original design: creating a Member wrote a member row. Creating a Team was a separate, manual step an admin was expected to do first. If an admin invited members without first creating the matching team, the dashboard showed nothing even though the members clearly existed. From the user's point of view, they did everything right. From the system's point of view, a required row simply didn't exist. Why it matters The Team record isn't independent information. It is fully derivable from the first member invited under a plan. When one entity's existence is implied by another, forcing a human to create it manually is a design smell. It leads to: Empty states that look like outages. Users can't tell "no data" from "misconfigured." Support load. Every skipped step becomes a ticket. Silent data dr

Okay so. We need to talk about classes. If you've been following along with this series, you're...

What I learned at Zone01 Kisumu's IP training Introduction Yesterday, I attended an Intellectual Property training at Zone01 Kisumu, and it fundamentally changed how I think about the code I write. As developers, we spend countless hours building software, but how many of us truly understand the value of what we create,and how to protect it? In Kenya's rapidly growing tech ecosystem, understanding IP isn't just a legal nicety, it's a competitive advantage. Whether you're building an app, contributing to open source, or launching a startup, knowing your rights can mean the difference between owning your work and losing it. This article breaks down the essential IP frameworks every software developer should know. What is Intellectual Property in Software? Intellectual Property (IP) in software encompasses legal protections designed to safeguard the rights of creators and developers. The four primary types of IP protection relevant to software are: patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets . Copyright: Protecting Your Code Copyright is the most immediate form of protection for software developers. In Kenya, copyright protection arises automatically at the moment of creation,registration is not mandatory . This means that when you write code, you automatically own the copyright to that expression, provided the work is fixed in a tangible medium . However, a crucial distinction exists: copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves . This principle was reinforced in the Kenyan case of Solut Technology Limited v Safaricom Limited, where the court confirmed that without access to source code, it's difficult to prove infringement because the "expression" (the code itself) wasn't shared . Key Insight: Registering your copyright with KECOBO in Kenya provides prima facie evidence of ownership and can make enforcement faster if someone copies your work . Patents: Protecting Functionality While copyright protects the expression of code, patents pro

Hey everyone, I recently had an "aha!" moment regarding how React handles updates under the hood, and I wanted to share it because I realize a ton of developers (including myself, until recently) trip over this exact concept. The common mental model is that React Reconciliation compares the Virtual DOM directly to the Real Browser DOM and surgically updates only what changed. But that’s fundamentally incorrect. React never reads or directly compares the real DOM during the diffing process. It actually splits the process into two entirely separate phases —The Render Phase and The Commit Phase —which creates a massive distinction between Re-rendering and Re-painting. Here is the exact breakdown of what happens when a single state change affects just 1 out of 100 divs in a component: The Render Phase (Pure JavaScript) When state changes, React calls your component function. It doesn't know which of your 100 divs changed yet, so it has to evaluate the entire JSX block. The Scope: React re-renders all 100 virtual divs in memory. The Process: It builds a brand-new Virtual DOM tree and compares it to the previous Virtual DOM tree (JavaScript object vs. JavaScript object). The Outcome: It spots that 99divs are identical, but 1 div has an update. It flags that single virtual node with an "Update" tag. Because this happens purely in-memory as JavaScript, it is incredibly fast and cheap. The Commit Phase (The Real DOM Update) This is where Reconciliation does its primary job. It acts as a shield to protect the browser from doing unnecessary work. The Scope: React completely ignores the 99 unchanged elements. The Process: It surgically targets the single real browser div associated with the flagged Virtual DOM element and updates only its modified property (e.g., element.textContent = "New Value"). The Outcome: The browser repaints only 1 single div on the screen. The Conclusion: Reconciliation isn't about stopping React from re-rendering (re-running JS to calculate the UI). It

Luca Mezzalira shares proven learnings from guiding hundreds of teams through the migration from monolithic web applications to distributed frontend architectures. He explains the core architectural difference between components and micro-frontends, outlines a 6-step decision framework spanning client vs. server rendering, and discusses how to utilize edge compute for safe, iterative rollouts. By Luca Mezzalira

A few weeks ago I was setting up a new project and needed to do the usual dance: create a Notion doc, spin up a Linear board, invite the team to Slack, and set up a couple of Zapier automations to connect them all. It took me most of an afternoon. That's when it hit me — I wasn't actually trying to "use" any of these tools. I just wanted the outcome. I wanted the project set up. And somewhere between the fifth Zapier trigger and the third failed webhook, I found myself thinking: why am I the one gluing all this together? That question is basically the whole thesis behind this post. AI agents aren't just a new feature category bolted onto SaaS. They're starting to eat the reason SaaS exists in the first place. The old deal: software rents you a workflow Traditional SaaS sells you a workflow, not an outcome. You pay for Notion, and Notion gives you a very nice, very rigid shape to pour your thoughts into. You pay for HubSpot, and it gives you a CRM shape. You pay for Zapier so you can awkwardly stitch the shapes together. This worked great for twenty years because the alternative was building everything yourself. SaaS was the shortcut. But the shortcut came with a tax: you had to adapt your work to fit the tool, and when you needed two tools to talk to each other, you had to become a part-time integrations engineer. The new deal: software does the workflow for you An AI agent flips that relationship. Instead of "here's a tool, go operate it," it's "here's the outcome, go figure out how to get there." You tell an agent "onboard this new client" and it can read the contract, create the folders, send the welcome email, schedule the kickoff call, and post a summary in Slack — using whatever tools it has access to, without you clicking through five different dashboards. That's the part that's easy to miss if you only think of agents as "chatbots with extra steps." A chatbot answers questions. An agent does multi-step work: It breaks a goal down into subtasks It calls tools

One of the most common questions I hear is: "My API is slow. Where do I start?" The first instinct is usually: Upgrade the server Increase CPU Add more RAM But in many cases, the database query is the real bottleneck . Whenever I investigate a slow Laravel application, I follow the same checklist. It helps me identify performance issues before making unnecessary infrastructure changes. Let's go through it. 1️⃣ Find the Slow Queries First Don't start optimizing random queries. Start with the queries that are executed the most or take the most time. Useful tools: Laravel Telescope Laravel Debugbar (development) MySQL Slow Query Log Application Performance Monitoring (APM) You can't optimize what you haven't measured. 2️⃣ Stop Using SELECT * One of the easiest improvements. ❌ Instead of: SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 10 ; Use: SELECT id , name , email FROM users WHERE id = 10 ; Why? Less data transferred Lower memory usage Faster response Easier for MySQL to use covering indexes Only fetch the columns your application actually needs. 3️⃣ Always Check the Execution Plan Before changing anything, run: EXPLAIN SELECT id , name FROM users WHERE email = 'john@example.com' ; Things I usually look for: Is MySQL scanning the whole table? Is an index being used? How many rows are examined? Is there a temporary table? Is filesort being used? EXPLAIN often tells you exactly why a query is slow. 4️⃣ Verify Your Indexes Indexes are one of the biggest performance improvements you can make—but only when they match your queries. Example: SELECT * FROM orders WHERE customer_id = 100 ; Create an index: CREATE INDEX idx_customer_id ON orders ( customer_id ); Now MySQL can jump directly to the matching rows instead of scanning the entire table. 5️⃣ Look for Composite Index Opportunities Suppose your query is: SELECT id , total FROM orders WHERE customer_id = 10 AND status = 'paid' ; Instead of two separate indexes: customer_id status A composite index is often better: CREATE INDEX idx_cu

AI makes the first 80% of development feel fast, but hides architectural complexity until it's too late. To prevent system instability, engineering leaders must shift from raw throughput to systemic comprehension. By unifying spec-anchored SDD, TDD, and automated fitness functions into a repo-bound "Context Store," teams can ensure AI agents and human reviewers evolve code safely. By Stella Berhe, Stephan Bragner, Vikram Maran, Anand Jayaraman

Teams make dozens of architectural decisions every month but document almost none of them. The rest dissolve into Slack threads, hallway conversations, and the minds of people who will leave the company within a year. Six months later, a new developer stares at the code and asks: "Why Redis here instead of PostgreSQL for queues?" Nobody remembers. An archaeological dig through Git history, Slack, and Notion begins. Two hours spent investigating a decision that originally took 15 minutes. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) solve this problem. But they don't get written. The reason is simple: drafting an ADR takes 30-40 minutes, and the developer has already moved on to the next task. AI compresses that to 3-5 minutes. This article covers ADR structure, prompts for LLM-based generation, real-world examples, and CI pipeline automation. What ADRs are and why capturing architectural decisions matters An ADR (Architecture Decision Record) is a document that captures one specific architectural decision. Not a spec, not an RFC, not a design document. One decision, one file. Michael Nygard introduced the concept in 2011. The format took hold at large companies (Spotify, Thoughtworks, GitHub) but remains rare in smaller teams. The main reason: the writing overhead feels higher than the value it delivers. Three situations where the absence of ADRs hurts the most: Onboarding. A new developer reads the code and encounters an unconventional decision. Without an ADR, they either spend hours investigating, or treat it as a mistake and "fix" it. Both paths are expensive for the team. Revisiting decisions. Context changes: load increases, new requirements emerge, a dependency goes stale. Without a record of why the current solution was chosen and which alternatives were rejected, the team re-runs the entire analysis from scratch. Audits and compliance. In regulated industries (fintech, healthtech), architectural decisions require documented justification. ADRs close that gap automa

Hey what's up guys👋🏻 Remember our last Perfect Circle challenge? We had some amazing attempts! While...

Welcome back to The Everyday Backend Engineer: Practical Design Patterns . In our last post, we made our core algorithms interchangeable using the Strategy Pattern. Today, we close out our design patterns roadmap with arguably the most native pattern in the entire Node.js ecosystem: The Observer Pattern . Let’s look at how to master event-driven decoupling to trigger secondary workflows seamlessly without bloat. 🔴 The Problem: Direct Inline Side-Effects Imagine you are writing a video processing engine or a simple order fulfillment system. When a specific event happens—such as an order being finalized—multiple unrelated departments want a piece of the action: The Notification Service needs to send an SMS and Email receipt. The Logistics Service needs to generate a warehouse fulfillment ticket. The Analytics Service needs to update marketing tracking boards. If you don't decouple these events, your primary execution service ends up managing a giant web of secondary micro-services: // ❌ Bad Practice: The primary service is drowning in secondary dependencies const EmailService = require ( ' ../services/email ' ); const WarehouseService = require ( ' ../services/warehouse ' ); const AnalyticsTracker = require ( ' ../services/analytics ' ); class OrderProcessor { async finalizeOrder ( order ) { console . log ( " Saving primary order to the database... " ); // Core business logic ends here // The codebase smell: Procedural cascading dependencies await EmailService . sendReceipt ( order . userEmail ); await WarehouseService . createShipment ( order . id ); await AnalyticsTracker . trackSale ( order . totalAmount ); } } module . exports = OrderProcessor ; Why does this slow your system down? Your core OrderProcessor is now structurally dependent on three separate systems. If the AnalyticsTracker throws a network timeout error or if the warehouse API changes its interface, your core transaction fails or hangs. Furthermore, adding a fourth side-effect (like an auditing logger

Jake Lazaroff discussed the AT Protocol as a framework for distributed applications beyond social networking. He emphasised a local-first architecture where users maintain data in PDSs while leveraging shared infrastructure for synchronisation and updates. The presentation included experiments showcasing collaborative tools and highlighted the benefits of reduced reliance on app-specific backends. By Olimpiu Pop

The Quest Begins (The "Why") I still remember the first time I tried to track down a bug that only showed up after midnight. I opened my terminal, typed git log , and was greeted by a wall of commits that read like a toddler’s grocery list: * 7a9c3f1 (HEAD -> main ) fix stuff * 4b2e8a1 update * f1d9c6b wip * 9e3b7d2 more changes * … I spent three hours chasing a regression that turned out to be a one‑line typo in a file I hadn’t touched in weeks. The commit messages gave me zero clues, and the diff was a tangled mess of unrelated changes. I felt like I was wandering through a dungeon without a map, hoping the next room would hold the answer. That night I realized the real monster wasn’t the bug—it was the way I was committing code. My commits were large, vague, and scattered , making every subsequent step (review, revert, bisect) a gamble. If I wanted to keep my sanity (and maybe even enjoy coding again), I needed a better system. The Revelation (The Insight) The turning point came when I read about Conventional Commits —a lightweight convention that gives each commit a clear type ( feat , fix , docs , refactor , test , chore , etc.) and a short, descriptive message. It sounded simple, but the impact was massive: Atomicity – each commit does one thing. Clarity – the message tells you why the change exists, not just what changed. Automation – tools can generate changelogs, version bumps, and even release notes straight from the log. Adopting this felt like discovering a hidden shortcut in a Zelda dungeon—suddenly the whole map made sense, and I could sprint to the boss room with confidence. Wielding the Power (Code & Examples) Before – The Chaos Imagine we’re building a tiny API for user profiles. Here’s what a typical day of committing looked like (messages only, but the diffs were just as messy): $ git log --oneline -5 7a9c3f1 ( HEAD -> main ) fix stuff 4b2e8a1 update profile handler f1d9c6b wip 9e3b7d2 added auth middleware c5d4e3f refactor utils If I needed to ro

Lately, I've been doing some deep personal reflection. I'm talking about myself, I hope no one misunderstands, on how pervasive the use of AI has become in my daily development workflow. Through a bit of self-analysis, I've discovered some interesting dynamics. Dependencies often arise from the desire to fill a void. But what kind of void does an experienced developer like me face? As a professional, I have the skills. Sure, AI helps me get things done faster, but the final product is always the translation of my vision; if I don't fully understand the solution, I discard it. I'm not looking for "magic," I'm looking for efficiency. Yet, I realize I've used AI to fill a specific void: the need for discussion. Software development is inherently solitary. The satisfaction of a successful "execution" after hours of discussions, refinements, and clashes over an architecture is an experience I miss today. The chat interface is always there, ready to respond. But there's a problem: it's a "yes-man." Even when I force it to be critical or provocative via the system's prompts, I know it's just reciting a script to please me. There's no conviction, no risk of error, none of the friction that arises when a colleague courageously defends their vision, perhaps one that conflicts with mine. We are part of a huge community, but debate often remains superficial. One might argue that posts and comments are enough, but anyone who has tried knows it doesn't work very well: a debate is truly alive only when there is no latency. In comments, the time between thinking, writing, and waiting for a response diminishes the energy of the exchange, turning it into a series of monologues rather than a dialogue. Why don't we try creating "virtual tables" where we can discuss projects, architectures, and technical choices with the natural rhythm of a conversation? Direct, real-time discussions, in person or remotely, where the exchange of ideas can spark sparks, without the filter (and delay) of