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Validate what comes in, shape what goes out, and give every outcome its proper status code. So Phase 1 gave my app a memory — a real database that remembers users and expenses even after a restart. Small problem: the only way to actually talk to it was a Python script I ran by hand. The app could remember things, but it was mute. Nobody on the internet could add an expense, list their spending, or delete a typo. Phase 2 fixes that. This is where the app grows a mouth — real HTTP endpoints you hit through the browser. The buzzword is CRUD : Create, Read, Update, Delete. The four things basically every app does to data. I went in thinking "it's just four functions, how hard can it be" and came out having learned about request/response contracts, dependency injection, and roughly six different HTTP status codes — mostly by triggering them wrong first. Let me dump what I learned [and the parts that tripped me up, because there were, uh, several]. The Structure is as follows. Lets call it PHASE 2 — The Endpoints: Set up the request/response contracts (two Pydantic schemas: one for input, one for output) Build a session dependency so every request gets a safe, auto-closing DB connection POST — create an expense GET — list them all + fetch one [with a proper 404] PATCH — update just the fields that changed DELETE — remove one cleanly First, the two new ideas [and no, nothing to install this time] Phase 1 had two new libraries. Phase 2 has two new ideas — and the nice part is there's nothing to pip install , because Pydantic already ships inside FastAPI. [Which means requirements.txt didn't change this phase. Still worth knowing the freeze habit is only for phases where you actually install something.] Pydantic — the bouncer at the door. Your SQLAlchemy models describe how data is stored ; Pydantic describes the shape data must have to cross the border of your API . It checks types, rejects garbage, and turns raw JSON into a clean Python object before it gets anywhere near

A practical workflow for turning release artifacts into an accurate, reviewable SaaS product demo without inventing product details. Shipping a feature and explaining it are different kinds of work. The code may have tests and a clean deployment path. The material needed to explain the feature is scattered across tickets, release notes, draft docs, screenshots, and a rushed screen recording. Consider a fictional SaaS team releasing workspace permissions. The feature adds Owner, Editor, and Viewer roles, plus a log of permission changes. By release day, most inputs already exist. The challenge is turning them into one accurate product demo without asking the workflow to guess. Treat release material as a versioned input bundle, then review the script and storyboard before generating video. Why shipping the feature is easier than explaining it Engineers and product managers see the feature as a diff. Viewers do not. A ticket might say "enforce role checks at the workspace boundary," while a customer needs to know where to choose Viewer and what that person can access. That translation is where demos drift. A script can inherit an internal name, skip a prerequisite, show an old label, or turn a planned benefit into a shipped claim. Set one rule before starting: the video cannot introduce a product fact that is absent from the release bundle. Every UI action must also map to the released build. Build a release-to-video source bundle Store the material in a release-specific folder with the release tag or build date. Give each input an owner who can resolve conflicts. Input What it contributes Owner Release note Shipped scope and exclusions Product manager Audience and job One viewer and the task they need to complete Product or PMM Approved claims Language the team can defend Product and legal, if needed Help-center draft Prerequisites, steps, and edge cases Docs or customer education Three current screenshots Exact labels and important UI states Designer or feature owne

Open a lot of .NET projects and you'll find the repository pattern sitting on top of Entity Framework Core. IProductRepository, GetById, Add, Save, the whole set. Underneath, every method just calls the EF Core DbContext and passes the result straight back. The wrapper adds a name and nothing else. So do you need the repository pattern with EF Core? For most apps, no. EF Core already gives you one. DbSet is a repository. It already does the thing the pattern is for. The reason this keeps happening is that the repository pattern got taught alongside EF, so people assume you need one to use the other. You don't. What the Pattern Was For The repository pattern came before EF Core. It started in a time when data access meant hand-written SQL, SqlCommand, and mapping DataReader rows to objects by hand. Wrapping all of that behind an interface was worth it. It hid a real mess, and it let you swap what was underneath without the rest of the app noticing. EF Core already does that. DbContext is the unit of work. DbSet is the repository. SaveChanges() is the commit. The pattern you're adding is one the tool already gives you. What the Wrapper Actually Does Here's the shape you see in most codebases: public class ProductRepository : IProductRepository { private readonly AppDbContext _db ; public ProductRepository ( AppDbContext db ) => _db = db ; public async Task < Product ?> GetById ( int id ) => await _db . Products . FindAsync ( id ); public async Task < List < Product >> GetAll () => await _db . Products . ToListAsync (); public void Add ( Product product ) => _db . Products . Add ( product ); } Read what each method does. GetById calls FindAsync. GetAll calls ToListAsync. Add calls Add. It's a passthrough. Every line hands the call straight to EF Core and returns whatever comes back. You wrote an interface, a class, and a registration to rename methods that already existed. This is what people mean by a generic repository over EF Core, and it's the most common version y

For a while now, an idea has been gaining traction: with artificial intelligence, anyone can build an app without knowing how to code . The promise is incredibly seductive: with just a few prompts, we can generate code and instantly turn an idea into a product. It’s no coincidence that this vision took hold so quickly and gave rise to services like Lovable.dev , Blot.new , v0 , and others. Every new technological evolution that narrows the gap between an idea and software tends to make developers' work look like an arcane ritual waiting to be dismantled by a simpler formula. There is something deeply familiar about all of this. Something that reminds me of a line from a song many of us grew up with, with its slightly childish enthusiasm: everybody wants to be a cat ! Today, it seems like everybody wants to be a dev. The real question is whether everybody can be a dev. Joking aside, the attempt to make programming accessible to everyone is an old story, one that certainly didn't start with the advent of AI. A World Without Developers The idea that technological evolution can democratize programming is a recurring theme in the history of computer science. Every time a new abstraction emerges, someone proclaims that the job of writing software is about to become obsolete . Sometimes the promise is alluring; other times, it's just a clever way to sell a new tool. Yet, the core premise remains the same: if computers get closer and closer to understanding human language, then perhaps those seemingly indispensable technical skills are no longer needed . I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself multiple times. A demo takes half an hour to build, a prototype seems to work, and suddenly, the idea of building an app feels within anyone's reach. It’s fascinating, but the problem is that what you see at the beginning is often just the surface-level work: the interface, the screens, the user flow. What remains hidden is the hardest part, the work that determines whether the applicati

It didn’t keep my coworkers at bay, but Flipper’s expensive productivity tool did help me focus on the task at hand.

Learn languages by exploring worlds and talking to locals. Discussion | Link

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. It will allow astronomers…

An AI workspace where your canvas and code work together. Discussion | Link

Synthesia launched AI Roleplay Sessions, an interactive enterprise training platform where employees practice workplace conversations with AI avatars that provide feedback, scoring, and analytics to help companies measure training effectiveness.

Google Cloud has published a new blueprint setting out how organisations should secure artificial intelligence workloads running on Google Kubernetes Engine, arguing that the shift from prototype to production has outpaced traditional security models. The document sets out a three layer approach covering infrastructure, model integrity and application security. By Matt Saunders

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What We Learned Building a Location-Aware Contact Management App Most contact apps are built like digital phonebooks. They store a name, phone number, email, maybe a company name, and then leave the user to remember everything else. That works when someone has 50 people saved. It starts breaking when someone has hundreds or thousands of professional connections from events, client meetings, referrals, business cards, conferences, online communities, and local networking groups. The hard part is not storing people. The hard part is helping users find the right person at the right time. While building a location-aware contact management app, we learned that contact data becomes far more useful when it is connected to context: where someone is, how the user met them, what they discussed, what industry they belong to, and why the relationship matters. Here are some product, UX, and privacy lessons we learned along the way. 1. A contact list is not the same as a usable network A normal contact list answers one basic question: “Do I have this person’s number?” But professionals usually need better questions answered: Who do I know in this city? Who did I meet at that event? Which industry contacts are nearby? Who should I follow up with before visiting this area? Who was that consultant I met last month? Which contacts are important but easy to forget? This is where the product problem becomes interesting. A user may technically have the contact, but still fail to use the relationship because the contact is buried inside a long list. So the first learning was simple: Saving contact details is not enough. The app needs to help users retrieve useful relationships when the context matters. That changed how we thought about the product. We were not just designing a place to store people. We were designing a system to make saved professional relationships easier to act on. 2. Location context changes the experience Most contact managers are list-first. You search by name, comp

Over the last 14+ years, I've been working with the Microsoft technology stack, designing and delivering enterprise applications for procurement, inventory management, warehouse operations, and EPOS systems. As a Tech Lead, I've worked on projects involving: Procurement & Purchase Order Management Inventory & Warehouse Management EPOS integrations Accounting integrations REST APIs & Microservices Azure cloud solutions Performance optimization and secure application design While enterprise software has always been my primary focus, I've recently been expanding my work with Next.js, React, and TypeScript by building browser-based productivity tools. One of my goals is to build applications that are fast, privacy-friendly, and solve real business problems directly in the browser whenever possible. Some of the tools I've been building include: YAML Studio for Kubernetes, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Helm, Prometheus, and Grafana configuration generation. JSON ↔ Excel Converter with support for nested JSON, multi-sheet exports, and parent-child relationships. Multilingual OCR for business documents. PDF to Excel with structured table extraction. JSON Formatter & Validator. CSV, Excel, and other data conversion tools. One thing I've learned while building document-processing tools is that file conversion is the easy part. The real challenge is preserving document structure—detecting tables, handling multi-line descriptions, reconstructing wrapped product codes, and generating output that users can actually work with instead of spending time cleaning it up. My experience in procurement has made this especially interesting because Purchase Orders, Delivery Notes, Goods Receipts, and Invoices all have different layouts and business rules. Building reliable tools requires understanding both the technology and the business process behind the documents. Alongside application development, I'm also continuing to strengthen my DevOps knowledge with Docker, Azure D

I honestly thought learning REST APIs would be easy. At first, creating a simple GET or POST endpoint feels straightforward and you start thinking, "I've got this." Then reality hits. Every API needs middleware, validation, error handling, controllers, database integration, authentication, authorization, testing, pagination, CORS, environment variables, deployment and a dozen other things. Somewhere along the way, you realize you didn't just sign up to build an API—you signed up to build an entire backend ecosystem. 😂💻

When people hear about a new project scaffolding tool, one of the first questions they ask is: "Can I choose React Query or TanStack Query?" "What about pnpm instead of Bun?" "Can I use ESLint instead of Biome?" "Can I choose Radix instead of Base UI?" "Can I skip Tailwind?" These are reasonable questions. In fact, I asked myself the same ones while building create-notils . My first instinct was to make everything configurable. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was about to build something I didn't actually want to use. The Configuration Trap Most project generators start simple. Then someone requests another option. Another package manager. Another ORM. Another authentication provider. Another CSS framework. Another UI library. Eventually the CLI starts looking like this: ? Which package manager? ❯ npm pnpm yarn bun ? Which CSS framework? ? Which ORM? ? Which auth library? ? Which formatter? ? Which icon library? ? Which deployment target? It feels flexible. But every new option creates more combinations to support. Five choices in one prompt don't create five possible projects. They multiply with every other prompt. The complexity grows much faster than the number of features. I Built the Tool I Wanted to Use One thing I've learned from building side projects is this: the first user should always be yourself. Every project I start today uses almost exactly the same stack: Next.js 16 React 19 Bun Tailwind CSS v4 shadcn/ui Base UI Biome TypeScript Turborepo (when needed) I wasn't switching between ten different combinations every week. I was rebuilding the same foundation over and over. So instead of asking twenty questions during scaffolding, I decided to optimize for the workflow I actually have. npx create-notils my-app A few seconds later, I'm writing features instead of answering prompts. Opinionated Doesn't Mean Closed There's an important distinction between opinionated and restrictive . Some tools hide their implementation behind abstraction

Originally published at tengli.dev Your MCP server can be 100% spec-compliant and still be unusable by an agent. The Model Context Protocol spec tells you how to transport tools: JSON-RPC framing, capability negotiation, schema shapes. It says nothing about whether a model can actually use what you serve — whether it picks the right tool out of your catalog, fills the arguments correctly, or burns 8k tokens parsing your schemas on every single request. I integrate first- and third-party MCP connectors into a production AI agent for a living, and I kept seeing the same failure: servers that pass every compliance check, yet the model calls the wrong tool, hallucinates arguments, or ignores the tool entirely. The problems were never in the protocol layer. They were in the parts no one lints: descriptions, naming, schema design. So I wrote mcpgrade — a Lighthouse-style scorecard for MCP servers. One command, no API key, report in seconds: npx mcpgrade --stdio "npx -y your-mcp-server" Then I pointed it at 36 popular servers. It did not go great. The results Full sortable table: https://tengli.dev/mcp-leaderboard.html . The short version (static analysis, point-in-time snapshot; servers marked (archived) are unmaintained reference implementations, included because they're still widely installed and copied): Top of the class (A): brave-search (archived) , exa, google-maps (archived) , slack (archived) , perplexity-ask, @shopify/dev-mcp, @apify/actors-mcp-server, airbnb, figma-developer-mcp, tavily, gitlab (archived) , elastic, shrimp-task-manager, and more — 15 of 36. Bottom of the class (D/F), 11 of 36 — and it's not hobby projects: MongoDB's official server (66, with 66 errors), Notion's official server (62), Airtable (69, 66 errors), todoist-mcp-server (67, 110 errors ), GitHub's archived reference server (67, 44 errors), and firecrawl-mcp at the very bottom (57, 134 errors ). Two more servers (Stripe, Supabase) couldn't be scanned with dummy credentials and were exclud

Bring the world's best AI agents into your app, with one API Discussion | Link