urban weekly #102
weekly tech news so you don't have to read all the internet
Good to know
Use Bash Strict Mode - Unless You Love Debugging bash
We Put a Coding Agent in a While Loop and It Shipped 6 Repos Overnight - This weekend at the YC Agents hackathon, we asked ourselves: what’s the weirdest way we could use a coding agent? ai, hackathon 🔥
Everything I know about good API design - Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs. apis, engineering 🔥
Evaluating LLMs for my personal use case - Most models are excellent, so cost and latency dominate. ai, llms, costs
My experience creating software with LLM coding agents - Part 2 (Tips) - This post details my experiences creating software with LLM coding agents, emphasizing that what you do with AI agents is ‘creation’, not just 'coding,' and sharing what worked for me. ai, tips
ASCII output - In the latest release of D2 (0.7.1), we introduce ASCII outputs. ascii, d2 
Hide object properties with JavaScript symbols - Simple way to hide object properties with JavaScript symbols. javascript
DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase - Eight ways I use DeepWiki to speed up real coding work deepwiki, ai, engineering 🔥
MCPs are just other people's prompts and other people's APIs - Understanding the hidden risk layers when your AI talks to their AI mcp
My Current AI Dev Workflow - Ghostty + Claude Code + minimal tooling = maximum productivity. ai, productivity
Communication is The Job - Each of us are always communicating. engineering, communication
How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews - In-person algorithmic interviews are not disappearing from Big Tech and many top scaleups and startups, so it’s useful to know how to succeed at them. Advice and tactics from Mike Mroczka engineering, interviews, career
The Making of gradient.style - Found these pics in a drawer and thought it'd be fun to share the journey of creating a CSS spec compliant gradient generator in 2023. making-of How we migrated our Rush.js monorepo to Node type stripping - To run the code natively without transpilation. rushjs, node
What are SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs? - A complete guide to service reliability metrics operations, metrics
Why I Started Using Postgres (And You Might Too) - A Microsoft SQL Server Expert starts using Postgres. postgres, sql, database
Will AI Replace Human Thinking? - The Case for Writing and Coding Manually ai, engineering
You no longer need JavaScript - So much of the web these days is ruined by the bloat that is modern JavaScript frameworks. css 🔥
Open Source is one person - Includes some graphs and insights oss, security
Read it! Read it! Read it!
Big O - Big O notation is a way of describing the performance of a function without using time. performance, algorithms 🔥
Code and Tools
NitroQR - Embedded Design QRs allow you to seamlessly integrate logos or custom designs into your QR codes while maintaining scannability. qr
Zedless - Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first zed, privacy
Perfect Freehand - Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines. drawing 🔥
UI Root - Discover and share tools and resources that supercharges your workflow ui
timep - timep is an efficient and state-of-the-art trap-based time profiler for bash code. bash, performance
MCP Context Forge - ContextForge MCP Gateway is a feature-rich gateway, proxy and MCP Registry that federates MCP and REST services - unifying discovery, auth, rate-limiting, observability, virtual servers, multi-transport protocols, and an optional Admin UI into one clean endpoint for your AI clients. mcp, registry
Crush - The glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal ai, terminal GhostTrack - Useful tool to track location or mobile number tracking
Cronicle - A simple, distributed task scheduler and runner with a web based UI. scheduler, cron
StreamDown - A drop-in replacement for react-markdown, designed for AI-powered streaming. markdown, ai
CSS HD Gradients - Generate gradients. colors, css 🔥
JSON Editor - JSON Schema Based Editor json
Maple Font - Open source monospace font with round corner, ligatures and Nerd-Font icons for IDE and terminal, fine-grained customization options. fonts
mcss - A modern classless CSS framework inspired by the typefaces of Matthew Carter. css
Kiwi.com Flight Search MCP - This is the Kiwi.com flight search MCP server. Search and book flights directly from your favorite AI assistant! mcp, ai
SVG Crop - Remove blank space from around any SVG instantly. svgs
Image.js - Image processing and manipulation in JavaScript images 🔥
Obs.js - Context-aware web performance for everyone javascript, performance 
All about Design
Color and typography pairings: A designer’s cheatsheet - Perfect the art of combining colors and fonts to create websites that look stunning and tell a cohesive brand story. typography
Tutorials
Gating entrances with Stripe and NFC passes - Mess around with your mobile NFC. nfc Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes - Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a great way to make apps built for the web feel native, but in moving away from a browser environment, we can introduce usability issues. Declan covers how we can modify our app depending on what display mode is applied to mitigate these issues. pwa
Unlocking Web Workers with React - A Step-by-Step Guide workers, react 🔥
Videos
Transformers, the tech behind LLMs - Deep Learning Chapter 5 - Old but still great to watch if you want to understand LLMs. llms, learning
Python: The Documentary - An origin story python 🔥
Published on 2025-09-01, last updated on 2025-09-14 by Adam
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Adam Urban is fullstack engineer, loves serverless and generative art, and is building side projects like weeklyfoo.com, flethy.com and diypunks.xyz in his free time.
