urban weekly #102
weekly tech news so you don't have to read all the internet
Good to know
How Are Images REALLY Stored? - Learning about image formats. images
Unexpected Benefits of Building Your Own Tools - Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the tools I've made, and I have found an insight from game development that I think can apply to the software engineering industry as a whole. engineering
A Little Bit of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - A short introduction to RLHF and post-training focused on language models. rlhf
How I brought LCP down to under 350 ms for Google-referred users on my website - Laying the foundation for super-fast performance with Signed Exchanges (part 1 of 8) performance
Developer philosophy - Amazing as it may seem after all these years, there are still junior developers in the world. engineering 🔥
Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry - Things changed, picked up and not changed. engineering
Cross-platform mobile development with Expo - Expo has quietly become one of the most popular tools for cross-platform development. Why is this, and how does Expo work? A deepdive with the Expo engineering team expo
Beej's Guide to Git - Learn git git
It’s OK to hardcode feature flags - I'd mostly agree with this article but there are some features that come with SaaS providers that static feature flags are not able to. featureflags
How I learned to code with my voice - Struggling with severe hand pain, I learned to code by voice. engineering, voice 🔥
How to Favicon in 2025 - Three files that fit most needs favicons
Ingesting Millions of PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 Changes Everything - Chunking PDFs—converting them into neat, machine-readable text chunks—is a major headache for any RAG systems. Both open-source and proprietary solutions exist, but none have truly achieved the ideal combination of accuracy, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. ai, gemini
The End of Programming as We Know It - There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. ai, engineering
On Product-Market Fit - PmF is when customers sell your product for you. pmf, startups
Which rich text editor framework should you choose in 2025? - Looking to integrate a WYSIWYG editor into your JavaScript app? This comparison dives into the best frameworks available, including Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, and Slate. editors
GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens - Introducing agent mode for GitHub Copilot in VS Code, announcing the general availability of Copilot Edits, and providing a first look at our SWE agent. github, copilot
Read it! Read it! Read it!
I spent five years building a web app, posted it on Hacker News, and got my first $1. - What a ride! startups 🔥
There are a lot of ways to break up long tasks in JavaScript. - It's very common to intentionally break up long, expensive tasks over multiple ticks of the event loop. But there are sure are a lot of approaches to choose from. Let's explore them. javascript 🔥
Code and Tools
Lume - A lightweight CLI and local API server to create, run and manage macOS and Linux virtual machines (VMs) natively on Apple Silicon. virtualization
Earthstar - A database for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users. databases
pydantic.run - Python browser sandbox. python, sandbox
Publican - Publican is a simple HTML-first static site generator for Node.js ssg
parse-duration - convert a human readable duration to ms javascript, tools
Feluda - Detect license usage restrictions in your project! licenses
HTTP Status codes for Node.js - Utility to interact with HTTP status code in Node.js status-codes
React QR Scanner - A library to scan QR Codes in react. qr, react
tinygradient - simple gradient generator gradients, colors
monoco - Monoco is a tiny JavaScript library that adds squircles (smooth corners) and other corner types to html elements. shapes, html, javascript 🔥
diagram.page - a simple & intuitive flowchart builder experience. diagrams 🔥
Lightpanda - the headless browser designed for AI and automation browsers 🔥
DB Fiddle - SQL Database Playground databases
All about Design
Tooltips are presentational - The ARIA tooltip role is functionally useless and semantically meaningless. The only legitimate use-case for tooltips is to show information that’s already accessibly defined. So tooltips only benefit sighted users, and are therefore presentational. aria, tooltips
Tutorials
Vite with TypeScript - A brief walkthrough on how to upgrade Vite from JavaScript to TypeScript. vite, typescript
Building a progress-indicating scroll-to-top button in HTML and CSS - What a nice effect just with some css! css 🔥
Creating an Angled Slider - Let’s walk through how this slider with angled content and hover effect works. css, slider 🔥
Videos
Angular: The Documentary - An origin story - All the Honeypot productions are so enjoyable. Also watch it if you don't care about Angular. angular, honeypot 🔥
Published on 2025-02-10, 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.
