urban weekly #71

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 hot

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 hot

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

I spent five years building a web app, posted it on Hacker News, and got my first $1. - What a ride! startups hot

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 hot

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 hot

diagram.page - a simple & intuitive flowchart builder experience. diagrams hot

Lightpanda - the headless browser designed for AI and automation browsers hot

DB Fiddle - SQL Database Playground databases

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

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 hot

Creating an Angled Slider - Let’s walk through how this slider with angled content and hover effect works. css, slider hot

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 hot