urban weekly #102
weekly tech news so you don't have to read all the internet
Good to know
The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers - There is so much debate online about the usefulness of LLMs. While some people see giant leaps in productivity, others don’t see what the fuss is about. Every relevant HackerNews post now comes with a long thread of folks arguing back and forth. I call it the new Great Divide. engineering, ai
You are using Cursor AI incorrectly... - I'm hesitant to give this advice away for free, but I'm gonna push past it and share it anyway. You're using Cursor incorrectly. cursor, ai
Patterns for building realtime features - Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other users, as the changes are happening. realtime
How Do You Spend Your Time? - Career advice, or something like it. career
Summarizing our recommendations for software documentation - Last year, my coworker Suzanne and I got a case study accepted into an ethnography conference! She's an anthropologist by training, and I'm a software engineer. How'd we wind up there? docs
Do I Need This Node Dependency? - Advancements over time in Node.js are improving the out of the box experience. nodejs 🔥
The Duolingo Handbook - How Duolingo works: 14 years of big learnings in one little handbook. duolingo, engineering
Tech's Dumbest Mistake - Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything engineering, ai 🔥
State of React 2024 - Results are here react
Introducing Fluid compute - Vercel introduces a new way to compute vercel
The European Accessibility Act for websites and apps - The European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect on June 28, 2025 - just 5 months from now. From that point, covered websites and apps of companies operating in the EU must meet accessibility standards. Only microenterprises are exempt. eaa
Understanding the trade-offs of using Tailwind CSS - Tailwind helps you build web pages quickly with a utility-first approach — but is it right for your project? Here we explore its benefits and trade-offs. tailwind 🔥
The Economics of Being a Founding Engineer - When I graduated from Georgia Tech in May 2023, Facebook was one of the largest employers of computer science graduates from my class. Their approximate starting offer for new grad software engineers in the Bay Area was $200,000/year, which included $50k/yr of Meta stock. startups 🔥
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji - Interesting! encoding
I failed my Anthropic interview and came to tell you all about it so you don't have to - Interesting insights from the interview process. interview
Move on to ESM-only - Post to motivate you to move to esm packages. esm
How I built an AI company to save my open source project - Learn about how timefold arised. startups
Replace your JavaScript Animation Library with View Transitions - Bonus points: save space by removing the dependency! animations 🔥
Software Quality - Google defines software quality as including four types: process quality, code quality, system quality, and product quality. engineering
Date pickles - Very good comparison of available date picker libraries. date, picker
Read it! Read it! Read it!
How AI Takeover Might Happen in 2 Years - I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios. ai, future 🔥
Code and Tools
Mail0 - open source gmail alternative email
JStack - Build seriously fast, lightweight and end-to-end typesafe Next.js apps nextjs
StockSnap.io - Beautiful Free Stock Photos. New CC0 images added daily, free from copyright restrictions. images
Consola - Elegant Console Logger for Node.js and Browser logs
Human Regex - Human-friendly regular expression builder with English-like syntax. regex
LocalSend - Share files to nearby devices. Free, open-source, cross-platform. sharing
a0.dev - Like v0 but for React Native apps. ai
Ohm - A library and language for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, etc. javascript
React D3 Tree - React component to create interactive D3 tree graphs tree, d3
React Image Gallery - React carousel image gallery component with thumbnail support react, images
Share Button - A Web Component to share web pages using the native OS sharing options sharing
Visprex - Visualise your CSV files in seconds without sending your data anywhere visualization, csv
PostSpark - Beautify Screenshots images 🔥
FullSoak - a no-build TypeScript fullstack SSR-first framework for developing fast web applications with a shallow learning curve deno, framework
Litur - Find, collect and organize all the colors around you. colors
Phase - Simple Animation For Product Designers animations 🔥
Flexbox Labs - A web app for creating flexible layouts with the power of CSS Flexbox. css, tailwind, layout
Style Observer - Run JS when a CSS property changes. Any CSS property. javascript
Oxidase - Transpiles TypeScript at the Speed of Parsing typescript
Unduck - A fast, local-first "search engine" for !bang users search
Fun
TabBoo - Add random jumpscares to sites you're trying to avoid extensions, bwoser 🔥
Tutorials
How to build a library in React - In this post, I quickly wanna go over how to build a library in React. react, libraries
Intro to Wasm in Deno - JavaScript is a scripting language—distant from the machine code your CPU actually consumes. But JavaScript has a way to execute binary machine code, or something close to it, called WebAssembly. WebAssembly, or Wasm, is a low-level, portable binary format that runs at near-native speeds in the browser. deno, wasm
Designing backgrounds with LLMs and React - That's so hot! backgrounds 🔥
Videos
Understand the Next Phase of Web Development - NDC London 2024 frontends
Published on 2025-02-17, 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.
