urban weekly #81

Advanced React in the Wild - Production Case Studies from Ambitious Web Projects (2022–2025) react

SVG - More about SVG. Note that the example code is written in JSX (or React), not ordinary HTML. svg

Everything Wrong with MCP - Explaining the Model Context Protocol and everything that might go wrong. mcp

How to Hire - Most companies hire the same way. They look for people who’ve already proven themselves elsewhere. They compete for the same small pool of established talent. This seems logical, but there’s a better approach. hiring

The Post-Developer Era - Two years ago, in March 2023, I published a blog post called “The End of Front-End Development”. This was right after OpenAI released its GPT-4 showcase, and the general reaction was that human software developers were about to be made redundant, that software would soon be written exclusively by machines. engineering

How I don't use LLMs - I enjoy shocking people by telling them I don’t use LLMs. llms

Tauri vs. Electron: performance, bundle size, and the real trade-offs - A breakdown of the choice between Tauri and Electron for cross-platform apps, backed by practical comparisons and benchmark data. electron, tauri

This is why you're not shipping - Red flags for teams that want to ship fast engineering, performance 🔥

Atuin Scripts - Shareable, Syncable Shell Snippets shell, atuin

The Second Half - tldr: We’re at AI’s halftime. ai

How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them - One of the most consistently neglected parts of today’s user experiences is our handling of errors. errors

Staff+ self-onboarding questions - Useful questions to get a head start as a newly hired Staff, Principal, or Distinguished engineer engineering, questions 🔥

Principles for coding securely with LLMs - Writing code with LLMs is fundamentally different from other ways of programming. LLMs are often non-deterministic and always unpredictable. They have a capability that no other technology can match: the ability to interface with natural language. What does that mean for security? ai, security 🔥

Hako - An embeddable, lightweight, secure, high-performance JavaScript engine. javascript, embeddable

Stealing credentials via polymorphic Chrome Extension - A few days ago, I came across new research explaining a novel cybersecurity attack via polymorphic Chrome Extension. After watching the demo video, I was curious to understand how exactly it could be implemented and decided to spend some time recreating it. security 🔥

How to be the best programmer, according to Daniel Terhorst-North - Great programmers are not born; they are made - says Daniel Terhorst-North, the author of the viral Twitter thread on the best programmer he knows. engineering, performance 🔥

Datastar - Datastar helps you build reactive web applications with the simplicity of server-side rendering and the power of a full-stack SPA framework. html, framework

gh-signoff - Local CI. Sign off on your own work. github

ts-rest - RPC-like client, contract, and server implementation for a pure REST API typescript, rpc

Mossaik - Create beautiful abstract SVG images for your designs. svgs

Lexe - Package your Node.js application into a single executable file, but only 10MB. nodejs 🔥

Demo Magic - A handy shell script that enables you to write repeatable demos in a bash environment. cli 🔥

@11ty/image-color - Small utility to efficiently fetch the colors from an image. images, colors

MCP Shield - Security scanner for MCP servers mcp, security

Scalar - An offline first API Client built for OpenAPI api 🔥

protobuf-ts-types - Zero-codegen, no-compile TypeScript type inference from protobuf messages protobuf

react-photo-sphere-viewer - Photosphere Viewer for React.JS react

PureAnim - SVG animations! svgs, animations 🔥

ActorCore - Stateful Serverless That Runs Anywhere. The easiest way to build stateful, AI agent, collaborative, or local-first applications. Deploy to Rivet, Cloudflare, Bun, Node.js, and more. ai

The Post-UX Era - The article argues that UX has matured into a baseline expectation — usable, accessible, and consistent design is no longer a competitive edge but a standard. ux

Introducing Kermit: A typeface for kids - Using design to empower children by making reading easier, improving comprehension, and helping dyslexics. fonts 🔥

A flowing WebGL gradient, deconstructed - In this post, I’ll break it down step by step. You need no prior knowledge of WebGL or shaders — we’ll start by building a mental model for writing shaders and then recreate the effect from scratch. webgl, shaders

VS Code Agent Mode Just Changed Everything - In this video, I'll show you how to use agent mode, MCP Servers and PRD documents to build an entire app complete with database. vscode, ai 🔥

weekly news

Published on 2025-04-21, last updated on 2025-05-15 by Adam

Comments or questions? Open a new discussion on github.

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.