Welcome to this week's Top 7, where the DEV editorial team handpicks their favorite posts from the previous week (Saturday-Friday).
Congrats to all the authors that made it onto the list 👏
@ivorjetski takes us behind the scenes of building a retro CRT TV entirely in CSS, sharing seven clever secrets from the creative process: squircle corners, rotating knobs, and a responsive layout. The YouTube intro for the project is also made completely in CSS, and yes, the music was composed just for it too.
@thormeier shares a wonderfully absurd project: turning Timberborn, a beaver city-building game, into a read/write data storage system by exploiting its HTTP lever automation feature. By encoding text as binary and flipping over 1,000 in-game levers via HTTP requests, he built something that technically qualifies as cloud storage since Steam syncs the save files.
@erturul_demir_695474ad8d walks us through building an AI translator for 4,000-year-old Assyrian tablets, working with only 1,500 training pairs in a language that modern digital tools cannot recognize. The post explains the entire process, including using Gemini for scanning books, ByT5 for translation, and fine-tuned Qwen with LoRA. This is a great example of how machine learning can be used to study ancient history.
@sylwia-lask reminds us that before reaching for a new npm package, it's worth asking whether the browser has already solved the problem (spoiler: it often has). The post rounds up nine underused native browser features, from requestIdleCallback and container queries to the <dialog> element and the Web Speech API, each paired with concise code examples.
@szymongib explores how to build a performant, I/O-heavy networking application in Rust without using async/await, diving deep into Linux's epoll API along the way. The post walks through a full working echo server in both C and Rust, weighing the real tradeoffs between control and convenience.
@supriya-kotturu makes a compelling case that as vibe coding lowers the barrier to shipping software, product thinking (knowing what to build and why) is becoming the skill that truly differentiates engineers. Drawing from firsthand experience building a Go quiz app, the post argues that the real bottleneck is no longer implementation, but the clarity of thought required before a single prompt is written.
@adiatiayu shares an update on their automated open source portfolio project, which has grown from a simple contribution tracker into a full-featured tool that surfaces "invisible" work like co-authored PRs, contribution charts, and a personalized "Collaboration Persona." The post also covers the decision to split the project into a community template and a personal sandbox, making it easier for anyone to showcase their open-source journey.
And that's a wrap for this week's Top 7 roundup! 🎬 We hope you enjoyed this eclectic mix of insights, stories, and tips from our talented authors. Keep coding, keep learning, and stay tuned to DEV for more captivating content and make sure you’re opted in to our Weekly Newsletter 📩 for all the best articles, discussions, and updates.
Top comments (5)
Wow, thank you so much, it means a lot! And honestly, my favorite part was one of the comments saying their bundle size dropped by 20kb just from reading the article 😄
Huge congratulations to everyone else featured as well! I haven’t had the chance to read everything yet, but I’m already looking forward to catching up 🔥
Thanks for publishing on DEV @ivorjetski, @thormeier, @erturul_demir_695474ad8d, @sylwia-lask, @szymongib, @supriya-kotturu, @adiatiayu!
Thank you so much, @jess and DEV team! ✨
Congrats to other writers! 🎉
Congrats everyone!
Amazing articles everyone. Really loved the diversity in these articles going from CodePen to Open Source.