Stay ahead in web development: latest news, tools, and insights #105

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weeklyfoo #105 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you'll find 36 valuable links in 5 categories! Enjoy!

🚀 Read it!

Increasing your practice surface area: The difference between being good and being great isn’t talent or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when you're just living life. by Channing Allen / engineering, career / 9 min read

📰 Good to know

Small Data: Small data appears to be a very exciting movement that is moving the overton window away from Big Data onto much simpler and cheaper solutions. by topicpartition.io / data / 5 min read
A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive: Query planning is hard. Sometimes. by Ethan Seal / sql / 8 min read
React ViewTransition: Smooth Animations Made Simple by Aurora Scharff / react / 9 min read
To AI or not to AI: A two-week experiment building an app with full AI assistance, exploring both the promise and frustrations of LLM-based development workflows. by antropia.studio / ai / 8 min read
90%: Three months ago I said that AI changes everything. by Armin Ronacher / ai / 9 min read
The AI coding trap: If you ever watch someone coding, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard. by Chris Loy / ai, engineering / 10 min read
Migrating to TanStack Start: A while ago, I decided to move away from full-stack React frameworks and use a client-server setup. That is, separate the backend and the frontend, each being a standalone app. by Catalin Pit / tanstack, migration / 11 min read
CSS Environment Variables Module Level 1: This specification defines the concept of environment variables and the env() function, which work similarly to custom properties and the var() function, but are defined globally for a document. by W3C / css, specification / 19 min read
Atuin Desktop: Runbooks that Run — Now Open Source by Ellie Huxtable / atuin, oss / 5 min read
A year of improving Node.js compatibility in Cloudflare Workers: We've been busy. by James M Snell / cloudflare, workers, nodejs / 26 min read
Mastering NPX: A Cheatsheet for npm and Node.js Power Users by nodejs-security.com / npx, cheatsheet, npm, nodejs / 5 min read
Organize your Slack channels by How Often, not What: A few weeks ago, I changed my Slack channel sections. by Mark Nguyen / productivity, slack / 5 min read
Effective context engineering for AI agents: Context is a critical but finite resource for AI agents. In this post, we explore strategies for effectively curating and managing the context that powers them. by Anthropic / context, ai, agents / 18 min read
Hiring only senior engineers is the worst policy in the startup industry: In the last 3 months, I've interviewed 134 engineers - students, mid-level, seniors and even CTOs. by Andrew Churchill / hiring, engineering / 9 min read
The Software Essays that Shaped Me: I started reading software blogs before I got my first programming job 20 years ago. by Michael Lynch / engineering / 17 min read
Give your AI eyes: Introducing Chrome DevTools MCP by Addy Osmani / devtools, ai, chrome, mcp / 17 min read
How much do you really know about media queries?: Earlier this year, I realized that I knew very little about possibly most of the media queries. by Daniel Schwarz / css, media-queries / 17 min read
A complete guide to HTTP caching: Caching is the invisible backbone of the web. by Jono Alderson / performance, http, caching / 49 min read
React 19.2: React 19.2 is now available on npm! by The React Team / react / 12 min read
Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world: By many measures it’s safe to say that TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world. by Justin Gage / database / 18 min read
Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think: Our work culture changed mainly for the better after COVID-19, but there were also some negative changes - like an increase of 13.5% in the amount of meetings per employee. by Anton Zaides / engineering, culture, meetings / 10 min read
Asked to do something illegal at work? Here’s what these software engineers did: What would you do if you learned your company is up to something illegal like stealing customer funds, or you’re asked to make code changes that will enable something illegal to happen, like misleading investors, or defrauding customers? by Gergely Orosz / engineering, culture / 15 min read

🧰 Tools

Zustand Sync: A simple, barebones multiplayer middleware for zustand by Ryan Tan / zustand
Snappy: Fastest Snappy compression library in Node.js by Brooklyn / compression
ESLint - React - You Might Not Need An Effect: Catch unnecessary React useEffect hooks to make your code simpler, faster, and safer. by Nick van Dyke / react, eslint
pompelmi: free, open-source file scanner by pompelmi / malware, scanner, nodejs
ffetch: TypeScript-first fetch wrapper with configurable timeouts, retries, and circuit-breaker baked in. by fetch-kit / fetch, wrapper, typescript
Handy: A free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline. by CJ Pais / speech-to-text, offline, extensible
HTML3D: HTML3D is a lightweight JavaScript library for creating interactive 3D scenes using CSS 3D transforms. by Tim Samshuijzen / html, 3d
eslint-plugin-depend: An ESLint plugin for suggesting optimisations in choice of dependency, native equivalents, etc. by es-tooling / eslint, optimisation
oq: Terminal OpenAPI Spec viewer by Alex Pliutau / openapi, viewer, terminal
Resterm: Terminal REST client for .http/.rest files with HTTP, GraphQL, and gRPC support. by david0 / http, terminal
Elephantshark: Postgres network traffic monitor by neondatabase labs / postgres, network, traffic, monitor