Stay ahead in web development: latest news, tools, and insights #98

#webdev #weeklyfoo #javascript #node

Signup here for the newsletter to get the weekly digest right into your inbox.

weeklyfoo #98 is here: your weekly digest of all webdev news you need to know! This time you'll find 39 valuable links in 4 categories! Enjoy!

🚀 Read it!

AGENT.md: The Universal Agent Configuration File by Geoffrey Huntley / agents, ai / 8 min read

📰 Good to know

How I use Tailscale: I’ve been using Tailscale for around four years to connect my disparate devices, servers and apps together. I wanted to talk a bit about how I use it, some cool features you might not know about, and some stumbling blocks I encountered. by Chris Smith / network, tailscale / 14 min read
an engineer's perspective on hiring: most companies suck at hiring. by Jynn Nelson / hiring, career, engineering / 9 min read
Introducing Open SWE: An Open-Source Asynchronous Coding Agent by LangChain / coding, agent / 9 min read
How I Code with AI on a budget/free: You don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on AI tools to get started. by Wu / ai, budget / 7 min read
What we learned from creating PostCSS: 12 years ago, we created PostCSS, a CSS automation tool with 400M monthly downloads which is used by Google, Wikipedia, Tailwind, and 38% of developers. In this post, we share what we learned during this long journey maintaining such a popular open source project. by Andrey Sitnik, Travis Turner / postcss, experience, engineering / 16 min read
v0.dev -> v0.app: v0.dev is now v0.app, the AI builder for everyone by Zeb Hermann / ai, vercel / 5 min read
What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand?: Startups and scaleups are on a hiring spree for a software engineering role pioneered by Palantir. A deepdive into this role, and why FDEs are so popular in 2025 by Gergely Orosz / engineering / 17 min read
you do not have to use generative ai art in your blogs because there are websites where you can get real, nice images for free: so many free resources! by Jenn Schiffer / free, images / 5 min read
A gentle introduction to anchor positioning: Anchor positioning allows you to place an element on the page based on where another element is. It makes it easier to create responsive menus and tooltips with less code using only CSS. Here’s how it works. by Saron Yitbarek / css / 11 min read
MCP UI: Bringing the Browser into the Agent by Michael Neale / goose, ai, mcps / 7 min read
Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings: A while back, I decided to undertake a project to challenge myself: build a web search engine from scratch. by Wilson Lin / search, ai / 45 min read
MCP Vulnerabilities Every Developer Should Know: This post covers the biggest risks (with real examples) and how to think about MCP securely. by composio.dev / security, ai, mcps / 28 min read
Deploy Buttons: The Deploy Button offers a shortcut for users to create and deploy a new application on Deno Deploy based on existing 100code hosted in a Git repository. by deno.com / deno / 3 min read
5 Useful CSS functions using the new @function rule: Currently, Chrome is the only browser to have shipped this feature, but it has gone through the CSSWG draft process. by Una Kravets / css / 9 min read
If you're remote, ramble: A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal ramblings channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice. by Steph Ango / engineering / 2 min read
Better CSS layouts: Time.com Hero Section: Taking another look at Time.com hero section. Can we do better? by Ahmad Shadeed / css / 20 min read

🧰 Tools

Stan: Minimal, type-safe state management by Rafał Krupiński / react
Engineering Blog Posts from Top Tech Companies: Latest software engineering articles, tutorials, and insights from Google, Meta, OpenAI, and more by engineering.fyi / engineering, tech
Quickshell: Quickshell is a toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick. by quickshell.org / ui, qt
ch.at: Universal Basic Chat by ch.at / llm, ai
Poltergeist: The ghost that keeps your builds fresh - Universal file watcher and build automation for any language. by Peter Steinberger / build, automation
Automerge: Automerge is a library of data structures for building collaborative applications. by automerge.org / local-first
FFlags: You can define the flag logic in JavaScript so the responses are consistent and predictable. by fflags.com / featureflags
POML: POML (Prompt Orchestration Markup Language) is a novel markup language designed to bring structure, maintainability, and versatility to advanced prompt engineering for Large Language Models (LLMs). by Microsoft / llm, ai
TypeGPU: A modular and open-ended toolkit for WebGPU, with advanced type inference and the ability to write shaders in TypeScript by typegpu.com / typescript
Open Lovable: Clone and recreate any website as a modern React app in seconds by Firecrawl by Mendable / ai
Bluefish: The missing diagramming framework by bluefishjs.org / diagrams
minifeed: Minifeed is a curated blog reader and search engine. by Rakhim Davletkaliyev / blog, search
Pricing Pages: Explore a curated collection of the best pricing page examples by pricingpages.design / pricing, galleries
sshrc: Bring your .bashrc, .vimrc, etc. with you when you ssh by Chris Down / ssh, shell
Deterministic mesh gradients as a service.: Useful for avatars for example. by Taylor Otwell / colors, gradients
CSS-Questions: Test your CSS knowledge with 100+ questions on CSS from basic selectors to advanced topics like pseudo-classes, cascade layers, and container queries. by Olasunkanmi Fafowora / css, questions, career
OGfolio: Curated Library of Open Graph Images by ogfolio.com / og, images
Omnara: Talk to Your AI Agents from Anywhere! by omnara.com / ai, chat, agent
Panda: Universal, Type-Safe, CSS-in-JS Framework for Design Systems by panda-css.com / css

📚 Tutorials

Writing Your Own Simple Tab-Completions for Bash and Zsh: If you've built a CLI tool, you might want to add tab-completion to it. by Li Haoyi / cli, bash / 13 min read
Safe JSON in script tags: How not to break a site by Jon Surrell / json, security / 10 min read
Learn MCP: Build a Model Context Protocol server with Cloudflare Workers. by Cloudflare Workers / mcps, cloudflare / 22 min read