BetterDev.Link collects links around the web that aims to help you learn something new. The topics aren't tight to any specific programming languages, technologies or frameworks but attempt to include resources that might help you learn a thing or two from them.
BetterDev Link
Every Monday
Hi everyone,
I’m slow and late this week but better than nothing. I’m keep doing this. I hope I didn’t disappointed anyone with such a late and short issue
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a pushback against the dismissive claim that “code was never the hard part”. Programming is a genuinely difficult, skilled discipline, and the author argues we should embrace both technical excellence and customer empathy while adapting to AI, rather than retreating into denial or extreme positions.
a deep performance investigation into why Envoy’s switch from nghttp2 to oghttp2 caused a ~20% CPU regression on HTTP/2 proxied traffic. The culprit wasn’t the Huffman decoder but string handling in header block processing, with std::string::push_back alone eating 13-20% of CPU. Envoy ended up reverting the default in 1.37.
the humble <img> is a replaced element, meaning its container and its content have separate dimensions - so with object-fit, object-position, and border-radius the image content can actually overflow its own box. The author turns this quirk into neat tricks like animated image reveals and loader effects with zero extra markup.
a fun deep dive into embedding photographs inside QR codes using Floyd-Steinberg dithering and error diffusion, producing codes that look like images while remaining fully scannable.
you don’t need a PhD to understand how LLMs work under the hood. This post shows that high-school vectors and matrices are enough: embeddings, high-dimensional spaces, dot products for similarity, and matrix multiplication as projection between spaces.
with AI removing the friction of writing software, taste - the ability to judge what deserves to exist - becomes the only genuinely scarce skill left. The difficulty of building used to force us to develop discernment through failure; frictionless generation has separated productivity from judgment, leaving us swimming in an ocean of “plausible” mediocrity.
not a programming article, but a great essay on building your own value system instead of chasing external rewards. Chasing arbitrary incentives stunts genuine growth; the author makes the case for doing what’s right regardless, through the story of abolitionist Charles Sumner, who pursued justice despite severe social and physical costs.
lessons from a decade of building EC2’s control plane - the system that reconciles desired infrastructure state with actual state. Fun fact: at the heart of it all was a plain MySQL database (“customer X now has VM Y” was literally a row in a table), and the article walks through the years of failover pain, read replicas, and sharding it took to scale it. Those pains shaped DSQL’s architecture: per-connection micro-VMs, automatic read replicas with strong consistency, and transparent partitioning. DSQL’s control plane even runs on DSQL itself.
a whole site dedicated to Postgres locks, written by a customer reliability engineer as “the documentation I wish existed when I was learning about locks”. It walks from animated concept explainers through runnable table-lock demos, troubleshooting guides, and monitoring tool reviews, and includes an interactive blocking graph showing which SQL operations lock each other out.
autovacuum is getting smarter in Postgres 19: instead of processing tables in catalog order, it scores and prioritizes them by transaction ID age, dead tuples, recent inserts, and analyze needs - with six new tuning knobs to weight those factors. Autovacuum workers can also finally parallelize index vacuuming across multiple workers.
for Go readers: a high-performance packet generator - think “the iPerf of packet generators” - that hits line rate (138M packets per second on 100G NICs) from a single static Go binary using AF_XDP, no DPDK required. Supports UDP, TCP SYN, IMIX, raw Ethernet, and PCAP replay. Apache-2.0 licensed. Don’t miss the amazing companion post Wireblast: a 100Gbs packet generator in Go with AF_XDP where the author walks through how it’s built.
Goa privacy-focused, accountless web app that encrypts and shares files with passkeys and AES-256, entirely on-device - it even works offline. The code is a great read if you want to see WebAuthn’s PRF extension and HPKE cryptography used in a real product, and how to design a trustworthy offline-first app. GPLv3 licensed.
NodeJSfor Python readers: a library that queries Apple’s FindMy network from any platform - no Mac required. It fetches and decrypts location reports for AirTags and iDevices, handles Apple account auth with 2FA, and scans for nearby devices, with both sync and async APIs. A fascinating read if you want to understand how Apple’s crowd-sourced location network actually works under the hood. MIT licensed.
Pythona zero-dependency spreadsheet engine in pure TypeScript that reads and writes XLSX, CSV, ODS, JSON, NDJSON, and XML, with streaming support and round-trip preservation. A great codebase to study how binary/document format parsing and streaming architectures work without leaning on any external libraries. MIT licensed.
TypeScripta configurable, fast, and thorough secrets scanner. It is maintained by the folks who made Gitleaks, including the original author.
a native macOS app for managing virtual iPhones - browse, create, and boot iOS research VMs from a single window. Built on Apple’s Virtualization.framework for Apple Silicon.
a pretty and modern terminal file manager written in Go, with customizable themes, plugins, and hotkeys. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
a storage-agnostic, Dropbox-like file manager for your existing storage: FTP, SFTP, S3, SMB, WebDAV, IPFS, and about 20 other protocols. Plugin-driven, so backends, auth, and file viewers are all swappable. Written in Go, AGPL-3.0 licensed.
a free, open-source screenshot and screen recording app for macOS - a native alternative to paid tools like CleanShot X. Area/window/fullscreen capture, video and GIF recording with webcam picture-in-picture, annotations, OCR, and screenshot history, with no paywall. Built with Swift 6 and SwiftUI.
a free macOS menu bar app that tells you what your USB-C cable can actually do - speed, power capability, and display support - based on what your Mac really detects, not what the packaging claims. Great for figuring out why a cable charges slowly or won’t drive your monitor. For Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14+, with a CLI for scripting.
a GitHub-powered Android app store. It discovers public repositories with installable APK releases and lets you browse, install, and update them through a Play Store-style Material 3 interface.
a minimalistic web app for sharing end-to-end encrypted notes and files. AES-256-GCM encryption happens client-side so the server knows nothing, with password protection, expiration timers, and self-destruct after reading. Built with SolidJS and Hono, comes with a CLI, Apache-2.0 licensed.
an LLM API management and redistribution system that unifies 20+ providers (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, …) behind a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Comes with token management, load balancing across channels, quotas, and multi-user support. Written in Go with a React frontend, MIT licensed, and deployable with a single Docker command.
a self-hosted tunneling solution to securely expose local services to the internet without relying on third-party servers - think ngrok, but on your own infrastructure. Unlimited tunnels and bandwidth, custom domains with TLS, and BSD 3-Clause licensed.
a fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted cloud platform you can self-host. It includes Ente Photos (a Google Photos alternative with face detection and semantic search), Ente Auth (a 2FA authenticator), and Ente Locker (for documents and credentials), across iOS, Android, web, and desktop.
BetterDev Link
Every Monday