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I shipped a plugin to the WordPress.org directory. It got zero installs. That is not a complaint, it is the normal outcome. Roughly 19% of all plugins in the directory never pass zero installs , which is more than 10,500 of them. But I wanted to know why , and whether the answer was "your plugin is bad" or something structural. So instead of reading marketing advice, I queried the directory API and counted. Everything below is reproducible. The API is free, needs no key, and every query I used is in the article. The short version Search is a two phase system, and phase one is a hard filter , not a ranking. If a single word of the user's query is missing from your listing, you are excluded from that search entirely. Phase two is where you lose, and it is ranked partly on active installs . That is the cold start trap. Of the plugins that broke out recently, 88% had distribution before they started . The two behaviours that actually correlate with breaking out from nothing are release cadence and resolving support threads , which are two of the five phase-two ranking inputs and the only two a plugin with no installs can move. WordPress.org gives plugin authors no analytics whatsoever . No listing views, no impressions, no click-through. Anyone who tells you confidently what makes people click install is guessing. How search actually works The best-documented account traces to WP Tavern's 2017 coverage of the directory relaunch, quoting Greg Brown, the Automattic data engineer who built it. It runs on Elasticsearch, and it has two phases. Phase one builds the candidate pool. It matches against title, excerpt, description, tags, slug, author name and contributor names. Critically: all search keywords must appear somewhere, or the plugin is excluded from the result set. Not ranked low. Excluded. Phase two sorts that pool by last update date, compatibility with the current core version, active installs, percent of support tickets resolved, and average rating. That split ma

A comprehensive, production-ready checklist for reviewing data validation, ETL testing, and automated reconciliation codebases. Code reviews for data engineering tools need more rigor than standard web apps. A subtle bug in a data validation framework can cause silent pipeline failures, false positive test passes, or accidental execution of unbounded SQL queries on production warehouses. Whether you are building a custom data framework or maintaining automated ETL tests, use this generalized checklist during code reviews to keep your test suites secure, performant, and reliable. 1. Test Case Configuration (YAML / JSON) TC ID Matching: Ensure the tc_id value matches the configuration filename exactly. Schema Validity: Verify that type (e.g., count, data, recon, file) and source/target drivers are valid and supported. Explicit Enablers: Confirm the enabled field is explicitly set (true or false) rather than omitted. Relative File Paths: For file-based validation, ensure paths are relative to defined source/target data directories. Non-Empty Queries: Confirm SQL sources and targets include non-empty query strings or valid template paths. Unique Case IDs: Ensure test case identifiers are unique across the test suite directory. Documented Rationale: If a test case has enabled: false or uses numeric tolerance thresholds (validation_tolerance), ensure a comment explains the business reason. Dependency Order: Verify that basic structural checks (COUNT) run prior to deep comparisons (DATA / RECON). 2. SQL & Query Logic Explicit Projections: No SELECT *. All columns must be explicitly listed to avoid schema drift breaks. Alignment: Source and target queries must return compatible data types and matching column ordering. Environment Isolation: Check that query strings contain zero hardcoded hostnames, schema names, or environment paths. Secret Hygiene: Ensure queries contain no hardcoded credentials or connection strings. Warehouse Pushdown: Confirm filtering and heavy aggrega

I recently had to do a deployment for a client demo. On local everything worked fine. All the tests were passing. All the data was where it was supposed to be. And then I pushed it to production. Suddenly, queries were failing. And I could not figure out why. So I fixed the first query. Re-built it, pushed again. It worked, but another thing broke. Rinse repeat and another thing broke. All the queries that were failing had something in common. An error because a function was receiving nil or an empty enumerable. They were built for when data to be queried existed. But in production, I had no data. I was working with an empty state. I had spent the past week designing for when the data is already there. Designing for when my database is already seeded. Designing for when queries were passing. But prod will get a blank slate. I was a bit angry and a bit embarrassed at myself for overlooking such a situation. It reminded me of old developer wisdom I had heard before. 80% of the time in software development is about discovering and covering the "unhappy" paths. source: https://x.com/sihui_io/status/914908896371777536? While I am not sure about that metric, the point stands. So now I have had to re-orient my process for writing new features. I have to define all possible states that the feature may be in and test all the states. That way I do not have to spend another 6 hours going through production wondering why that query is failing. It is good to assume failure and the unhappy path. Because then you can plan for it.

Time zones look like a tidy grid of whole hours. They aren't. I read the standard UTC offset of all 162 cities, countries and regions on our World Clock straight from the IANA database (via Intl ) — and the real shape is lumpy, with quarter-hour outliers and a near-even split over whether clocks move at all. The quirk, in one line: Kathmandu keeps its clocks 5 hours 45 minutes ahead of UTC — the only :45 offset on the board, and one of 11 places out of 162 that don't sit on a whole hour. Nearly half the rest never move their clocks at all. The clocks that don't sit on the hour Most of the world rounds to a whole hour from UTC. A handful don't: Offset Places UTC+3:30 Tehran (Iran) UTC+4:30 Kabul (Afghanistan) UTC+5:30 India — New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad UTC+5:45 Kathmandu (Nepal) UTC+9:30 Adelaide, Darwin (Australia) Half-hour and quarter-hour offsets are a reminder that a time zone is a political decision, not an astronomical one — which is exactly why date code should read the IANA database rather than dividing longitude by 15. Nearly half never change their clocks Daylight saving feels universal if you live in North America or Europe, but it isn't. Of the 162 places tracked, 87 (54%) shift their clocks and 75 (46%) never do . The whole of East Asia, the Gulf, most of Africa, India and much of South America keep one fixed offset year-round — Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, Nairobi and New Delhi never spring forward. Where the clocks crowd together Offsets aren't evenly populated. Four of them carry nearly half the board: Offset Places Who's there UTC−5 25 US Eastern — New York, Toronto, Miami, Boston UTC+1 21 Central Europe — Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid UTC−6 14 US Central — Chicago, Dallas, Mexico City UTC+2 12 Eastern Europe & Africa — Athens, Cairo, Johannesburg The full set spans 22 hours , from Honolulu at UTC−10 to New Zealand and Fiji at UTC+12. Reproduce it Every number here is printed by one dependency-free Node script that reads each place's

The differences between the iPhone and Android show up when you connect them to your car, as well.

If you've been developing WordPress websites for several years, there's a good chance you've spent a lot of time working with files like: header.php footer.php single.php page.php archive.php functions.php That's certainly where most of my WordPress development experience has been. But WordPress has been changing. With the Block Editor, Site Editor, block themes, patterns, and theme.json , WordPress now offers a very different approach to theme development. So I decided to take a closer look at the question: If you're already comfortable building classic WordPress themes, is it worth moving toward block themes in 2026? This isn't an article written from the perspective of someone who has spent years exclusively building block themes. Most of my own WordPress work has traditionally involved classic themes . Instead, I'm looking at block themes from the perspective of an experienced WordPress developer who is exploring how the platform is evolving—and where the newer approach fits alongside the architecture I've used extensively. Classic Themes vs Block Themes WordPress currently identifies two primary theme types: Classic themes Block themes According to the official WordPress Theme Developer Handbook, classic themes primarily use PHP, JavaScript, and CSS and can make extensive use of WordPress functions, hooks, and filters. Block themes, on the other hand, are built around block markup and HTML-based templates and allow users to edit more areas of the website through the Site Editor. A simplified comparison looks like this: Classic Theme Block Theme PHP templates HTML block templates single.php templates/single.html header.php parts/header.html footer.php parts/footer.html Template hierarchy Block-based templates Custom PHP logic Blocks + APIs + plugins Customizer / theme options Site Editor / Styles theme.json optional theme.json commonly used This doesn't mean classic themes are obsolete. They aren't. WordPress continues to maintain documentation for classic theme

DeepSeek Code is an open-source CLI built specifically for DeepSeek — one of the most cost-effective AI models on the market! It was heavily inspired by tools like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex for most of its feature set. Since it is fully open-source, you are more than welcome to open Pull Requests, report bugs, or submit issue suggestions! Installation You can install it globally via npm or bun: `` Using npm npm install --global @hermenics/deepseek-code Using bun bun add -g @hermenics/deepseek-code `` Check out the repository, star the project, or contribute: 👉 GitHub: https://github.com/Hermenics/deepseek-code Feel free to test it out and leave your feedback below! PRs and Issues are highly appreciated. ai #cli #showdev #typescipt

On 11 August the GoFullPage extension disappeared from the Chrome Web Store and got disabled in Chromium browsers. Eleven million users, one Tuesday. It was not a hack. The developers say it was a copyright dispute over a design element, that it was "definitively not a security issue", and that they are working with Google on getting it back. Chrome shows the same "might be unsafe" string for every kind of Web Store policy breach, so the warning read far worse than the cause. Two things came out of it. A short list of fixes, and a longer thought about where our tools live. Get working again in a minute Re-enable it. Open chrome://extensions . If Chrome disabled the extension rather than deleting it, the toggle is still there. Use Edge. GoFullPage was never removed from the Edge add-ons store. Install the beta. The team published a separate build at ID kehafhfdnkhdgbnpeofmhmbibmpnjaof , and it can sit alongside the original. That is the practical answer. The more interesting one is that most of us never needed the extension. Five ways to capture a full page with no extension at all 1. Chrome DevTools, no code Open DevTools, press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P , type screenshot , choose Capture full size screenshot . This has been in Chrome for years and most people have never found it. It handles scroll-height pages properly and drops a PNG in your downloads. 2. Firefox, even shorter In the Firefox console: :screenshot --fullpage Add --dpr 2 for a retina-density capture, or --clipboard to skip the file. 3. Chrome DevTools Protocol, if you want it scripted The thing the extension was wrapping is one CDP call: await client . send ( ' Page.captureScreenshot ' , { format : ' png ' , captureBeyondViewport : true , }); captureBeyondViewport is the flag that does the work. Everything else in a full-page screenshot tool is UI around it. 4. Playwright import { chromium } from ' playwright ' ; const browser = await chromium . launch (); const page = await browser . newPage ({ viewport

Building software in 2026 feels surreal. With LLMs handling boilerplate, we ship features in hours that used to take weeks. But fast shipping has a nasty side effect: it breeds overconfidence. A few days ago, we ran an automated check against our own live marketing site ( vergate.dev ). We build security and diagnostic tools for a living, so we expected a clean bill of health. We were wrong. Our scanner flagged 8 real issues in production—including missing security headers that left us exposed to basic cross-site attacks. Dogfooding your own tool isn't a marketing gimmick. Sometimes, it's just plain embarrassing. But it taught us a crucial lesson: you can’t fix what you don't automatically measure. What our scan actually found Here is the exact breakdown of what slipped past us into production (and what probably exists in your current deployment right now): 1. Zero Security Headers Enabled Our hosting provider’s default CDN edge rules didn't set baseline headers. We were shipping without: Content-Security-Policy (CSP): Left us open to inline script injection. Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS): Didn't force browsers to enforce HTTPS strictly. X-Content-Type-Options : Allowed MIME-type sniffing on static assets. X-Frame-Options : Rendered our pages vulnerable to clickjacking IFrames. Why this happens: Framework defaults (like Next.js, Nuxt, or Astro) often expect your proxy or CDN edge (Vercel, Cloudflare, Nginx) to handle headers. If you forget to configure the edge, your app runs bare. 2. Sensitive Meta & Server Leakage Our response headers explicitly broadcast our server stack and proxy details. Attackers use automated scanners like Shodan or Censys to query these specific signatures and exploit target-specific CVEs in seconds. 3. Cookie Missing SameSite & Secure Flags A tracking cookie set on a subroute wasn't explicitly flagged as SameSite=Lax or HttpOnly , leaving a window open for CSRF-style cross-domain requests. How we fixed it (in under 10 minutes) Fixing the

I've seen this happen a lot. A developer builds a fast website, gets the Core Web Vitals into a good range, adds proper metadata, creates a sitemap, fixes broken links, and makes everything responsive. Then they wait for Google traffic. And... almost nothing happens. The problem is that technical SEO is only one part of SEO. A technically clean website can still struggle if Google doesn't clearly understand what the site is about, which searches it should appear for, or why its content deserves to rank. Start With Search Intent One of the easiest mistakes is creating a page around a keyword instead of a user's actual problem. For example, imagine someone searches: "how to reduce JavaScript bundle size" They probably don't want a 2,000-word definition of JavaScript bundles. They want practical answers: What is making the bundle large? How do I find the problem? What can I remove? Which tools should I use? What does a good result look like? That's search intent. Before creating a page, ask: "If I were searching this, what would I actually want to accomplish?" Then build the page around that. Don't Ignore What Your Competitors Are Doing When a page isn't ranking, don't immediately add more keywords. Look at the pages already ranking. Not just their word count. Look at: Questions they answer Topics they cover Examples they provide Tools they recommend Content structure Missing information on your own page Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't "write more." It's cover something useful that the current results don't cover well. Developers Have a Huge SEO Advantage Developers can do something many content teams struggle with: show the actual thing. Instead of writing: "Improve your website performance." You can show a Lighthouse result, explain what caused the problem, provide the code change, and show the result afterward. That's much more useful. The same idea works for SEO. If you explain an SEO problem , include the actual query, page, code, Search Console data, expe

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition . Upload a photo of your dog. An AI accuses them of a crime. You're their defense attorney. What I Built Paw & Order is a browser game where your own dog is the defendant. You upload one photo and a few seconds later your dog has been arrested: The People vs. Biscuit Docket #PAW-042 DEFENDANT: Biscuit CHARGE: Grand Theft Sausage COUNSEL: You STATUS: Extremely suspicious Then the trial starts. The prosecutor puts a question to you, you pick a response, and the case branches from there. Three exhibits go into evidence: generated images of your dog, at the scene, with the frosting still on their muzzle. Two witnesses give statements, and at least one of them is usually lying. A trial runs a few minutes. At the end you get one of four verdicts: NOT GUILTY NOT GUILTY, BUT SUSPICIOUS GUILTY, BUT REASONABLE DOUBT GUILTY Plus a scoreline that isn't the same thing as winning: VERDICT NOT GUILTY Biscuit is free to commit additional crimes. Defense Performance: 94/100 You can lose the case and still score 96. You can win it badly. Every case has a hidden truth, generated before the trial begins. Sometimes the dog really did it, sometimes they're innocent, sometimes the evidence just lies. The client never sees any of it, so you're not hunting for a correct answer. You're building the strongest defense the facts allow. Choices decide the outcome. Replay the same case, answer differently, and the verdict and the score change with you. Demo Live: https://paw-order.pages.dev Bring a dog photo, or don't. The home page has a public docket of cases other players entered into the public record, and you can play any of them without uploading anything. Code ArjenPostma / Paw-Order dev.to weekend challenge submission Paw & Order Justice for every good boy. Upload a photo of your dog. AI generates a fictional criminal case around that dog. You defend them in court. Live: https://paw-order.pages.dev DEV Weekend Challenge:

✓ Human-authored analysis; AI used for formatting and proofreading. Kelsey Hightower gave a talk at PlatformCon 2026 that was about the arc of a career, from running commands in SharePoint to writing Go tools that play music on your terminal. The stories has an architecture principle that applies to how security verification should work. Solve the problem once, encode the solution as a reusable artifact, and never solve that problem again. The Jira loop He joined a company where deployments were driven by Jira tickets. Someone opens a ticket with deployment parameters. An engineer would read the ticket, copy the parameters, run the commands, paste the output back into the ticket, close it, and wait for the next one. Every hour, another ticket. Same process, commands and manual steps. The engineer became the loop. He wrote a Puppet manifest that watches the tickets, extracts the parameters, runs the deployment, posts the output, and closes the ticket. The loop ran once as automation and then it was over. No engineer in the loop or ticket waiting for a human. The problem was solved, permanently, by encoding the solution into a reusable artifact. Doing a repetitive manual process faster is not the right thing to do. Eliminate the loop by recognizing the abstraction hiding in the repetition and encoding it into an artifact that makes the manual steps unnecessary. The substrate This is the pattern that runs through every transition he describes. It's missed by most people when they talk about automation. System administrators ran deploy.sh manually. Docker didn't automate typing apt-get install . Docker recognized that "application + dependencies + environment" was a repeatable unit. The container image became the substrate. Deployment stopped being a sequence of commands and became a declaration. The commands didn't get faster. They became unnecessary. Operators placed workloads on servers manually. Kubernetes didn't automate SSH-ing into machines to check available mem

Let's get something out of the way first. Having data is good. Having a database full of reviews, commits, and org activity sitting there quietly, untouched, unread, never once glanced at by a human being with a coffee and an opinion? That's not "having data." That's a very expensive data graveyard. At LiveReview , we build what we call a Blast-Radius Aware AI Code Review for Business-Critical Systems . Which is a fancy way of saying: we review your code, we figure out how bad it would be if a change goes wrong, and we don't shut up about it until someone fixes it. Along the way we accumulate a review data: who reviewed, how much, how fast, how often, which repos are on fire. And for a while, that pile just sat there. Engineering leaders would ask "is adoption increasing?" and get back a vibe, not an answer. So we built Livi , a chat bot that answers real questions about that data with real charts, not paragraphs of hedging. This post technically about how Livi draws those charts. Specifically: why we never let the LLM touch a pixel, how the same chart definition ends up as both a live interactive graph in your browser and a flat PNG in a Slack thread, and why teaching a language model to pick the right chart shape is a surprisingly deep rabbit hole. The core decision: don't ask the LLM to draw, ask it to describe The tempting, wrong idea is: "let's have the LLM generate an image." Please don't. Image-generating models are a different beast entirely, and even if you got one to draw a bar chart, you'd have no way to verify the numbers on it are real. You'd be trusting a model that hallucinates plausible-sounding review counts to also render them faithfully into pixels. That's not a chart, that's chart-shaped fan fiction. The actually good idea, and the one every serious LLM-charting integration eventually converges on, is: the LLM writes Vega-Lite , a JSON grammar for describing charts declaratively. You don't say "draw a blue bar going up." You say: { "mark" : "bar"

We moved a server-side SEO engine into a Chrome extension. Measuring the page was the easy half. Saying what we could not measure was the hard half. We had been running an on-page analysis engine on our own servers for years. You give it a URL, it fetches the page, it reports. Ordinary. Then we moved that engine into the browser, because a server cannot reach localhost , a staging box, an intranet, or anything behind a login. The browser can. Porting the analysis was mechanical work. What took the real time was a category of problem that barely exists on the server: in a live tab, half the things you want to measure are sometimes unavailable, and the honest answer is not a number. This post is about the decisions that came out of that, with the code that implements them. The One Rule: Null Is Not Zero Every derivation in the engine returns number | null , and the two mean different things. 0 means we measured it and it is zero. A page with no layout shift really does score zero. null means we could not measure it. No interaction happened yet, the browser does not support that entry type, or the document came from another origin and the size fields were zeroed out. A zero printed where a null belongs is a made-up number. It is worse than an empty cell, because the reader has no way to tell it apart from a real measurement. So the two never collapse: the derivation keeps them separate and the UI renders them differently. That sounds obvious written down. It is surprisingly easy to violate, and the next section is the most common way. PerformanceObserver Fails Silently, So Ask It First Here is the trap. Calling observe() with an entry type the browser does not support does not throw . It does not warn. It quietly does nothing, and your handler is simply never called. Which means an unsupported metric produces exactly the same result as a measured zero. The one thing the rule above forbids. The fix is to ask before you observe, and to record the refusal: js const SUPPOR

Today I did something I've wanted to do for a while — I took an app running on my own laptop and put it "live" on the internet using AWS. It sounds scary when you read about it online, but once I actually did it, it was just a bunch of small, simple steps, one after another. This post is me writing down everything I did, in plain, easy words, so that if you're a beginner like me, you can follow along without getting confused by fancy tech terms. What is AWS, in simple words? AWS (Amazon Web Services) is basically Amazon renting out computers over the internet. Instead of buying your own physical server and keeping it running 24/7 at home, you "rent" a computer from Amazon. That computer runs your app, and anyone with the internet can visit it. The specific service I used is called EC2 . Think of EC2 as one virtual computer that lives in Amazon's data center, and you get to control it like it's your own. Step 1: Set up IAM first Before touching any servers, I went to IAM (Identity and Access Management). This is AWS's way of managing "who is allowed to do what" in your account. In simple words: instead of using your main AWS login for everything (which is risky), IAM lets you create a separate user with its own permissions. It's like giving someone a spare key instead of your master key. I set this up first so my account stays safer. Step 2: Launch an EC2 instance Next, I went to the EC2 section and launched a new instance (a fancy word for "a virtual computer"). During this step, AWS also lets you create a .pem file — this is basically a secret key file. It's like a digital key to a lock. Only someone with this file can get into the server. I downloaded it and kept it safe, because if you lose it, you can't easily get back in. Step 3: Login to the server using SSH Once the server (EC2 instance) was ready, I needed a way to "log in" to it from my own laptop. For that, I used something called SSH, along with the .pem key file I downloaded earlier. In simple words: SSH

LLMs can be surprisingly useful for company research. But I kept running into a strange split: parts of the reasoning were useful, while the financial facts underneath them were much harder to trust. A model could identify an accounting risk in one paragraph, then mix fiscal periods, accounting scopes, or currencies in the next. Missing values might quietly become zeros. A deterministic calculation could be performed probabilistically. A citation could point to a real filing without actually supporting the claim. Those are different failure modes, and treating all of them as one giant prompting problem did not feel like a reliable architecture. So I started building OpenThesis , an Apache-2.0 desktop system for evidence-first, AI-assisted company research. The project is not a stock picker or a trading bot. The idea is simpler: use ordinary software for work that should be deterministic, and give the LLM a bounded evidence set for the reasoning work where it can actually help. The monolithic prompt is doing too many jobs A common company-research workflow looks roughly like this: company question ↓ LLM ↓ answer That single model call is implicitly responsible for remembering reported values, selecting the right fiscal period, recognizing the accounting scope, finding sources, performing calculations, comparing scenarios, identifying risks, and writing a conclusion. Some of those tasks are probabilistic by nature. Others are not. Qualitative reasoning, connecting evidence, forming scenarios, and challenging an assumption are reasonable uses of a language model. Remembering an exact reported value, deciding whether a value is missing, and calculating a margin or valuation are poor places to accept probabilistic behavior. My design rule became: Deterministic work should stay deterministic. Use LLMs for reasoning, not as the database and calculator underneath the reasoning. Evidence before reasoning OpenThesis starts from official filings rather than from model memory o

Built 2026-08-15 against us.amazon.nova-lite-v1:0 via the Bedrock Converse API. FastAPI on Python 3.13, deployed to an Amazon Lightsail container service ( nano , scale 1) in us-east-1 . Scored against the live deployment, not localhost: 20/20 on the fixture set, median 880 ms per scan. Live: Dog or Not: Lite · Source: github.com/xbill9/dog-or-not-lite · Built for the AWS Weekend Challenge: Build a Creative App . TL;DR Make the model fill in a schema instead of writing a sentence. The Converse API's toolConfig plus toolChoice forces a named function call, so is_dog arrives as a boolean because it was declared as one. Every image comes back in the same shape — including the ambiguous ones, which is exactly where free-text output gets creative and a string-matching parser gets it wrong. The app is a webcam scanner that tells you whether the thing you are holding up is a dog. One HTML page, one POST /api/scan , one model call, no build step, no framework. The whole backend is 285 lines. Three AWS specifics are worth the price of admission: Lightsail container services have no IAM task role. There is nothing to attach a policy to, so the container needs a real access key as an environment variable. The mitigation is scope, not secrecy. A cross-region inference profile is authorized against every region it routes to. With the policy pinned to us-east-1 , a call made to us-east-1 was denied naming us-west-2 . Measured, not inferred. --platform linux/amd64 is not optional. An arm64 image builds, pushes and deploys cleanly, then crash-loops with an exec format error that never mentions architecture. And a mock mode that answers every scan locally is what made the frontend free to build — no credentials, no model access, no bill. 1. The shape: one route, one call The classification rule is the only opinionated part. is_dog is true only for a living domestic dog: a wolf is not a dog , nor is a coyote, fox, plush toy, bronze statue, cartoon, or person in a costume. That is a c

Nearly a decade after its debut, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold finally comes into its own.

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition What I Built A game where...

With automatic mapping, Spot Mode functionality, and smart AI cameras, the TerraMow V1000 is the complete package.