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Someone asked us a sharp question on X this week. Tokenized stocks will drop dividends straight on-chain, so do we see any downsides? It's a fair question, and the honest answer is yes, one big one. The downside isn't the dividend itself. Instant, programmatic, no broker statement to wait for: that part is genuinely good. The downside is that you can't see it. On-chain dividends for tokenized equities are silent. They arrive without a transaction, without a notification, without anything landing in your wallet history. And a payment you never see is a payment you never declare. That's not a tracking annoyance. It's a tax problem, and it gets expensive. The dividend that never sent a transaction Backed Finance's xStocks (the Xs-prefixed mints like AAPLx, TSLAx, NVDAx) and Ondo Global Markets equities (the ondo-suffixed mints) both use the SPL Token-2022 ScaledUiAmount extension. It's an elegant piece of engineering. When the underlying stock pays a dividend, the issuer doesn't airdrop tokens to thousands of wallets. It updates a single number, a multiplier, on the mint account itself. The instant that multiplier changes, every wallet holding the token shows a larger balance. Your 10 shares are now worth the equivalent of 10 shares plus the reinvested dividend. No transfer hit your wallet. No transaction was signed. Nothing appeared in your activity feed. The number simply went up. Compare that with a traditional brokerage. When Apple pays a dividend, you get a line on a statement, an email, a figure on a 1099 or an annual tax summary. The paperwork chases you. On-chain, nothing chases you. The dividend is real, it's yours, and the only evidence it happened is a multiplier value buried in an on-chain mint account that almost nobody thinks to read. Why a number going up is a taxable event Here's the part that catches people. Dividend income is ordinary income. It's taxable in the year you receive it, at your marginal rate, in every jurisdiction we serve: Australia, the

AI image tools rarely make me feel like I'm part of the creative process. They are, afterall, mostly designed so that people with no design experience can type in a few words and get back a usable result. So I was pleasantly surprised by Adobe's latest take on an AI image assistant: it's a bot […]

Every line of your smart contract costs something. Some lines cost more than others. In this part of our gas saving series, we’ll explore how to write smarter Solidity code that keeps your contract lean and efficient. Here are six simple and practical ways to reduce gas costs while writing Solidity smart contracts. 1. Use payable Only When Needed, But Know It Saves Gas In Solidity, a function marked payable can actually use slightly less gas than a non-payable one. Even if you're not sending ETH, the EVM skips some internal checks when the function is marked payable. See this example: function hello() external payable {} // 21,137 gas function hello2() external {} // 21,161 gas That tiny difference may not seem like much, but across thousands of calls, it adds up. Only use payable when your function is actually meant to accept ETH 2. Use unchecked for Safe Arithmetic When You’re Sure Since Solidity 0.8.0, all arithmetic operations automatically check for overflows and underflows. While this makes contracts safer, it also uses extra gas. When you're certain that overflow won't occur, you can use the unchecked keyword to skip these safety checks. uint256 public myNumber = 0; function increment() external { unchecked { myNumber++; } } Gas used: 24,347 (much cheaper than using safe math) Warning: Use unchecked carefully. Only when you're confident there's no risk of overflow. 3. Turn On the Solidity Optimizer The Solidity Optimizer is like a smart helper that cleans up and tightens your compiled bytecode. It does not change how your contract works, but it removes waste and makes it cheaper to run. If you’re using tools like Hardhat or Remix, always enable the Optimizer before deploying to mainnet. 4. Use uint256 Instead of Smaller Integers (Most of the Time) Smaller types like uint8 or uint16 might look more efficient, but they can cost more gas during execution. That’s because the EVM automatically converts them to uint256 behind the scenes. So, if you're not tightly p

The Redefinition of "Frontend Engineer" in 2026 The era of the frontend engineer as a purely visual specialist is over. In 2026, companies like Vercel, Linear, Figma, Shopify, and major FAANG divisions expect their frontend engineers to think in terms of systems, not just components. A modern frontend engineer must understand rendering pipelines, browser internals, network optimization, and component architecture at the same depth that a backend engineer understands database indexing or API design. This shift is reflected directly in how companies interview frontend candidates. If you walk into a 2026 frontend interview expecting to answer "what's the difference between let and const ," you will be humbled. This guide covers everything you need to know to pass a senior-level frontend interview at a top tech company. Core Web Vitals: The Mandatory Topic You Can't Skip Google's Core Web Vitals have become a standard lens through which senior frontend engineers are evaluated. Interviewers now routinely ask candidates to diagnose performance bottlenecks using CWV metrics. The three primary metrics are: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Measures perceived load speed. Target under 2.5 seconds. Optimized via image preloading, server-side rendering, and CDN caching. INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Replaced FID in 2024. Measures responsiveness. Optimized by breaking up long tasks, using web workers, and deferring non-critical JavaScript. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Measures visual stability. Prevents jarring layout shifts by pre-defining dimensions for images, iframes, and dynamic content. Be prepared to walk through a real-world scenario: "Given an LCP score of 4.2s, what is your systematic debugging and optimization approach?" This is now a standard senior frontend interview question. React 19 and the Concurrent Rendering Model React 19 introduced a fully concurrent rendering model that fundamentally changes how components behave. Key concepts interviewers probe in 2026

I wanted a soft gate on my resume download. Not a paywall. Just an email field — enough friction to filter bots, enough signal to know who's interested. What started as a straightforward feature turned into a three-part lesson: stateless token signing, S3 public access, and email delivery mechanics. Here's the full story. The Feature The flow I wanted: Visitor clicks "Download Resume" on the About page or Hero A modal asks for their email Backend validates the email (format + disposable domain check) A signed, time-limited link is emailed to them They click the link, the PDF opens No database tokens. No cron jobs. No permanent S3 URLs floating around. Part 1 — The Model and the Gate The Resume Model Resume follows the singleton pattern I already use for page headers — force pk=1 on every save, restrict add/delete in admin. One row, forever. class Resume ( models . Model ): pdf = models . FileField ( upload_to = " resume/ " , storage = private_resume_storage ) last_updated = models . DateField ( default = date . today ) def save ( self , * args , ** kwargs ): self . pk = 1 super (). save ( * args , ** kwargs ) ResumeDownloadRequest logs every email that requests a link — no tokens, no expiry columns, just a record of who asked and when. class ResumeDownloadRequest ( models . Model ): email = models . EmailField () created_at = models . DateTimeField ( auto_now_add = True ) unsubscribed = models . BooleanField ( default = False ) class Meta : ordering = [ " -created_at " ] The unsubscribed flag is there for a future newsletter broadcast — when a new blog post goes out, skip anyone who opted out. Blocking Disposable Emails Before signing anything, the email is checked against a frozenset of ~70 known throwaway domains: # core/validators.py DISPOSABLE_EMAIL_DOMAINS : frozenset [ str ] = frozenset ({ " mailinator.com " , " guerrillamail.com " , " yopmail.com " , " 10minutemail.com " , " trashmail.com " , # ... ~70 total }) def is_disposable_email ( email : str ) -> bool

The enterprise AI search startup tripled its annual revenue even as tech giants entered the category.

A new law and AV tracker tool gives the clearest accounting yet of how many robotaxis and self-driving trucks are in Texas.

We were burning 400ms in p99 tail latency on a core event-processing path in Veltrix. The upstream teams kept blaming the network, but the numbers didnt lie—64% of the time was spent inside the JVM, specifically in sun.misc.Unsafe.park during GC pauses. Every time we hit 80% heap pressure, the throughput collapsed and we lost 300k events per minute. That was the exact moment I stopped believing in the JVM as the runtime and started looking at the system boundary. The first attempt was aggressively tuned HotSpot with G1GC and pinning the critical threads to their own NUMA nodes. We set -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=20 , -XX:+UseNUMA , and even migrated to Azul Zulu Prime because its handling of large heaps was supposedly better. The p99 dropped to 280ms, but the GC telemetry still showed a sawtooth pattern of 30–40ms spikes every 230ms on a 16GB heap. Profiling with JDK Flight Recorder told us 18% of CPU time was spent in card-table scanning. At that point I knew we were fighting the runtime, not the problem. The event pipeline was small—just JSON parsing, enrichment, and a single RocksDB write—but the JVMs generational collector couldnt stop moving objects. The architecture decision came during a four-day blackout window after a failed Blue-Green deploy. Three of us sat in a war room with a single Grafana dashboard showing 100% CPU steal time on the Kubernetes nodes. We had two choices: squeeze more life out of the JVM by manually balancing the heap or rewrite the critical hot path in Rust and give the compiler full control over memory layout. The Rust option meant losing the JVM ecosystem (no more async-profiler, no more one-liner heap dumps) but gave us stackless futures, zero-cost abstractions, and compile-time memory safety. We chose Rust. We forked the Cargo.toml wed used in a sidecar for metrics and started porting the event collector. The numbers after the rewrite told the story. We recompiled the same two endpoints— POST /events and GET /aggregates —and served them f

When most people think about UK data sources to scrape, they go straight to Companies House. And they should — it's an excellent dataset. But there's a more valuable register that compliance teams, fintech sales teams, and KYC workflows desperately need, and it has zero scrapers on the Apify marketplace: the FCA Financial Services Register. The Financial Conduct Authority maintains a live register of every firm authorised to provide financial services in the UK — ~50,000 firms ranging from Barclays Bank to a one-person IFA. It includes their regulated permissions (what they're actually allowed to do), their principal address, trading names, and enforcement history. It's the data source used to verify "is this firm actually regulated?" — a check every fintech, insurance company, and compliance team runs regularly. The opportunity The FCA register has a free official REST API at register.fca.org.uk/Developer . No paid tier, no scraping needed — just register an account, get a key, and start making authenticated requests. Despite this, there was literally no Apify actor for it. The US equivalent — FINRA BrokerCheck — already has two actors with thousands of users. The UK gap was sitting there, unoccupied. The architecture This is one of the simplest actor architectures I've built — no Playwright, no Cheerio, no browser automation. Pure HTTP requests with fetch . The FCA API has a few key endpoints: GET /V0.1/Search?q={query}&type=firm — search for firms by name or keyword, returns FRNs GET /V0.1/Firm/{FRN} — fetch base details for a specific firm GET /V0.1/Firm/{FRN}/Address — registered address + phone + website GET /V0.1/Firm/{FRN}/Names — trading names and historical names GET /V0.1/Firm/{FRN}/Permissions — the full list of FCA-regulated activities All endpoints require X-Auth-Email and X-Auth-Key headers. The rate limit is ~100 requests per 60 seconds, which works out to about 25 fully-enriched firms per minute at 4 API calls each. async function fcaFetch < T > ( p

The Bezos-backed EV startup has yet to announce final pricing for its vehicle, which is supposed to start shipping by the end of this year.

There are strategies to improve healthcare, but US isn't trying them.

A decade ago, Nintendo made a big splash into the world of mobile gaming with a new Super Mario platformer directed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. But even though the game proved popular, it wasn't the success the company had hoped for. Over the ensuing years Nintendo has slowly retreated from smartphone gaming, with […]

Asana will incorporate StackAI into its growing suite of AI workflow tools.

Meta’s upcoming Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus subscriptions are the latest example of the company seeing what works elsewhere and mimicking it.

Anthropic has closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, marking what could be the AI startup's final private fundraise before a highly anticipated IPO.

Pre-orders are opening up for Slate, the Spirit Airlines of EV trucks

The ESC collection lets you escape the confines of your desk and get out into the sun where good ideas are bound to happen. The post Still a developer. Just outside. Our latest GitHub Shop collection is here. appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

Amazon is turning a corner with its launch providers, but ULA's Vulcan remains grounded.

The most memorable part of 007 First Light is something that's typically pretty boring: the tutorial. In many games, you're forced through a series of tedious lessons in how to play, presented in a way that feels disconnected from the story itself and at a plodding pace. But First Light does something different. Because the […]

Researchers say they’ve found a new way to extract lithium, a crucial metal used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage arrays. This new technique could be more environmentally friendly and cheaper than existing ones. The research was published today in Science, and a startup called Rock Zero is working to…