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Introduction I've spent way too much time trying to come up with some generic introduction for this story, but then I realized none of you probably want to read that anyway. So instead, I'll just jump straight into the story—which is why you're here in the first place. The day I received the requirements The story begins when I received the requirements for a new feature that allows Teachers to share their presentation to review slides before the Lecture begins, so we would have teachers aids using the web version and seeing a screenshare from the main pc powerpoint, at first I thought maybe we can use HLS or RTMP for this and be okay with the 3 seconds delay that it has, but then I continued reading the ticket, we also needed the user to move to the next and previous slides via the web application, which immediately threw my initial idea out of the window. This is because if the user needs to interact with the application there is no way it will be usable without almost immediate feedback. Since we needed to show this to the client quickly we had 2 weeks to implement this feature, so before I did anything, I stopped and started drafting a simple design doc, which besides the fancy name was really just a document with my raw notes taken from research and comparisons between different solutions. After spending some time doing research and looking into different architectures and engineering blogs from companies like Twitch, Slack and Discord, I narrowed the possibilities down to four common architectures used for this type of use case. Architecture Options P2P Mesh This approach revolved around a user establishing WebRTC connections with every other user in the room. Besides being difficult to manage in terms of connections and sessions, it had one fatal flaw: network and CPU overhead. If we had twenty users in the room, every participant would maintain nineteen separate peer connections while sending nineteen streams, quickly consuming both CPU and bandwidth. MCU (M

Most people think building an AI voice agent means writing a clever prompt. I build these for a living, and I can tell you the prompt is maybe an hour of the work. The other week disappears into two places: wiring up everything the agent touches, and testing it against the twenty ways a real caller will break it. So I built a pipeline that points one AI coding tool at each of those problems. Claude Code generates and wires the agent from a spec. Comet, an AI browser automation tool, runs it through dozens of messy call scenarios before a human ever picks up the phone. This post is how that loop actually works, and where it still needs me. Why the build loop is slow (and it is not the prompt) When you picture building a voice agent, you picture the prompt. That is the easy part. The slow part is everything around it. A production agent for, say, a car garage is not one artifact. It is a conversation flow, a set of custom functions that hit your automation layer, calendar and CRM wiring, a telephony number with A2P registration, and a pile of edge-case handling that only shows up when someone calls in angry with a dog barking in the background. The reason it is slow is not typing. It is the round trips. You build a version, you call it, it fumbles when the caller interrupts or asks something off-script, you fix one thing, you call it again. Each loop is a few minutes of manual dialing and listening. Multiply that by the fifty scenarios a real agent needs to survive and you have burned a week. The pipeline exists to kill those round trips. Half one: Claude Code builds the agent from a spec The first insight is that most of what goes into a voice agent is structured and repetitive, which is exactly what an AI coding tool is good at. I do not hand-write every custom function and every n8n node from scratch for each new client. I write a spec, and I let Claude Code turn that spec into concrete artifacts. The spec is a plain description of the vertical and the business: wh

Hi everyone! this is my first post here on dev. About 4 days ago I realized I'm stuck as a mid-level backend engineer, and honestly, not even a good one. Some background: I have a CS degree and started working as a software engineer in 2022. I spent a year and a half at a financial company, then moved to one in the tourism industry, and now I work at a client-based company doing multiple projects. For a while I've felt like my growth here is blocked, so I started looking for another job. That search made me realize something uncomfortable: I've been relying on AI way too much. So now I'm trying to cut down on AI for my tasks, and I've decided to build a couple of projects that'll actually challenge me and help me learn. I've got two projects in mind: a stock exchange engine and a collaborative music production system. I'll share how it goes, including the parts I get wrong! (English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help polish the wording. The story and the projects are all mine.)

Week 5 of my Google Summer of Code journey with CircuitVerse ( June 22nd to June 28th ) is officially in the books. After dealing with a rough sickness last week, I’m happy to say this week was incredibly positive . 🔄 Reconnecting with the Community Since I had to miss last week's sync because I was under the weather, I had to attend the CircuitVerse GSoC Contributors' Meeting this week. It felt so good to reconnect with everyone ! I shared the progress I'd managed to scrape together over the last couple of weeks, and the mentors were incredibly understanding and kind about my slower pace due to being sick. The CircuitVerse community is genuinely unmatched! Everyone is so encouraging, and having that layer of support makes a world of difference. It was also super motivating to hear what the other contributors have been up to. Seeing how much progress everyone has made gave me a massive burst of inspiration to jump right back into development! 🛠️ importCanonical.ts is Completed! Once the meeting was over, I officially finished implementing the entire import pipeline in importCanonical.ts! 🥳 This file does the heavy lifting of taking our clean, deterministic canonical JSON and reconstructing the circuit right back onto the user's canvas. Here is what's packed inside: 🔀 Full Multi-Circuit Support: The import pipeline seamlessly handles projects containing multiple individual circuits. 📐 Smart Subcircuit Dependency Resolution: Just like the export pipeline, the import engine now uses Kahn's Algorithm to figure out the exact sequence the circuits need to be loaded in so that nested dependencies never break. 🛑 What's Missing? (For Now): The import pipeline doesn't validate the incoming JSON file . I am waiting until the canonical format is finalised. Once that's locked in, I will add JSON schema validation in the file. 🚀 The PR Status On the GitHub side of things, the three foundational Pull Requests I opened earlier are still actively under review . One of my mentors gav

Hey everyone! 👋 I'm a complete beginner and today I'm officially kicking off my #100DaysOfCode challenge with Python. I've dabbled with the idea of learning to code for a while, but this time I want to actually commit - so I'm posting daily updates here to keep myself accountable and track my progress over the next 100 days. My plan: Post a short update here every day - what I learned, what I struggled with, and what's next Eventually move into some small real-world projects once I've got the basics down Why I'm doing this: I want to build real skills, not just "watch tutorials and forget everything." Writing it down publicly (even anonymously) keeps me honest and hopefully connects me with others on the same path. If you're also learning Python or doing a 100 days challenge, I'd love any tips, resources, or just to follow along with each other's progress! Day 1 status: Just setting up my environment and going through the basics — nothing exciting yet, but everyone starts somewhere! 100DaysOfCode #Python #Beginner #LearnToCode

A year ago today, I started at Approov. A hundred days in, I wrote about the transition: leaving management, the refreshing day-to-day feedback loop, the strange experience of relearning a craft I thought I'd lost. I stand by most of it. But a hundred days is enough to notice a change; it takes a year to understand it. So here is what a year taught me that a hundred days couldn't. The rust that mattered At a hundred days I called myself rusty. I was. I reached for patterns that no longer fit and looked up syntax I once knew by heart. I expected that to be the hard part. It wasn't. The rust came off faster than I feared, and somewhere along the way I realised I'd been worried about the wrong thing entirely. The agentic era arrived in earnest this year, and it quietly rewrote the job description. The premium skill is no longer how fast you can produce code from memory. It's whether you can write a precise specification and make a strong architectural decision, then judge honestly whether what comes back is any good. Those are not new skills for me. They are the exact skills that years of reviewing architecture and mentoring engineers had been sharpening the whole time. The craft I sat down to relearn was not the craft that turned out to matter. I spent years assuming management had pulled me away from engineering. It hadn't. It had been quietly preparing me for the version of engineering that was coming. Charity Majors has a name for the shape of this: the engineer/manager pendulum. The idea that a healthy career swings between the two, rather than treating management as a one-way door you walk through once and never come back. I didn't choose when mine swung back. But it swung the right way, and the years spent on the other side weren't lost. They were compounding. A secure transaction is a secure transaction The work itself has been a homecoming of a different kind. I spent years in payments. Now I work in mobile and API security. On paper those are different worlds

June was not about making the most contributions -- it was about becoming a better collaborator. This month I had: ✅ 1 PR merged 🔄 1 PR still open 👀 3 PR reviews completed 🐞 1 issue opened I am making this graph all green... Biggest Learning The biggest milestone wasn't writing code. It was reviewing pull requests. One review led the author to update their PR based on my feedback. That experience taught me that open source isn't just about contributing code; it's also about helping improve someone else's work through discussion and constructive feedback. Working Alongside AI Reviewers I also had an interesting experience interacting with automated reviewers like Vercel Bot and Copilot. Rather than accepting every suggestion, I tested them, evaluated the trade-offs, and explained why I chose a different approach. It was a good reminder that AI can assist reviews, but engineering judgement still matters. Looking Ahead My biggest challenge is still finding a larger project that I can consistently contribute to over the long term. That's my main goal for July, alongside publishing my OSS Contribution Toolkit repo and making my CaaS project usable for others. Small, consistent steps continue to move the journey forward. What was your biggest open source learning in June? Transparency Note: I used AI as an editor—not as the author. For this article, it helped refine the structure and improve the English grammar. The technical content, experiments, opinions, and conclusions are my own and were reviewed by me before publishing.

There's a Yu-Gi-Oh game on PS1 where you can fuse two cards together. The result isn't random. There are rules. But you don't know the rules yet — you just know that two inputs produce a third thing that neither input was, and that the third thing surprises you even when it shouldn't. That's the hook. Not the surprise alone. The realization underneath the surprise that the system has depth. That there's a grammar to what's possible, and you can learn it. I've been building toward that feeling ever since. Jade Cocoon does the same thing with monsters — merge two creatures, watch the result carry both parents in its design. Dragon Quest Monsters runs on fusion too. Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories taught me that combination-as-discovery is its own mechanic, separate from any theme it wears. Everything Is Crab is the roguelike version: you absorb what you fight, you become it, you discover what you're becoming one encounter at a time. No Man's Sky showed me that procedural generation has finally caught up to what those PS1 games were reaching toward — creatures that feel like they emerged from a system rather than a designer's hand. The mechanic isn't genetics. Genetics is just the implementation I keep reaching for. What I'm actually trying to build is a machine that produces controlled emergence — outcomes that surprise you within a system deep enough to eventually master. Pure RNG is a slot machine. You can't get better at it. Pure determinism is a calculator. You can solve it and put it down. The games I keep returning to live between those poles: consistent enough to reward learning, deep enough to keep producing novelty. TurboShells was an attempt at this. Turtles whose bodies expressed their genomes at render time — shell radius, leg length, color emerging from a sequence. The faster ones bred. Over generations you watched the population drift. The system had rules. The outcomes still surprised you. SlimeGarden chose basic shapes deliberately. If the creature is simp

Hey everyone! I bring you my development journey on what I have discovered, accomplishments for this...

I log commutes in a spreadsheet because mobility apps smooth over the ugly legs. Last week I added a column I should have tracked years ago: carry seconds ? time from curb to platform when stairs replace ramps. The hidden leg My one-wheel leg is fine on paper. Three metro exits on my route have no elevator during maintenance. Carrying a 14 kg wheel down 22 stairs does not show up in trip duration. It shows up in whether I arrive annoyed enough to skip coffee. What I logged (one week) Exit Stairs Carry time (s) Mood after (1-5) North gate 22 38 2 Side ramp (control) 0 8 4 East stairs 16 29 3 Battery delta on those days? Within noise. Mood delta? Not noise. A cheap decision rule I turned this into a go/no-go check before leaving: if stairs > 15 AND carry_weight_kg > 12: prefer transit-only or locker elif stairs > 0 AND wet_floor: walk the wheel (no riding in station) else: ride It is blunt. It works better than pretending every leg is rideable. Assumptions up front Wheel weight includes pads and charger pouch (~14 kg for my commuter setup). I am not timing competitive carries ? just whether I can do this daily without hating it. Your threshold differs if every exit has elevators. What I would do differently I would log carry seconds from day one, same tab as distance and battery percent. Range math without carry math is incomplete for anyone who mixes metro and one-wheel. I work around personal EVs and sometimes cross-check specs on the official Kingsong catalog. https://www.kingsong.com/collections/electric-unicycle

Introduction — On What I've Been Writing for Years This is a follow-up to my previous post on Claude and MCP . Just sharing some recent thoughts. Personally, I've always enjoyed keeping records and analyzing my own work. So for years, I've been logging my daily tasks, jotting down thoughts, hesitations, and impressions in notes. I've drawn on these records for reviews, analysis, and decisions on various projects. The tools have shifted over time — Evernote, Notion, Logseq, Taskuma, and so on — but the habit itself, of writing notes into some app or tool, has stayed with me for years. What Happened with MCP I recently wrote about connecting Notion and Google Docs through MCP, and the results have surprised even me. I won't repeat the details here since they're in that post, but ever since I introduced MCP, the flow of information has accelerated dramatically. In particular, I'd been accumulating reviews, task management notes, and brainstorms in Notion for years, and letting Claude read all of this has shifted the meaning of what I'd previously written. When I first started recording in Notion, it never occurred to me that it might be useful to AI. Of course — I had no way to imagine a time when AI would become this close to everyday life, used in this way. I was just writing for plain, analog reasons — "so I could look back later," "so I could organize my own thinking." But the moment MCP made it all readable, the feeling shifted. It's as if my past self comes forward to help my current self. Claude answers my current questions while drawing on the reasoning behind old project decisions, or on impressions I'd noted at the time. I've had moments like that more than once now. Thinking about it: the human brain's memory has limits — even the person who wrote something forgets it quickly. That's why I kept taking notes, leaving behind my thoughts and conclusions at each point in time as a record. And now, in the flow of conversation, AI reads from those records, distill

Environment And Situation Control room of an apartment Number of installed product : 3 (PC-based NVR, dual-LAN supported) Remote support : X (I actually went to the site and diagnosed) Reported Issue In viewer, when user changes play speed while playing back the recorded data, it randomly plays the data in hyper speed(almost 30x~60x) For example: 4x play means 4 seconds in video per a second. But in the site, it played 30~60 seconds per a seconds, showing the video stutturing. Diagnosis Checked the overall environment. System(CPU / RAM usage), network environment(bandwidth), resoulution, stream configurations, etc. -> Nothing suspicious. Some of the installed cameras had unusual fps and gop values Normally, fps and gop values are set to be equal(for exmaple, if fps is 30 then gop is also 30 so that iframe can appear every second) But the cameras' set up values were fps 15, gop 60(iframe per 4 seconds) Assumption Somehow the viewer keeps failing to find iframe to play. And it's maybe because iframe appears with a long gap. Quick note: iframe is kind of a key-frame. Since the viewer starts decoding from an iframe, it's necessary when it comes to playback. What I Tried Set all the cameras' gop value to 15(same as fps) Result Ran a test with data before changing the gop values and after. During interval before changing the gop, the issue occurred almost every time I tried. But after chaning the gop, the issue no longer occurred. Concolusion The issue was triggered by large GOP value (GOP 60 with FPS 15). With only one iframe every four seconds, the viewer sometimes failed to find an appropriate iframe after changing the playback speed, causing abnormal playback behavior. According to the viewer developer, this is likely related to the viewer's iframe searching logic, which is still under investigation. Keep This In Mind Check camera settings(especially gop and fps) first when it comes to playback issue. Always check before/after data to confirm assumption.

Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week Cyberpunk cat RPGs and robot personalities Jess Lee Jess Lee Jess Lee Follow for The DEV Team Jun 23 Top 7 Featured DEV Posts of the Week # discuss # top7 34 reactions 7 comments 2 min read

I'm Dr. Mohammad Reza Beheshti, Founder of CyberSiARA. I hold a PhD in Electronic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence and have over 15 years of experience in cybersecurity research and innovation. My passion has always been solving complex security challenges through technology. This journey led me to found CyberSiARA, where we're developing AI-powered bot protection and human verification solutions to help organizations defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. I enjoy combining academic research with practical engineering to create technologies that are both innovative and effective in the real world. Through this blog, I share insights from my research, product development, and experiences building a cybersecurity company, with the aim of helping developers and security professionals stay ahead of emerging threats. I'm always keen to learn, collaborate, and contribute to the global developer and cybersecurity communities.

Spent the week breathing new life into DevNotion—59 commits and over 10,000 lines of code later,...

Every startup idea looks perfect... until you start building. The first version of PixoraCloud looked amazing on paper. Then reality hit. We discovered: Some features weren't necessary Some APIs were too complicated Some ideas solved our problem, not the user's problem So we changed them. A lot. That's where we are today. Not chasing perfection. Chasing simplicity. Building in public means admitting your first idea isn't always your best one. What's one thing you've completely changed after starting a project?

I joined DEV at the start of January, but it's only really been in the past week or so that things clicked into place — and looking back, it's been a lot more eventful than I expected for "week one." What I Set Out to Do My original plan was simple: write a structured series covering iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, one topic at a time, with anime examples thrown in to keep things fun. Strings, arrays, loops, functions — the building blocks. What I didn't plan for was everything else that happened alongside it. The June Solstice Game Jam Happened I saw the announcement for DEV's June Solstice Game Jam and, on a whim, decided to build something for it. A few hours later I had a fully working SwiftUI trivia game — Pride Trivia & Alan Turing Edition — with ten questions covering LGBTQIA+ history and Alan Turing's legacy, a rainbow progress bar, and a results screen with score-based messages. I'd never built and shipped something end-to-end like that before, let alone submitted it to a community challenge. Going from "let's see if this works in the simulator" to "this is live on GitHub with a demo video and a published writeup" in one sitting was honestly a bit of a blur. Then I Detoured Into Google AI Studio A few days later, I worked through the DEV Education Track for Google AI Studio and built MascotCraft Studio — an app that generates coding mascots using Gemini and Imagen. One prompt later, I had a fully deployed web app and a mascot named Octo-Byte , a cheerful deep-sea developer with eight arms and a talent for multitasking. That post sparked one of my favorite discussions so far — a few comments turned into a genuinely interesting conversation about how AI is shifting the bottleneck from "can I build this" to "what should I build, and how do I know if it's good." Not at all what I expected from a post about a cartoon octopus. The Badges Somewhere in all of this, I picked up: A 1 Week Community Wellness Streak badge, just from commenting on other people's

🗓️ This Week While organizing ideas for my first iOS app , I remembered an old web app idea called ToneDrill , which I had casually built before to help practice note names on a guitar fretboard🎸. I decided to try turning it into an iOS app 🛠️. I clarified the purpose of ToneDrill , its minimum requirements , and its core features , then organized them in Notion 📝. I was curious to see how well Codex could implement an iOS app from those minimum requirements , so I gave it a try right away💡. I reviewed the SwiftUI code generated by Codex and worked through the app logic to understand how it was implemented 🔍. For now, I was able to create a working app, which felt like a meaningful step forward 🚶. I created the top page UI design for my portfolio website in Figma 🎨. I focused on keeping the structure simple and implementation-friendly, and designed the UI with reusable components for each major part. Based on what I learned from my previous failed attempt, I tried again to see how well Codex could implement a prototype from the Figma UI design (You can read about my previous attempt that didn’t go so well here😅.) Worked on the AI Threat Modelling room from the AI Security Learning Path on TryHackMe this week🤖. 📱 iOS (SwiftUI) Revisited an old web app idea called ToneDrill, which I had previously built casually as a guitar note-training app, and considered turning it into an iOS app. Organized the app idea in Notion, including its purpose, target use case, minimum requirements, and core features. Decided to aim for an MVP-level version first, instead of trying to build a fully featured app from the beginning. Wrote down simple requirements and tested how accurately Codex could implement the initial version of the app. Reviewed the iOS app implementation generated by Codex and examined the code in detail to understand how the logic worked. 🌐 Web Development Posted my weekly dev log on Dev.to📝 Completed the top page UI design for my portfolio website in Figma. Tried us

问题降临：毫无征兆 那天和往常一样，打开YouTube准备看一个英文视频。习惯性地点开字幕按钮—— 没反应。 不是字幕延迟，不是字幕错位，而是整个字幕功能像是从这个世界上蒸发了一样。原始语言的字幕不可用，点进字幕设置一看，连翻译选项都是灰的。没有原始字幕，自然也就没有任何语言的翻译字幕。 一整个功能链，从根部断裂。 第一反应：一定是扩展插件搞的鬼 作为一个浏览器里装了不少扩展和油猴脚本的用户，我的第一直觉非常明确—— 肯定是哪个插件冲突了。 这个判断合情合理。浏览器扩展劫持页面元素、油猴脚本注入自定义代码，这些操作干扰YouTube的正常功能，实在是太常见了。之前遇到过播放器界面异常、按钮消失之类的问题，十次有八次都是扩展惹的祸。 于是我开始了标准排障流程： 禁用所有油猴脚本 → 刷新 → 字幕依然不可用 禁用所有浏览器扩展 → 刷新 → 字幕依然不可用 开无痕模式 （彻底排除扩展和缓存影响）→ 字幕依然不可用 三轮操作下来，扩展插件的嫌疑被彻底洗清。 但这还不是最让人困惑的部分。 真正的诡异之处：薛定谔的字幕 在反复测试的过程中，我发现了一个极其反直觉的现象： 字幕的可用性是随机的。 开着所有扩展 → 有时候字幕 有 ，有时候 没有 关掉所有扩展 → 有时候字幕 有 ，有时候 没有 这完全打破了因果逻辑。如果问题出在扩展上，那么"关掉扩展"就应该稳定地解决问题。但现实是，开和关都呈现随机状态，说明扩展根本不是变量—— 真正的变量藏在别的地方。 这种"薛定谔的字幕"状态让我一度非常迷茫。你没办法用常规的控制变量法去定位一个表现为随机的问题，除非你能找到那个真正在变化的隐藏变量。 灵光一闪：换个节点试试？ 在排除了浏览器层面的所有可能之后，我突然想到了一个平时根本不会和"字幕"联系在一起的东西—— 网络节点。 抱着试一试的心态，我切换了代理节点，选了一个不同地区的服务器。 刷新页面。 字幕回来了。 原始字幕、自动翻译、多语言选项——一切恢复正常，仿佛之前的问题从未发生过。 我又切回原来的节点——字幕消失了。再切到新节点——字幕回来了。反复测试了好几次，结果完全一致。 真相大白：问题出在节点上。 恍然大悟：视频和字幕，原来是两套系统 这次经历让我意识到一个之前从未注意到的事实： YouTube的视频流和字幕数据，很可能是由不同的服务器（或CDN节点）分别提供的。 这意味着： 视频能正常播放 ≠ 字幕能正常加载 你的网络可以顺畅地连接到视频服务器，但与此同时，字幕服务器可能对你当前的IP/地区/节点不可达或响应异常 不同的代理节点连接到的Google后端服务器不同，某些节点恰好无法正常获取字幕数据 这也完美解释了之前"随机可用"的现象。我在测试扩展的过程中，代理工具可能在后台自动切换了节点（很多代理工具有负载均衡或自动切换功能），导致有时碰巧连上了能提供字幕的服务器，有时则没有。我一直以为变量是"扩展的开关"，实际上真正在暗中变化的是"网络节点"。 技术推测 虽然Google没有公开YouTube的完整架构细节，但根据这次经历可以合理推测： YouTube使用分布式CDN架构 ，视频内容、字幕数据、评论、推荐信息等可能分布在不同的微服务和服务器集群上 字幕API的端点 可能与视频流的端点不同，它们的可用性、地理限制、负载状况都是独立的 某些地区的某些IP段可能因为各种原因（服务器维护、区域限制、DNS解析差异、临时故障）无法正常访问字幕服务 这种问题具有 高度的偶发性和地域性 ，这也是为什么它如此小众，在网上几乎搜不到相关讨论 写在最后 这大概是我遇到过的最小众、最反直觉的技术问题之一。 它小众到什么程度呢？你去搜索"YouTube字幕不可用"，得到的答案几乎都是：清除缓存、禁用扩展、检查字幕是否被上传者关闭、换个浏览器试试。 没有人会告诉你"换个代理节点"。 因为在绝大多数人的认知里，"视频都能看"就等于"网络没问题"，不会有人把字幕缺失和网络节点联系在一起。 但事实就是这么奇怪： 视频能播放，不代表字幕能加载，因为它们根本就不在同一条路上。 这次经历也给了我一个教训：当排障陷入死胡同的时候，不要只盯着最明显的嫌疑犯。真正的问题，有时候藏在你认为"完全不可能"的地方。 下次再遇到YouTube的某个功能莫名其妙消失，而视频本身却能正常播放的时候——先换个节点试试。说不定，答案就在那里。