标签：#web

The obsession with centralizing heavy compute on backend servers is a massive bottleneck for both cost and latency. In 2026, as more applications move to the edge, developers are realizing that the user's browser is an incredibly powerful, untapped compute engine. Recently, I challenged myself to build a free live chess game analyzer for my developer utility suite, CipherKit. The traditional architecture for this requires passing FEN strings to a dedicated backend cluster running the Stockfish engine, which introduces network latency and scales operational costs linearly. I wanted to achieve a 100% client-side, zero-latency experience. Here is how I offloaded the heavy lifting entirely to the browser edge. The Architecture: WASM + Web Workers Running a heavy calculation engine directly in JavaScript instantly blocks the main UI thread. To achieve a flawless 60fps UI, I completely decoupled the state from the computation. The UI Thread: Handles strict DOM rendering, board states, and piece animations. The Worker Thread: Instantiates the Stockfish engine via WebAssembly within the browser's memory. When a live game update occurs, the main thread fires a simple FEN payload via worker.postMessage() . The Worker processes the deep-line evaluations (Depth 20+) asynchronously in the background. It then streams the evaluation lines back to the main thread without causing a single micro-freeze. The Result By treating the browser as the edge compute layer, the tool achieves: Zero Server Latency: Bypassing API rate limits and network bottlenecks. $0 Infrastructure Cost: Heavy compute is crowd-sourced to the user's local device. Absolute Privacy: Sensitive payloads never leave the browser. If you want to see this local asynchronous thread management in action, you can test the live analyzer (and inspect the network tab) here: 👉 CipherKit Live Chess Analyzer Are you offloading heavy computations to the client side in your current projects, or are you still relying on traditional

A conversation between Uncle (a backend architect) and Nephew (a curious developer) about events, publishers, subscribers, Redis Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and Kafka The Beginning: What is an Event? 👦 Nephew: Uncle, I see words like "Redis Pub/Sub", "RabbitMQ", "Kafka" everywhere in job descriptions. What do they all do? Are they the same thing? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: (smiles) No, they're different. But before I confuse you with names, let me ask you something. Have you ever watched the news on TV? 👦 Nephew: Yes uncle, every morning! 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Perfect! So when the news channel says "Breaking News: India won the cricket match" - what happened? 👦 Nephew: Something important occurred... and they announced it! 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Exactly! That "something important occurred" is called an Event . In software, when something happens - like a user placing an order, a payment succeeding, or a file uploading - that's an event. 👦 Nephew: So event = something that happened? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Yes! Think of it as news. When you place an order at Zomato, that's an event. When you get a payment notification from Google Pay, that's an event. When someone follows you on Instagram, that's an event. 👦 Nephew: Okay, I get it. But uncle, why is this "event" concept important? I can just write code directly, right? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Ah! That's where the real story begins... The Problem: Spaghetti Code 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Imagine you own a food delivery company. A customer places an order. Now, what all needs to happen? 👦 Nephew: Umm... save the order, send email confirmation, alert the restaurant? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Good! Let me write the code without events: function placeOrder ( orderId ) { saveOrder ( orderId ); sendEmailConfirmation ( orderId ); sendSMSNotification ( orderId ); notifyRestaurant ( orderId ); updateAnalyticsDashboard ( orderId ); addLoyaltyPoints ( orderId ); updateInventory ( orderId ); } Now, one day your boss says "Also send WhatsApp notification". What do you do? 👦 Nephew: Add another function call in the same code? 👨‍🦳 Unc

Supply chain security is terrifying right now. With new vulnerabilities popping up daily and governments mandating compliance (like the EU CRA and US Executive Orders), I realized my open-source projects were completely flying blind. I needed a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to track exactly what dependencies I was shipping. But every tool I found was either a massive enterprise platform or a clunky CLI tool that took forever to set up. So, I built my own. It's called Deptic . 🏗️ The Architecture I wanted the developer experience to be completely frictionless: you paste a GitHub URL, and it instantly spits out a compliant SBOM and highlights any critical CVEs. Here is the tech stack I went with: Next.js 14 (App Router): For a lightning-fast React frontend and seamless API routes. Go (Golang): The backend scanning engine. Go's incredible concurrency allows it to parse massive dependency trees in milliseconds. Supabase: For database management and instant authentication. Tailwind CSS: Because writing raw CSS is pain. 🧩 The Hardest Part: Dependency Resolution Building the UI was easy. Parsing package.json or go.mod files? Also easy. The hardest part was recursively walking down the dependency tree to find transitive dependencies (the dependencies of your dependencies). I had to write custom parsers that could speak to the NPM registry, PyPI, and Maven Central simultaneously to map out the entire tree and cross-reference them with global CVE databases in real-time. 🚀 The Result What started as a weekend script turned into a full platform. Deptic now supports: Instant scanning of public GitHub repos. Generating perfectly compliant CycloneDX (1.5) and SPDX (2.3) JSON files. Live CVE vulnerability detection. Try it out! If you want to see exactly what dependencies are hiding in your codebase, you can run a free scan here: 👉 deptic.netlify.app It's completely free for developers. I would love to get your brutal feedback on the UI, the scanning speed, or any feature reque

A few weeks ago I shipped a feature I'd been putting off because it felt like it needed a backend: subscribable calendar feeds. "Add this holiday to Google Calendar." "Subscribe to all your country's public holidays so they show up in Apple Calendar forever." Every calendar competitor has this. My site had none. The catch: the whole thing is a static export — next build produces a folder of HTML/CSS/JS that I drop on Cloudflare Pages. No server, no API routes at request time, no ISR. So how do you serve a .ics feed that a calendar app polls every few hours? Turns out you don't need a server at all. Here's the approach, the RFC 5545 gotchas that bit me, and the parts I'd tell my past self. The "aha": a feed is just a file A .ics subscription feed is not a live API. It's a static text file that calendar clients re-fetch on a schedule. So for a static site, the idiomatic move is a post-build emitter : after next build , run a Node script that walks your data and writes assets straight into out/ . # scripts/deploy.sh npx next build node scripts/emit-feeds.mjs # writes .ics + .json into out/ That's the entire architecture. The emitter reads the same JSON the pages render from, so the feeds can never drift out of sync with the site — there's one source of truth. It emits: a per-year feed ( holidays-de-2026.ics ) a per-holiday feed (one event, for the "download this day" button) an all-years subscription feed (the one you point webcal:// at) and, almost for free in the same loop, a JSON API under out/api/ No new pages, no new routes. Just files. RFC 5545: all-day events are sneakier than they look I assumed an all-day event on Jan 1 would be DTSTART:20260101 , DTEND:20260101 . Wrong. DTEND is exclusive. A one-day all-day event ends on Jan 2 : BEGIN:VEVENT UID:de-2026-neujahr@calendana.com DTSTAMP:20260614T101500Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260101 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260102 SUMMARY:Neujahr TRANSP:TRANSPARENT CATEGORIES:Holiday END:VEVENT Get this wrong and some clients render a ze

Some API requests can't finish in time for a single HTTP response. Generating a report, transcoding a video, running a batch import — these take seconds or minutes, far longer than any client should hold a connection open for. If you try to do this work inside a normal request, you'll hit gateway timeouts, frustrated clients retrying half-finished jobs, and load balancers killing connections at 30 or 60 seconds. The fix is a well-established HTTP pattern: accept the work, hand back a receipt, and let the client poll for the result. Here's how to build it properly. The shape of the pattern The client POST s the job. The server validates it, enqueues it, and immediately returns 202 Accepted with a URL where the status lives. The client polls that status URL until the job is done (or failed ). When complete, the status response points to the finished resource. The key detail most implementations get wrong: 202 does not mean "success." It means "I accepted this and will work on it." The actual outcome arrives later. Step 1: Accept the job import express from " express " ; import { randomUUID } from " crypto " ; const app = express (); app . use ( express . json ()); const jobs = new Map (); // use Redis or a DB in production app . post ( " /v1/reports " , ( req , res ) => { const id = randomUUID (); jobs . set ( id , { status : " pending " , createdAt : Date . now (), result : null }); // Kick off work without blocking the response processReport ( id , req . body ). catch (( err ) => { jobs . set ( id , { status : " failed " , error : err . message }); }); res . status ( 202 ) . location ( `/v1/reports/ ${ id } ` ) . json ({ id , status : " pending " }); }); Notice the Location header. It tells the client exactly where to look — no need to construct the URL itself. Step 2: Expose a status endpoint app . get ( " /v1/reports/:id " , ( req , res ) => { const job = jobs . get ( req . params . id ); if ( ! job ) return res . status ( 404 ). json ({ error : " unknown job " })

The Problem Nobody Talks About Picture this: You're trying to find a place to meet up with friends. Someone suggests a coffee shop. It's 8 minutes from their house. It's 45 minutes from yours. You say yes anyway, because suggesting a different place feels awkward. This happens all the time — with friends, with remote teams, with family scattered across a city. And the worst part? Most "meet in the middle" suggestions aren't actually in the middle. They're just the geographic midpoint, which completely ignores traffic, transit options, and the fact that roads don't go in straight lines. I got frustrated enough to build something about it. Meet Meetle Meetle is a free web app that finds the fairest meeting spot for any group of people — based on real travel times , not just distance. A Chrome Extension is coming soon so you'll have it one click away in your toolbar. You add everyone's starting location, choose how each person is traveling (driving, walking, or transit), hit Find Meeting Point , and Meetle does the math across every person simultaneously. It then surfaces the best nearby cafés, restaurants, parks, gyms, or whatever venue type you're looking for — ranked by actual fairness. No more "it's fine, I don't mind the drive." Now you have data. How It Actually Works Under the hood, Meetle uses three Google Maps APIs working together: Distance Matrix API calculates travel time from every person's location to every candidate venue, simultaneously. This is the core of the fairness scoring — you can't rank venues fairly without knowing everyone's actual travel time to each one. Places API finds candidate venues near the calculated center point. You can filter by type (coffee, food, parks, gyms, etc.), price level, minimum rating, and whether they're open right now. Maps JavaScript API renders everything visually — the map, the travel zones (isochrones), and the markers for each suggested venue. The scoring works two ways and you can toggle between them: Fairness mo

Token economics is not only about token price. It is about designing the rules, incentives, and long-term logic of a Web3 ecosystem. When people start building a Web3 project, they usually focus on the visible parts first. They think about the smart contract, the frontend, the wallet connection, the token launch, the whitepaper, and maybe the community. All of those are important. But there is one part that can decide whether the project survives or fails: Token economics. A project can have clean smart contracts, a nice UI, and strong marketing, but if the token economy is weak, the project can slowly collapse. Users may come only for rewards, early investors may dump, inflation may destroy value, and the token may lose its reason to exist. That is why token economics should not be treated as just a “crypto finance” topic. For developers and Web3 builders, token economics is closer to system design . It defines how value moves inside the ecosystem, how users are rewarded, how supply is controlled, how governance works, and how the project can grow without depending only on hype. What Is Token Economics? Token economics, often called tokenomics , means the design of how a token works inside a project. It answers questions like: Why does this token exist? Who receives the token? How is the token used? How many tokens will exist? How are rewards distributed? When can team and investor tokens unlock? How does the project treasury work? What creates real demand for the token? In simple words, token economics is the rule system behind a token. A token is not only something people buy and sell. In a real Web3 product, a token can be used for payments, staking, governance, access, rewards, collateral, or network fees. If the token has no clear role, it becomes only a speculative asset. That is dangerous because speculation can bring attention, but it cannot support a project forever. Why Developers Should Care Some developers think token economics is only for founders, eco

Programming is all about solving problems efficiently. Two concepts that play a major role in writing reusable and efficient programs are loops and functions . Loops help us perform repetitive tasks without writing the same code again and again, whereas functions help us organize code into reusable blocks. Let's understand these concepts in detail. Why Do We Need Loops? Suppose we want to print "Hello" five times. Without loops, we would write: console . log ( " Hello " ); console . log ( " Hello " ); console . log ( " Hello " ); console . log ( " Hello " ); console . log ( " Hello " ); Although this works, it violates one of the fundamental principles of programming: Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) Repeating code: Increases the number of lines. Makes maintenance difficult. Introduces more chances for errors. Loops solve this problem by allowing us to execute the same block of code multiple times. Types of Loops in JavaScript JavaScript provides three looping statements: Loop Type Category while Entry-Check Loop for Entry-Check Loop do...while Exit-Check Loop Entry-Check Loop / Entry-Controlled Loop In entry-Check loops, the condition is checked before executing the loop body. If the condition is false initially, the loop body never executes. Examples: while loop for loop Exit-Check Loop / Exit-Controlled Loop In an exit-Check loop, the loop body executes first and then checks the condition. Therefore, the body executes at least once. Example: do...while loop Components of Every Loop Every loop generally consists of three parts: 1. Initialization Determines where the loop starts. let i = 1 ; 2. Condition Determines whether the loop should continue executing. i <= 5 3. Increment or Decrement Updates the loop variable after each iteration. i ++ ; or i -- ; 1. while Loop The while loop repeatedly executes a block of code as long as the condition remains true. Syntax while ( condition ) { // statements } Example: Print Numbers from 1 to 5 let i = 1 ; while ( i <= 5 ) { cons

Working with complex JSON payloads can quickly become a nightmare. You end up chaining .map() , .filter() , and .reduce() calls across multiple lines just to pull out a few nested values. Add optional chaining to avoid crashes and the code becomes nearly unreadable. There is a cleaner way - JSONata . It is a compact, purpose-built query and transformation language for JSON data. Think of it as XPath for XML, but designed from the ground up to work with JSON objects and arrays. What is JSONata? JSONata is an open-source project originally created by Andrew Coleman at IBM. It gives developers a declarative syntax to extract and reshape JSON data without writing procedural JavaScript loops. Where vanilla JS might take 15 lines, a JSONata expression often takes one. It is available as an npm package and integrates naturally into Node.js and TypeScript projects. Simple Path Navigation The foundation of JSONata is its dot-notation path traversal. Given a nested JSON object, you simply trace the path to the value you need: customer.address.city This returns the city value without any need for null checks or defensive coding. JSONata handles missing properties gracefully by returning undefined rather than throwing errors. Automatic Array Mapping When JSONata encounters an array during path traversal, it automatically maps across all items. There is no need to write an explicit .map() call: customer.orders.product This returns an array of all product names from every order in one clean expression. Inline Filtering You can filter arrays directly using bracket notation with a condition: customer.orders[price > 1000].product This returns only the products from orders where the price exceeds 1000. No .filter() callback required. Built-in Aggregation Functions JSONata ships with a solid set of built-in functions for math, strings, and arrays. Aggregating a set of values is straightforward: $sum(customer.orders.price) Other useful functions include $count() , $average() , $string(

From Confused to Confident: How I Finally Mastered GitHub Copilot in Every Situation I still remember the afternoon I rage-closed VS Code because Copilot kept suggesting the wrong function signatures — again . I had been treating it like a magic oracle, typing vague comments and expecting perfect code to rain down from the AI heavens. Spoiler: that's not how it works. After weeks of trial, error, and a few embarrassing pull request reviews, I cracked the code (pun intended). Here's everything I wish someone had told me about using GitHub Copilot accurately — across Chat , Plan , and Agent modes. 🧠 First, Understand What Copilot Actually Is Before diving into tips, let's reset expectations. GitHub Copilot is not a search engine. It's not Stack Overflow with a fancy UI. It's a context-aware AI assistant trained on massive amounts of code. That means: The quality of your output depends directly on the quality of your input . It works best when it has rich context — open files, good comments, clear naming. It can be wrong. Confidently wrong. Always review what it generates. With that mindset locked in, let's explore each mode. 💬 Copilot Chat: Your Pair Programmer in the Sidebar The first time I opened Copilot Chat, I typed: "fix my code." It stared back at me, basically confused. Of course it was — I hadn't told it which code, what was broken, or what I expected. Tips for Accurate Chat Usage 1. Be specific and contextual. Instead of: "Why isn't this working?" Try: "This useEffect hook in React runs on every render instead of only when userId changes. Here's the code: [paste snippet]. What's wrong?" The more context you give, the more surgical the answer. 2. Use slash commands to guide intent. Copilot Chat supports built-in commands that dramatically improve accuracy: /explain → Explains selected code in plain English /fix → Suggests a fix for a highlighted bug /tests → Generates unit tests for selected code /doc → Writes documentation for a function or class These aren'

How a PHP SDK Can Save You Hundreds of Lines of API Integration Code Most APIs provide documentation, examples, and maybe even a Postman collection. That's usually enough to get started. But once your application grows, you'll quickly discover that working directly with HTTP requests introduces a surprising amount of repetitive code. You end up writing the same things over and over: Authentication headers Request serialization Response parsing Error handling Pagination logic DTO mapping This is exactly why SDKs exist. In this article, we'll look at how a PHP SDK can simplify API integrations and reduce maintenance costs over time. The Hidden Cost of Direct API Calls Let's imagine you're integrating a URL shortening API. A typical implementation might look like this: $client = new GuzzleHttp\Client (); $response = $client -> post ( 'https://example.com/api/links' , [ 'headers' => [ 'X-Api-Key' => $apiKey , 'Content-Type' => 'application/json' , ], 'json' => [ 'url' => 'https://example.com' ] ] ); $data = json_decode ( $response -> getBody () -> getContents (), true ); This doesn't seem bad. Now repeat it for: Create link Update link Delete link Get link List links Create group Update group Get profile Eventually your codebase becomes filled with API boilerplate. The business logic becomes harder to see because it's buried under HTTP implementation details. What a Good SDK Does A well-designed SDK abstracts repetitive tasks and exposes a clean programming interface. Instead of dealing with HTTP requests directly, developers work with resources and objects. For example: $link = $client -> links () -> create ([ 'url' => 'https://example.com' ]); This is easier to read and easier to maintain. The SDK becomes responsible for: Authentication Request building Validation Serialization Response mapping Exception handling Consistent Error Handling One common problem with raw API integrations is inconsistent error handling. Without an SDK, every request may need its own validat

Your API hands out 50 records at a time across 400 pages. You need all of them. You do not need them all at once. Here's a very familiar situation that shows up constantly on the backend. Some API returns data in pages, 50 or 100 records at a time, and you need to walk every page: sync them to your database, export them to a file, run a report. The endpoint gives you a cursor or a page number and you keep asking until there's nothing left. The way most of us write it the first time looks like this: async function getAllRecords () { const all = []; let cursor = 0 ; while ( cursor !== null ) { const { records , nextCursor } = await fetchPage ( cursor ); all . push (... records ); cursor = nextCursor ; } return all ; } const everything = await getAllRecords (); for ( const record of everything ) { process ( record ); } It works. At four hundred records it's fine. The trouble starts when the dataset grows, and it has three separate problems hiding in it. It holds the entire dataset in memory before you touch a single record. It's all or nothing: if page 380 fails, you've thrown away the 19,000 records you already fetched . And it's eager. You can't start processing record one until the very last page has landed , even if all you wanted was the first ten. There's a shape in JavaScript built for exactly this, and if you read the first two posts in this series you already have both halves of it. Two ideas you've already seen In the CSV post , we pulled rows out of a huge file one at a time with a generator, so the file never fully loaded into memory. Lazy. Pull-based. You ask for the next row, you get the next row, nothing more. In the async/await post , we saw that a generator can pause at a yield and resume later.A generator can hold its place across an asynchronous gap. Put those together. A generator that pulls data lazily, and can pause to await something between pulls. That's an async generator, and it's the natural tool for walking a paginated API. You pull records

How I Built My Indie AI Stack — A Practical Guide for 2026 A few months ago I hit a wall. I was bootstrapping a side project, burning through API credits way faster than my wallet could handle, and honestly questioning whether shipping a product as a solo dev in 2026 was even realistic anymore. The big-name providers were charging me an arm and a leg, and I kept reading about indie hackers who somehow made it work. So I went down a rabbit hole — tested dozens of models, tracked every dollar, and built what I now call my "indie AI stack." Let me show you exactly what I landed on, why it works, and how you can copy it. Why This Stack Exists (And Why I Almost Gave Up) Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: the default path — just throwing GPT-4o at everything — will quietly drain your runway. When you're an indie dev, every cent matters. I remember watching my first invoice roll in and doing actual math on whether I could sustain this for six months. The answer was no. So I started experimenting. I tested 184 different AI models (yes, really) through Global API, ran them against real workloads from my product, and started measuring not just quality but cost-per-useful-output. That's the metric that actually matters. The result? I landed on a stack that delivers 40-65% cost reduction versus just slamming GPT-4o on every request. Quality stayed comparable — sometimes better. Average latency sits at around 1.2 seconds with 320 tokens per second throughput. And the whole setup took me under 10 minutes. Let me walk you through it. The Models That Actually Made The Cut After weeks of testing, I narrowed my shortlist down to five models that form the backbone of my indie stack. Here's the pricing breakdown I'm working with today: DeepSeek V4 Flash — $0.27 input / $1.10 output, 128K context DeepSeek V4 Pro — $0.55 input / $2.20 output, 200K context Qwen3-32B — $0.30 input / $1.20 output, 32K context GLM-4 Plus — $0.20 input / $0.80 output, 128K context GPT

Eight years ago (a geological epoch or two ago in Internet terms) Nicholas Jitkoff released itty.bitty.site - a website which could render whole websites just based on what was in the link, something like: itty.bitty.site?SOMEBASE64ENCODEDVALUE== et voilà! Free web-hosting if you could make it fit ;) At the time, I was rather obsessed with qr-codes thanks to developing QRGoPass and was working with aster plots a lot, so I developed an app that could fit into a qr-code! Today itty.bitty.site no longer exists so I can't do that any more... But I did make it 80% smaller without "cheating" and using modern CSS instead of d3.js ;)

Every time you use an online PDF converter, your file travels to a server somewhere — processed by a company you don't know, stored temporarily on hardware you don't control. For a random meme? Fine. For a payslip, a contract, or a medical document? That's a real privacy problem. What I built ConvertiZen is a document converter that runs 100% in the browser using WebAssembly and modern JS APIs. Your file never leaves your device. Ever. Verify it yourself: open DevTools > Network tab > run a conversion. Zero outgoing requests containing your file data. What it supports 40+ format pairs: PDF ↔ Word, JPG, PNG, Text, HTML, Markdown Excel ↔ CSV, JSON, HTML Images: JPG ↔ PNG ↔ WebP, GIF/BMP → PDF JSON ↔ CSV, Markdown ↔ HTML, XML → JSON How it works PDF.js for PDF parsing docx library for Word generation SheetJS for Excel/CSV Canvas API for image conversions Everything client-side — no server required Pricing 3 free conversions/day, no account needed. Beyond that: €0.69/conversion, €4.99 for a pack of 10, or €4.99/month for unlimited Premium. Feedback welcome What formats are missing? What would make you trust a browser-based tool over a server-based one? 👉 https://convertizen.netlify.app

Converting Word documents to PDFs on the server is the classic approach: upload the file, run LibreOffice or a cloud API, send the result back. But that means your users’ resumes, contracts, and reports touch your infrastructure. I wanted something simpler for en.sotool.top : pick a .docx file in the browser, preview the parsed content, and download a PDF. No server involved. Here is how I built it with Vue 3, mammoth , and html2pdf.js . Why Client-Side? The main reason is privacy. Resumes, contracts, tax documents — users do not want them on a stranger’s server. Client-side conversion also means: No upload bandwidth limits No file size caps from your server No storage to clean up Works offline after the page loads The trade-off is that very complex documents are limited by the browser’s rendering capabilities. For typical office documents, that is fine. The Stack Vue 3 — UI, file handling, and reactive state mammoth — Parse .docx files into clean HTML html2pdf.js — Render the HTML into a PDF using html2canvas + jsPDF Native File API — File selection npm install mammoth html2pdf.js Loading the Word Document The first step is reading the uploaded .docx file into an ArrayBuffer , then converting it to HTML with mammoth . import mammoth from ' mammoth ' ; async function convertDocxToHtml ( file ) { const arrayBuffer = await file . arrayBuffer (); const result = await mammoth . convertToHtml ({ arrayBuffer }); return result . value ; } mammoth intentionally produces simple, clean HTML. It ignores complex formatting like text boxes and embedded fonts, which makes the output predictable. I keep the HTML in a reactive ref and render it in a preview panel: < template > <div ref= "previewRef" class= "word-preview" v-html= "htmlContent" ></div> </ template > < script setup > import { ref } from ' vue ' ; const htmlContent = ref ( '' ); const previewRef = ref ( null ); </ script > Generating the PDF Once the user is happy with the preview, html2pdf.js turns the preview element

At this time, AI is still a business that largely survives on valuation rather than profitability. The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence is driven as much — if not more — by financial speculation as by technological progress. This makes the twin narrative of an “AI infrastructure boom” essential. Ed Zitron has become well known for challenging this story. In reality, such an infrastructure boom is difficult to sustain when the underlying economics remain deeply unprofitable. Now, let us take a moment to reflect on the danger of relying — for our businesses, and worse, for our civilization — on a bubble that could burst at any moment, much like the dot-com bubble. Entire industries are restructuring themselves around assumptions that may ultimately prove irrational, even disastrous. The illusion and danger of replacing engineers There is a dangerous idea circulating in the world, born from the union of greed and ignorance: that software engineers have become obsolete. We no longer need them! Of course, someone who does not know how to write code cannot evaluate code quality. For such a person, any piece of code that works is just as good as any other piece of code that also works. They may see a functional demo and hastily conclude that AI can entirely replace software developers. An _experienced _engineer sees something different: brittle architecture, code with absurd or duplicated logic, security flaws, poor maintainability, and code that often collapses under real-world complexity. To the untrained eye, AI-generated code frequently looks convincing, while it may host invisible vectors of disaster. Hallucinations in software development are not harmless mistakes; they can become production bugs, security vulnerabilities, and eventually catastrophic business failures. The problem is not that AI writes code. The problem is that we seem to be heading toward an era in which we no longer fully understand the code powering our civilization. And because of th

If you have made it this far in 100 Days of Solana, you have been working in JavaScript and on the command line. You have been calling RPC methods, building instructions, signing transactions, and reading and writing account data in JavaScript, and most recently minting and sending tokens and NFTs from the CLI. Either way, you have been driving Solana with tools that let you assign a value and move on with your life. Soon the ground shifts. You are going to open a file called lib.rs , and it is going to be Rust, and for a day or two it is going to feel like you forgot how to program. That feeling is normal, it is temporary, and it is not a sign you are in the wrong place. Here is the thing nobody says out loud: you do not need to learn all of Rust to write Solana programs. Rust is a big language with a steep reputation, but the slice of it that shows up in an Anchor program is small and repetitive. You will see the same handful of patterns on almost every line. Learn those patterns and the wall turns back into a floor. This post is that handful. Not a Rust course, just the parts you need to read your first Anchor program and understand what every line is doing. Next week we start Arc 9, the Anchor introduction, where this all becomes real. This week is about making the language stop being scary before you get there. Why it feels like a wall JavaScript is dynamically typed and garbage collected. You write const x = 5 , you never tell anyone it is a number, and when you are done with it the runtime quietly cleans up. The language trusts you and sorts out the consequences at runtime, which is why a typo surfaces as undefined is not a function three minutes into a demo. Rust is the opposite philosophy. It is compiled and statically typed, so every value has a type the compiler knows about before the program ever runs, and it has no garbage collector, so it tracks who is responsible for every piece of memory through a system called ownership. The trade is blunt: Rust mak

I am a solo learner. I started coding last year with the help of AI and sometimes without any tutorials or courses. At first, I thought this journey would be easier. But soon I realized something important — no AI or tool can fully solve the real problems I was facing as a developer. I used AI a lot. It explained things with confidence and even provided code. But when I ran that code in my terminal, many times it didn’t work. That’s when I understood something important: AI can guide, but it cannot replace understanding. After facing these issues, I changed my way of learning. Instead of blindly trusting AI, I started: Finding real open-source projects Studying how they were built Listing important topics from those projects Reading documentation carefully Asking AI to explain specific lines of code This helped me understand real-world code better. From this learning journey, I realized something: I should also build my own open-source projects. At first, I believed that creating a powerful project could automatically bring attention and users. But I was wrong. I made a mistake — I was not active on any platform. I was just coding inside VS Code, without communication or sharing my work anywhere. Then I realized: Being a developer is not only about coding. Visibility and communication are also important. After that realization, I started being active on platforms like Dev.to, LinkedIn, and other developer communities. I started posting my work and sharing my progress. Even though I didn’t get many comments, I started getting reactions and engagement. That small feedback gave me motivation. From this journey, I learned something important: Open source is not only about code. It is about helping other developers, sharing knowledge, and being consistent and visible. A developer should not only code silently but also participate in the community. Now I understand that coding is only one part of being a developer. Community, communication, and consistency are equally imp

Few lines of code look more innocent than this: retry ( 3 ) It feels responsible. Professional. Resilient. After all, networks fail. Servers become unavailable. Databases occasionally time out. Retrying seems like the obvious solution. And sometimes it is. But after enough years building production systems, I've become convinced of something: Retry is one of the most dangerous keywords in software. Not because retries are bad. Because retries amplify everything. Good systems become more reliable. Bad systems become disasters. The problem is that many developers treat retries as a reliability feature when they're actually a distributed systems feature. And distributed systems are where simple ideas go to become complicated. Why Retries Exist Imagine: await fetch ( " /api/users " ); The request fails. Maybe: Network hiccup Temporary database issue Load balancer restart Service deployment The operation might succeed if attempted again. So we write: retry ( 3 ) Seems reasonable. And in many cases: It Works Which is why retries become popular. The Dangerous Assumption Most developers unconsciously assume: Failure = Operation Did Not Execute Unfortunately that's not always true. A request can: Execute Successfully ↓ Response Never Arrives From the client's perspective: Failure From the server's perspective: Success Now a retry becomes dangerous. The Double Payment Problem Imagine a payment service. await chargeCard ( order ); The card processor successfully charges: $100 The response is lost due to a network issue. Client sees: Request Failed and retries. await chargeCard ( order ); again. Now: Charge #1 = Success Charge #2 = Success The customer paid twice. Nobody wrote bad logic. The retry created the bug. The Email Storm Problem Consider: await sendWelcomeEmail ( user ); Email provider accepts the message. Response times out. Application retries. await sendWelcomeEmail ( user ); again. Customer receives: Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Support ticket created. Marke