Programmer Weekly

Welcome to issue 184 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

Quote of the Week

"Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software." - Jensen Huang

News

Introducing Gemini: our largest and most capable AI model

Google has introduced Gemini 1.0, their most capable and general AI model yet. Built natively to be multimodal, it’s the first step in their Gemini-era of models. Gemini Ultra’s performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely-used academic benchmarks. With a score of 90.0%, Gemini Ultra is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU.

Reading List

The evolving landscape of API protocols in 2023

The API landscape is constantly evolving, with some protocols rising in popularity while others fade. Postman’s latest State of the API report, which is based on a survey of over 40,000 developers, offers a snapshot of these shifts—and reveals which API protocols are capturing the most attention and adoption right now. In this article, we’ll explore these API protocols in detail, analyze why they are attracting so much interest, and dive into the key strengths and limitations of each one.

Understanding Objective-C by transpiling it to C++

In this article, we will transpile an example Objective-C program to C++, highlight some interesting parts of the generated code, and explore some of the history and current status of this work on the LLVM project.

Weird HTML Hacks

Many of these code quirks shouldn’t work, but somehow they do. We’re highlighting 10 hacky website coding strategies—some big, some small. 

6 tiny wording tweaks to level up your communication as a software engineer

We’ll cover 6 tiny wording tweaks you can use to become a stronger communicator.

ChatGPT's One-year Anniversary: Are Open-Source Large Language Models Catching up?

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 marked a transformative moment in AI, influencing both research and commerce. This overview, commemorating its first anniversary, delves into the significant impact of ChatGPT, its instructional tuning methodology, and the ensuing proliferation of large language models in academia and industry, examining the evolving landscape of closed-source and open-source models and their implications for research and business.

Watch and Listen

Open Source Supply Chain Security at Google

The video highlights Google's dedication to supply chain security in Go programming, covering topics like open-source attacks, cryptographic signatures, and the significance of monitoring the software supply chain. It introduces tools such as Sigstore, Salsa, Capslock, emphasizing secure build systems, reproducible builds, and two-person approvals. The discussion includes Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), stressing the need for a clear definition, and features tools like the Go Vulnerability Database. The conclusion emphasizes the ongoing importance of research, collaboration, and continuous monitoring for improved supply chain security in the software industry.

Writing Maintainable Infrastructure as Code

This talk focuses on instructing participants on designing maintainable and extensible infrastructure-as-code (IaC) modules, addressing key topics such as lifecycle management, environmental parity at scale, use-case-specific modules, and optimizing inputs/outputs for minimal developer overhead. Additionally, it explores the challenges with IaC registry modules and advocates for teams to consider creating their own, using OpenTofu/Terraform as an illustration applicable to other IaC tools like Pulumi and Crossplane.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Excalidraw

An open source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted. 

Loco

The one-person framework for Rust for side-projects and startups.

Endatabas

Endatabas is a SQL document database with full history.

LinGo

LinGo is a terminal based language acquisiton application, which allows you to learn languages while reading texts.

SQLSync

SQLSync is a collaborative offline-first wrapper around SQLite designed to synchronize web application state between users, devices, and the edge.

hysp

An independent package manager that every hacker deserves. 

Gymbo

Gradient-based symbolic execution engine implemented from scratch.

Biome

Biome is a performant toolchain for web projects, it aims to provide developer tools to maintain the health of said projects.

Our Other Newsletters

Python Weekly

- A free weekly newsletter featuring the best hand curated news, articles, tools and libraries, new releases, jobs etc related to Python.

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