Programmer Weekly (Issue 240 January 30 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
January 30, 2025

Quote of the Week

"The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself." - Alan Cooper

Writer RAG tool: build production-ready RAG apps in minutes

RAG in just a few lines of code? We’ve launched a predefined RAG tool on our developer platform, making it easy to bring your data into a Knowledge Graph and interact with it with AI. With a single API call, writer LLMs will intelligently call the RAG tool to chat with your data.

Integrated into Writer’s full-stack platform, it eliminates the need for complex vendor RAG setups, making it quick to build scalable, highly accurate AI workflows just by passing a graph ID of your data as a parameter to your RAG tool.

Reading List

InstantDB upgraded their Aurora Postgres instance from version 13 to 16 with zero downtime, overcoming challenges like replication issues and sequence data. They developed a custom failover algorithm that paused transactions, waited for catch-up, and switched connections, achieving a seamless upgrade for their modestly-scaled database system.

A software developer built a custom smartwatch for his son with Type 1 diabetes, focusing on simplicity and CGM data display. The project involved learning hardware design, PCB fabrication, and overcoming challenges in BLE connectivity and component integration.

What they don't tell you about developing scalable and reliable controllers

In this article, we will uncover the “whys” behind the OAuth2 protocol design and break down the most common authentication grants.

The article proposes introducing composable SQL query fragments called "functors" with statically-typed interfaces. This approach aims to improve SQL's testability and reusability of business logic, addressing current limitations in SQL query composition and testing.

WinVisor is a hypervisor-based emulator for Windows x64 user-mode executables that leverages the Windows Hypervisor Platform API to provide a virtualized environment for logging syscalls and enabling memory introspection.

The article describes the development of an ultra-fast phrase search algorithm using AVX-512 instructions, achieving performance up to 1600 times faster than Meilisearch. It builds upon the "Roaringish" concept, employing clever bit manipulation and data packing techniques to optimize phrase searches across large document collections.

Starting with a 192-byte one-liner that implements a Reverse Polish Notation arithmetic compiler, we'll work backward to transform it into readable JavaScript by removing one code golf trick at a time.

Learn how specially crafted artifacts can be used to attack Maven repository managers. This post describes PoC exploits that can lead to pre-auth remote code execution and poisoning of the local artifacts in Sonatype Nexus and JFrog Artifactory.

Watch, Listen

Learn how to use DeepSeek-R1 in this crash course for beginners. Learn about the innovative reinforcement learning approach that powers DeepSeek-R1, exploring how it achieves performance comparable to industry giants like OpenAI's o1, but at a fraction of the cost. You'll learn about its architecture, practical applications, and how to deploy this model to leverage its advanced reasoning skills for your own projects.

Dimitris Kyriakoudis is a researcher, programmer and musician who's combining all three talents to build dedicated music hardware. Specifically a device called the µseq, which reads Lisp programs and uses them to drive synthesizers to make music. In this episode we go through the full platform that he's building, from soldering resistors to an RPi chip, up through writing a Lisp interpreter, to the design ideas that make Lisp a good choice for composing both software and music.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1.

Static code analysis engine to find security issues in code.

Vim plugin for LLM-assisted code/text completion.

This is the latest version of the internal repository from Pebble Technology providing the software to run on Pebble watches.

Lab helps you experiment with code without friction. Type lab with any extension and start coding - it handles files, organization, and cleanup automatically.

PocketPal AI is a pocket-sized AI assistant powered by small language models (SLMs) that run directly on your phone.

Onit is an open-source AI chat assistant that lives in your desktop!

Nevalang is a new programming language that uses dataflow programming, where programs are created as networks of nodes that pass immutable messages in parallel. It offers features like implicit concurrency, strong static typing, and machine code compilation, aiming to simplify development of high-concurrency, cloud-native applications.

A very fast linker for Linux.

Enable AI models for video production in the browser.