Programmer Weekly (Issue 249 April 10 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
April 10, 2025

Welcome to issue 249 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

The #1 AI Meeting Assistant

Still taking manual meeting notes in 2025? Let AI handle the tedious work so you can focus on the important stuff.

Fellow is the AI meeting assistant that:

✔️ Auto-joins your Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls to take notes for you.
✔️ Tracks action items and decisions so nothing falls through the cracks.
✔️ Answers questions about meetings and searches through your transcripts, like ChatGPT.

Try Fellow today and get unlimited AI meeting notes for 30 days.


Quote of the Week

"It is far better to improve the effectiveness of testing first than to improve the efficiency of poor testing. Automating chaos just gives faster chaos." — Mark Fewster


News

Google is launching Agent2Agent (A2A), an open protocol supported by over 50 partners, to enable AI agents from different vendors to seamlessly collaborate across enterprise systems. A2A aims to standardize communication, secure information exchange, and coordinate actions between agents, fostering innovation and efficiency in enterprise workflows.

NVIDIA has introduced native Python support to CUDA, allowing developers to write Python code that runs directly on GPUs without relying on C or C++ intermediaries. This update simplifies GPU programming, enhances accessibility for Python developers, and integrates seamlessly with libraries like NumPy and PyTorch.


Reading List

Interview processes are changing in a tech market that’s both cooling AND heating up at the same time. A deepdive with former Meta Staff Engineer/Engineering Manager Evan King and Stefan Mai.

When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications. Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall reliability. This article shows you a few common gotchas in safe Rust that the compiler doesn’t detect and how to avoid them.

Engineering a Trace Details Page That Handles a Million Spans

Rendering millions of spans in a browser isn’t easy. Most UIs choke under that kind of load. Here’s how we scaled trace visualisation to handle it seamlessly.

Daniel Stenberg outlines the guidelines followed in the curl project to write safe and secure C code, emphasizing testing, readability, and avoiding problematic functions. These practices aim to minimize memory-related bugs and ensure code stability across billions of installations.

This post details the extensive process of emulating iOS 14 using QEMU, focusing on overcoming challenges such as kernel patching, graphics rendering, and debugging. The author describes their journey from initial attempts to achieve software rendering to eventually enabling a functional display by addressing various system-level issues.

Lessons learned from my first dive into WebAssembly

This post explores the author's journey into WebAssembly (WASM) by porting projects like a game and a pkg-config clone, sharing experiences and techniques. It highlights the challenges of the WASM ecosystem, such as limited documentation and tooling, while showcasing direct coding against the WASI interface without language runtimes.

Lessons learned working on sync engine at Figma.

The shebang (#!) in a script tells the Linux kernel which interpreter to use to execute the script, a process handled directly by the kernel through the execve system call. If a script lacks a shebang, the shell falls back to interpreting it directly, but the kernel requires the shebang and execute permissions to run the script.


Watch, Listen
Making OCaml Safe for Performance Engineering

Jane Street is enhancing OCaml's type system to improve its suitability for high-performance systems, focusing on modal types for memory safety and a kind system for better memory representation. These additions aim to bring Rust-like performance features to OCaml while maintaining its simplicity and ease of use.

This hands-on Linux tutorial guides DevOps engineers, developers, and beginner sysadmins through essential commands like ls, grep, and vim by solving a real-world debugging scenario. Learn to navigate file systems, examine logs, and troubleshoot application issues while building confidence in terminal use.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Instantly create a Remote MCP server for any GitHub project.

The neobank built for nonprofits.

GitHub's official MCP Server.

ESP32-based focus timer with an epaper display and rotary dial.

Monitor cross-zone network traffic in Kubernetes.

An opinionated GoLang framework for accelerated microservice development. Built in support for databases and observability.

Lightweight Firebase/Supabase alternative built to run anywhere — incl. Next.js, Remix, Astro, Cloudflare, Bun, Node, AWS Lambda & more.

Free, simple, and intuitive online database diagram editor and SQL generator.


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.


Founder Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.